Some time ago, I wrote an article saying how surprised I was about the habit of enhancing the growth of vegetables in conservatories by using artificial light.
Now, an engineer working for OSRAM told me that the entire affair is a lot worse than this. In modern conservatories, no natural light at all is allowed to get in. It seems like they found out that cucumbers grow even faster on an eight-hour day with a shortened night.
Consequently, conservatories are darkened 24 hours and then the vegetables are allowed to grow on artificial light.
Is this really possible? Something inside me cannot believe it! Now I hope it is not true and our readers convince me otherwise!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S. The picture of the cucumber is from wikipoedia, where it is published under GNU-Lizenz für freie Dokumentation. The copyright is with Rainer Zenz.