Thanks to some wild and woolly house plants. We both spent years in apartments so we have been toting along some of our plants for a very long time. And the thing about apartments is that space is at a premium along with sunlight. So we basically had one plant stand crammed full of greenery by the one sunny window at our last apartment before buying our house. Naturally we just transported it to our house. But the time has come. To say goodbye and start anew. With a fresh crop of not so crazy looking plants.
Here is the aforementioned plant stand that lives in the front corner of our living room. Every morning we crack the blinds to give a little sunshine to our plants, and every evening we close up shop. In case you can’t tell, we have four plants on the top and one at the very bottom (which may explain why that one didn’t thrive.)
What’s all that other crap? You mean besides the embarrassing amount of dead leaves? Well, there is a birthday balloon from my birthday in April 2010. I am perplexed as to how it still has air in it. There is also a “Happy Birthday” sign and ribbon also from my birthday in 2010. And to cap off the menagerie, a sparkly pom-pom thing that I got at the after-Christmas clearance sale at Target in December 2009. Clearly it is time.
Here is the pile of dead leaves that we pulled out.
We evaluated all of the plants, and sadly, we decided to get rid of a few of them (plant killers…guilty as charged). Dain tried to make me feel better by saying two of them were beyond repair, but I know that my mom could have brought them back since she’s the freaking plant whisperer. She has brought back many a plant for me since I routinely brought them to the edge of death at my apartments. But we didn’t want to hassle her with some otherwise crazy looking plants. So we started anew. With three fresh pots and three thriving plants from Ikea.
First Dain filled the pots with some of our hideous lava rock that surrounds our house in a protective moat. The rock provides some necessary drainage since these pots do not have holes in the bottom.
Then he added some potting soil and the fancy new plants along with one old one…..a mini-Christmas tree (of course) that has battled against the odds to still look good in August. And here is our new plant station. Three crisp pots with three nice plants. And one on the floor…..temporarily. We need a more sophisticated plant stand to replace the old wicker beast, but that plant was still looking good once we removed all of its dead pieces.
The white Ikea pots are definitely better than our hodgepodge of assorted colors.
While we did chuck two plants, Dain decided to start anew with this bad boy (that had tangled itself in other plants and in our plant stand.) He cut off a few of the vines and will try to regenerate them in water for a little while before repotting them.
We also picked up a bamboo reed because we haven’t had a lucky bamboo in our new house yet. I used to have them at my apartments until they would inevitably turn yellow and start to choke on their own roots. Hopefully this one will not suffer the same fate. We just stuck it in a vase we already had with a few rocks leftover from our wedding.
All of the plants certainly look a lot better, and we have our fingers crossed that they will stay that way. We also have a flourishing palm tree in our office, a healthy pothos in our basement, and a few little plants in our kitchen too. So we have definitely evolved from the one plant stand model. We just ended up keeping that one stand in the process. We’ll probably try to sell the old one on Craigslist and either make something new or hunt it down. How many houseplants do you have? Our total is actually at 12 (even after the re-do). I just counted. Apparently we may be plant hoarders.
