Lighting For Small Plants And Clones
For small plants and clones you want to keep them short so you have a few options depending on what your goal is. To start off you can use high wattage fluorescents, low wattage LEDs, or low wattage HIDs. Any of these are suitable for cannabis growth but they all have their own strengths and advantages.
LEDs have started to become more popular in recent times for a few reasons. They tend to be a lot cooler which can be an advantage in a few ways. First of all because the lights are cooler you can keep them closer to the plants and save light. In a previous article I explained that light has an exponential decay based on distance from the light source so this is a major advantage for any indoor set-up in my opinion.
If you’re not afraid of the extra pruning that would come along Fluorescents due to their low intensity nature will cause your plants to stretch. If done appropriately the plants will be taller due to competition with light. One would need to prune to make sure that the light is hitting as much of the plant as possible.
Coupled with proper food and water both strategies are viable but as i previously stated i prefer to use LEDs due to the fact you can keep them closer to the plants while maintaining the strongest intensity the light can produce.