/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>2450167
are you looking for an actual raised garden bed like pic rel? If you just have potted plants I feel like you're more looking for a grow shelf or a rack with grow lights on it, you can probably find alright ones just searching up "grow shelf" online. Personally I'd just buy a 100w led light with a timer and just find a spot you can mount the hanging fixture to over your plants if they're potted.
Can get a reflective grow box if you're autistic about it for less light loss. Put a tray under your plants to catch excess water, can reuse it for later. I went autistic and got a PAR quantum flux meter, apogee is the standard but spot on sells one for $300 which works just as well, but obviously probably dont have the money for it, you can use a lumens to PPF converter online to estimate photoactive light instead or w/e based off lumens. https://www.waveformlighting.com/horticulture/convert-lumens-to-ppf-online-calculator
Then just use PPF to PPFD converter (https://horticulturelightinggroup.com/blogs/calculators/ppfd-calculator)) to give you how much light is actually reaching your plants, then take that and time how long your lights are on for, and get DLI. After that theres some ok guides for shit like tomatos on how much DLI they should get. Can't find shit for cactuses, one resource says 20-25dli, another says succulents need only 70-150PPF, which is like fucking 6dli, but this other source says 15-25.
If you don't know what that shit means, PAR is just photosynthetic light, basically the "useful" light to plants, lumens is how bright it appears to humans, while PAR is how much light a plant can use, so fluorescents are really bright, yellow/green light appears brighter to us, but plants use yellow, green, blue, red, etc. pretty equally. PPF is just how much PAR is emmmited per second, PPFD is how much of that emmited light reaches a given area, ie 2 square foot 12" away from the light. DLI is how much light hits a plant in a given area within a given time.