I did it. I bought a new grow light. You know that I’ve used a lot of LED grow lights in the past, especially the NextLight Mega, which I’ve written about before. You also know that I’ve written a lot about HID grow lights, even though I do not use them anymore. I used them way back when, though.

But now I got a new light that is neither of those. It is a brand-new LED grow light called the Optic 6. When the switch from next like? I didn’t really. I’m still using NextLight Mega and I always will. However, this new company called Optic LED is making LED grow lights that are far far cheaper than anything else on the market, apart from the Chinese made lights that don’t work.

These optic LED grow lights use cobs and mix them with 5 W chips to give you the ultimate in penetrating power and spectrum. The cobs are all white lights while the five watt chips have a mix of red blue and white. This gives you a great spectrum and also a ton of power. And they cost very little. I believe I mentioned that, but it’s worth repeating. They are insanely cheap.

That’s good for me, because I bought it for basically an experiment. You may remember that I have mentioned growing tea quite a bit in the past, but it was just a theory and something I read. Now, I finally decided to give it a try. I figured why not? But because I’m just giving it a try, I didn’t want to blow a ton of money on a light, but I still wanted to make sure I got the right plant light.

I don’t know much about doing it, but that doesn’t really matter. You can learn anything on the Internet today. And a little bit of searching and I found a great article on growing your own tea. I also found several videos. All that combined should be plenty to get me going.

It seems that growing tea is not really that hard. It is a fairly easy plant to grow, as long as you provide the right environment. Since I’m growing indoors in a grow tent and with artificial grow lights, I can provide the exact environment my tea plant wants. This means I should have no trouble growing healthy and strong tea bushes.

In fact, it is not the growing that worries me. It is processing the tea afterward. I’ve been reading up on it and it seems there are so many different ways to process tea. You can steam it quickly to stop the oxidation process and make green or white tea. You can wait a little longer and have oolong tea. You can wait even longer than that and let it fully oxidize and make black tea. Or you can let it ferment after it is oxidized and make pu-erh tea. Then there is yellow tea, which is somewhere in the middle. I don’t even know exactly how it fits into the whole thing.

The point is, there are a lot of different ways to process tea and how you process it has an effect on the type of tea you get. They all have slightly different flavors and I don’t really know that much about it yet. But I’ve been reading up on it and I believe I will be able to make a pretty good batch of tea my first try. And from there it will only improve and get better each time. Perhaps, someday I’ll even be able to sell my tea online.