Too much anthocyanin? High powered LED use.

[stevek216]

Hi all,

I have a pretty powerful LED light (Spider Farmer SF2000) in a grow tent with my orchids. The top shelf is maybe a foot away from the light so gets very, very bright light.

A few of my orchids (mostly dendrobiums, a rhyncostylus, some tolumnia, a few brassavola/hybrids) are getting to possibly an extreme level of anthocyanins, aka the leaves are turning almost nearly uniformly red where they get the light.

I'm wondering if anyone knows to what level this might be hurting the plants. In my mind the big issues when it comes to high light are heat/UV radiation that could burn leaves, but presumably producing all this anthocyanin is taking resources away from other functions too. Is this a case of too much of a good thing?

On the flip side, these plants with very high anthocyanin content are growing quite well - multiple new growths, robust root growth, etc. Whether that's in spite of or because of the higher light I'm not so sure.

Maybe my solution is to just get more very high light orchids