Houseplant 101: Houseplant Home Makeover! — Ep 118

in this next episode of houseplant 101 back to basics we're going to go through a real-life house plant home makeover will apply much of what we've already learned in the first two episodes of this series including how to assess light in the home choosing the right plants for you and your space and how to create green space when no light is available this hour-long special has been made possible by our sponsors including premium soil bias poem organic new state of the art grow lights by GE lighting and plants provided by plant shed it's a gorgeous spring day here in Central Park and I am about to see one of my best friends in the whole world Damon who has just moved back to New York City and he wanted help greenify in his apartment so of course I wanted to be able to help him do that so I'm going to see him right now [Music] it's so good to be back good to see you come in come in looks like you have some more plants since last I saw you we got a thing or two come take a look yeah this one's new this is new yeah an old friend of mine just donated that I took it yeah I love the these finger-like qualities and how they unravel yeah this has actually just been put into a new genus called the Madoff elem so congratulations you have like a new genus this is fantastic we might have to talk about leaving it here or not we'll figure out where it goes Daymond is a philosophy professor in New York City he also happens to love playing classical piano which really is the centerpiece of his home now that he's in New York for a while he wants to breathe new life into a space with a little bit of greed i sat down with Daymond to talk about his goals for greening up his space well another space the space was really built around the piano and so that's the starting point and then from there what would make it feel liveable also and I think having living things in it would be a good first step towards that it's been this way for several years and I want to bring any new energy to it I wanted to have a real different feel the plants I have here are more symbolic value they're things that you know have a place in my life there's a little story about each one in a sense what I want to bring in is something that makes me feel like I'm not so far from nature you know that I'm not stuck in an urban environment without any recourse to something green yeah just to have some living thing in a room it changes the room it's like having a piece of art artist or a dog or something yeah right now it's a little bit sterile yeah well let's have a little bit further look around actually I'd like to take a look at the type of light that you're getting here and because I think a lot of people can relate to the fact that oh I have a window in at least one part of my house but I don't have much light in the other part but this to me it feels a little bit more like my light in my kitchen which is a nice gentle light have you ever noticed any kind of like harsh sunlight coming through here or no as we move into spring you know as the Sun starts heading further north when it rises an hour or so of Sun coming in maybe a little bit more but mainly it's a fair amount of reflected light and ambient light yeah and almost no direct light ok great so you probably just get a nice slide of moderate light and so getting moderate light plants versus like your port crassula you might not want to get too many more succulents in this window but right now this one that you have over here this is called a Schlumberger ah I believe it's a Schlumberger at roncada it's an actual type of cactus but not like the typical kind of cactus that we all know with like the spikey glock EDS and things along those lines this is actually a jungle cactus which sits in the understories of trees so the fact that it gets a little bit more dappled light the fact that you're getting it to bloom all the time even if it's a weird times tells me that that plant is probably happy and that would be the exact type of plant that I would try to fit in an area and in a window like this if that's the kind of light that you're actually getting well then we just need some trees to go over it and we'll be fine yeah you are like directly like between north and east so you are gonna get a little bit of that sunrise north generally means that it's a lower light area but with that East you're kind of saved too because it gives you a little bit more I would just guess moderate light and you're of course having to work with some of these buildings outside which might actually obstruct some of the light coming in but I have this par meter so this actually checks the photons of light coming in because the way that plants at least see light is a little bit different than us so it's for us the blue and the red ends of the spectrum actually look a lot dimmer whereas to a plant they could actually utilize all photons of light so what I'm going here is I'm measuring this in unit moles per meter squared per second this is around 101 eleven so this is kind of in the kind of indirect to moderate light range which is really good because if this was just a northern aspect you might be in really low light range and that would restrict the kinds of plants that we could actually put in this window that makes sense now as far as care because I know you do travel some here and there like I travel quite a bit and so I'm only here about half the time and usually I'll have someone on my family or friend come by and just water everything once a week okay once a week that's really my care pattern okay I'm happy to fertilize periodically if I knew what to do but in terms of steady state care once a week is really what's available okay my lifestyle and this is