Leo in N E Illinois
The Professor
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The T-5 lamp is excellent, and with a good reflector, one of the best for easy of use and good performance. (too many quality control issues with LED in my opinion)
Low tech is good, especially for reliability. I have a number of 4 lamp, 48 inch T-5 fixtures with 6500K lamps and I grow orchids and trees under them that are considered to be "full sun" requiring plants. I like the Sun Blaze reflectors, they are excellent for focusing light downwards. I use an 18 hour day length all year round. To some extent you can make up for lower light intensity with longer day length. There is no benefit to day length longer than 18 hours. I highly recommend just adding an inexpensive fan to your current set up. Even if it is just moving low humidity air from the room, the air movement will markedly improve the health of your plants. I use cheap 7 inch fans from Wal-Mart or Menards, if you catch them on sale, less than $15. Even a 2 inch or 3 inch cooling fan for electronics will work for a small space. You just need enough air movement to keep thin grassy leaved plants waving lightly. The trees will tolerate a stronger breeze no problem, but all you need is a gently breeze. Helps keep mites and other insects under control, and gives you healthier roots - air movement helps bring air into soil. Adding a fan will change how often you have to water, but the health improvement will be dramatic. Set the fan below, or above, and have it blow in the general direction of the plants. I even have a fan running in the space I use for wintering my cold requiring outdoor trees. Helps keep bacterial rots and mold problems under control. Air movement is an often overlooked problem with growing indoors.
You could also add Eugenia and Malpighia to the list. Both will do well under T-5's. My Malpighia is a relatively new addition to my collection, but so far I have a nice flush of new growth growing right now after a hard prune in September. It was outdoors for the summer. Another that can be run as a subtropical is the pomegranate. There are a number of really nice small leaved cultivars, I have 'Evergreen's Red Dwarf' and it seems a good one for tight growth. The advantage of pomegranate is that they tolerate a hard dry out. One or two days bone dry won't kill them. They will drop some leaves, but then begin growing again once watered. I have kept a pomegranate 'Nana' going that I started while still in high school. It survived many moves through college, major illness, and so on. Been watering it for 40 years now. It has to be a survivor to have lasted that long. There are many cultivars running around under the name 'Nana', so I would go with 'Evergreen's Dwarf Red' to be certain I got a true dwarf if I were starting over.
Evergreen Garden Works is very reliable for mail order and has a great selection of material propagated for bonsai. http://www.evergreengardenworks.com
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