House plants are my new co-workers

 

Every year as soon as the weather starts to warm up and the days get longer, I get super excited!! It's been warm lately (50s), I've been taking hour-long outdoor lunch breaks with the cat almost every day, and my mental health is t h r i v i n g (why don't I live in California??). 

I recently found an awesome greenhouse nearby and got hit hard with plant fever. I already knew I wanted to start a garden this year (will write about that in a separate post), but now my eyes have also been opened to the awesomeness that is house plants. The home office has a whole east-facing wall of windows and one south-facing window, so it gets good but indirect light, which is ideal for a lot of house plants. (Apparently strong direct light, like you get in a west-facing window, can scorch leaves on certain plants.) I've also been under a ton of work stress lately so I wanted to make the office a happier place to be.

BEHOLD, my plant shelf!! I bought this plank of knotty pine wood for $17 when I got all the power tools for the basement, planning to use it to make a little box as a beginner project. Buuuut it's the perfect length for a window shelf right here. I got 4 iron L-brackets for $15, stained and finished the board (since I'll probably be spilling water all over it when I water the plants), and installed it. "Hmm that looks like it's sagging a little on the ends / the brackets are spaced a little weirdly," you say. "Shhhh," I say. The studs at the edge of the windows are non-existent (at least I couldn't find any using both a studfinder and the "drill and find out" method -- this house has weird studs), so I can't put brackets at the ends where it would very much make sense for them to go. Also I don't wanna buy another pack of brackets. 🤷‍♀️I'm just gonna try to keep heavy things in the middle and light things on the end. I'm not saying this is a smart idea, but it's what I'm doing... (Edit: I later bought more brackets and added one to each end. They are only half-attached to the stud, but the shelf ends are definitely more stable.)

The shelf also spurred some moving of furniture around the office. I don't have a before picture, but you can see above that my desk was facing the left wall and the piano was facing the right wall. There was also a short bookshelf up against the back wall. In fact, literally everything in the room was facing a wall, with big empty dead space in the middle. This is a design no-no. How do I know that? Because I regularly make this mistake with my very square house in Animal Crossing.

(Image is from Polygon, but is very representative of my house in Animal Crossing whenever I start a game)

Also, my mom is obsessed with Feng Shui, and some of that has rubbed off on me. You want your desk (and bed) to be in a "commanding position", where you're facing away from the wall, and you have the door in your line-of-sight. This makes you feel less stressed, because no one is gonna sneak up on you from behind, and you can see anyone coming into the room. At least that's how I like to think of it. My mom says the energy will flow in through the door, and the headboard / wall will trap the energy near you. It's also just a lot more inspiring to have a nice view from your desk as opposed to a wall. I had the window to my side which I thought was enough, but the new layout is way better. Tada:

Now I have all four windows and all my plants in my field of view while sitting at my desk, without having to turn around to look. And, the lighting looks a lot better on video calls, since I'm not backlit by the outdoor light :) And, I can show off my cool space posters to my coworkers. Also, the cat really likes sitting on the piano bench, which is right in a sunspot for half the day. I didn't actually think turning the desk away from the wall would be a big deal, but I immediately felt a sense of relief when I first sat down after moving it. And the space just feels so much better utilized.

Okay, anyway, I was gonna talk about plants. I spent $120 in one trip to the greenhouse, and I have no regrets. Pictures of my new children:

First is this spider plant, that I bought just beforehand off a neighbor for $12. They are supposed to be one of the easiest house plants to take care of, and they grow little babies that you can propagate and give away. 

At the south window I have a big snake plant (left), supposedly another resilient house plant. I wanted a large-ish floor plant, but the big ones can get really expensive (over $100). This was a nice size, $34, the lighting requirements were right, and it's easy to take care of. It is toxic to cats if ingested, but the leaves are so stiff and hard my cat won't be interested in chewing on them. I've seen these grow even taller as well, so one day he might grow into a full blown floor plant. For now he's on a little box.

Moving to the right, I have a cute little hobbit jade succulent. Also toxic to cats, but also not something my cat would want to chew on. It gets good light from the south window and is the only house plant in this room that likes direct light. I tried repotting it into that white decorative pot when I got it, and it started deflating. Now it's back in its original tiny nursery pot, which is nestled among some pebbles inside the larger decorative pot. Apparently repotting a plant into a too-big pot isn't good because the roots won't access all the soil anyway and the pot will stay moist for too long. 

After that is a plastic flower I bought from Michael's last year. It's cute and I don't care that it's fake :p

The ivy-looking plant is called baby tears. I ended up moving this to the bathroom later because it was getting scorched by the southern sun, and the leaves were starting to turn yellow. It likes to stay moist and humid so the bathroom should be perfect for it.

And the last thing is another fake plant, from the side of the road. I dunno, it's cute. It's trying to blend in with all the real plants.

Now the great plant shelf. The leftmost one is a prayer plant. It's supposed to close at night ("pray"), but I haven't seen it do that yet. Probably because the light is always on. It likes humidity so it's right next to my diffuser. This one and the baby tears seem to be thriving the least in their new home, probably because the air is very dry inside during the winter. I mist them and keep the soil moist, but still. My favorite thing about it is the leaf patterns. There's even tiny pink stripes on some of them.

The next little guy is a pilea and it's so cute and perky. Apparently it grows lots of babies, so I'm looking forward to propagating it. It's good to shake indoor plants once in a while (or put them in front of a fan) to simulate wind so the stems grow strong, so I wiggle this guy during work meetings or when I'm bored. He's very bouncy :)

Next is the money tree! Of course I want a money tree. It looks great and it's good feng shui. It's actually five plants braided together into one. The braid is supposed to trap good luck for you. These can also get pretty big and turn into a floor plant.

Then there's the spider plant, and finally a zz plant. Toxic, but again, very stiff and waxy and therefore at no risk of being eaten by the cat. Supposedly very easy to care for.

Last thing, I want to show off my Venus fly trap! I've had this for almost a year now and it's still alive. They do go dormant in the winter, so it's been looking very droopy with some traps dying off and turning black. But it's coming back to life now, which makes me really excited about the Spring. One of the first signs that it was waking up was this flower shoot it put out, which I've never seen before!

You're supposed to cut this off before it flowers so the plant doesn't waste energy on it. So I did, but I felt a little bad about it since it was the first sign of growth from this thing for months. I was rewarded weeks later with lots of new traps starting to grow. Here's the biggest one:

The trap started out green, but then developed the red color on the inside. This is a great sign!! Venus fly traps only turn red when they get a good amount of sunlight, and red traps are a sign of a healthy plant. At the old place, we didn't get a lot of strong sunlight so the plant was all green. Now it's in our super warm and sunny west-facing bay window and seems to be loving it :) So, happy birthday to my longest-living house plant so far. 

Ok, I'm done effusing about the house plants. I love them so much though. It's so nice to come downstairs in the morning, into the office filled with morning sun, and see all these green plants :) I did some watering for the first time this past weekend and felt super proud when the pilea perked up a couple hours later after a good watering. Here's hoping they stay healthy and survive :')

PS: I joined a bunch of Facebook groups about house plants and gardening. Now my newsfeed is full of plants. It's great, you should try it.