like really good to know because now we have a sense of like the lighting here and then what your schedule is because if you're a once a week kind of guy then we don't want to get anything that's like too high-maintenance yeah yeah I think that's right should we take a look at some of the other spaces great the nice fellow who sold me the apartment was also the architect who remodeled it yeah and when I got it from him many years ago he'd done this with a window which was terrific with these very plants so the same plants in actual how many years ago was that he probably put them in almost a decade ago oh my god been an extremely long time but he put some kind of special soil I think in these plastic cups within these planters and they're lined up so that when you water one it drips down into the others yeah I see they haven't been moved yeah so long look at this but they've survived yeah and these are these are which is just terrific I love these it's such a great use of an interior window yeah I think it's a pleasant place to look now instead of looking at at a building yeah exactly well you know I think this is also a testament to the types of plants that he used here and I don't know if he had some prior knowledge to this but this is a philodendron header a cm these are Devils ivy epip Wrentham or iums which are just survivors really easy they sprawl all over as you can see we might actually I might suggest actually trimming some of these depending because they build Bush out a little bit more if you if you trim some I just like this being as as possible so it doesn't need to be manicured for a certain style but I'm also worried that at some point make are they about are they on their last legs so whatever we need to do to make them healthier greener bushier would be lovely so let me show you this over here under these cabinets you see here this is a region where as you're coming to the apartment it would be great if it felt kind of like more forest floor because you have that just that sense liminal II that there's kind of green underfoot so I'd love to do something almost ambient here and these are real candles and they're not the ones that kind of like our you know fake candles so these are real candles with with wicks that are hard to light and everything and real stones and yes that's a reason something could happen in that's fantastic yeah I love the idea of like feeling like you're walking through a forest especially if you could get the candles to light too it might feel like a little fairy forest so you go see the kitchen now great so you do have a little window in here and you have some plants yeah these guys also are troopers they're on the same once a week treatment that everything else is okay this guy's kind of fun because explorers that goes wherever this is a cliff eeeh these are actually get some really beautiful flowers it's native to South Africa this could probably appreciate a little bit more light because you do it's a little bit darker here yeah only because you're in this kind of like alleyway right here and yeah this is again that your your Devils ivy the pothos this is a trusty reliable plant for for your area but we could see you know a little bit do you cook at all um I make peanut butter and jelly well sometimes just peanut butter peanut butter an experiment you know I get a lot of water out of the tap I'm in here for that okay well let's see if we could maybe you know change your mind because there are some really interesting like kitchen things that we could install you know that have some herbs and so maybe it will inspire you to cook a little bit you know get a pan and a little olive oil a little salt I can imagine okay we'll try it we'll try that yeah so you do get a little bit of ambient light now this will probably be a little obviously less light because light diffuses so if we were to do anything here it would have to be some like lower light plants but would you be open to that I'd love to have something here look that when you walk by you kind of have the green but also when you're below looking up it's neat to think that the forest continues now here could be an interesting space - it's a little bit more of like this dark nook so if we wanted to have something here I think we would probably need a little bit of extra help like but the grow light is that something that you'd be open to I think it could be neat because the architect made an interior window here between two rooms and so it's as though it's a window to the outside and so the idea of something growing would be you know in keeping with that idea and it looks like you're not really using this space or underutilizing it very stable yeah I think that would be a really cool thing to do but again creating its own Sun I think would be you know in order for here because this almost seems just even a little bit further back from this window compared to there already seems a little bit darker I feel like as we can progressively go this way it's gonna get darker and darker we're gonna go to the cave now all right so it's totally dark back here very sleep which is great for sleeping but it sure would be nice if efforts some way to have something alive you know yeah here we go okay so that's the amount of light that you're actually getting here we could be up for the challenge and figure out what we could do here great without having to get you a plastic plant there I won't go and then this is your bathroom the architect comes from a background of designing spas and so forth and so he put in all these touches that are things you have in spas different ways of raining and so forth you can rain like this or can rain that is awesome so you know that's like a waterfall right yes different forms of waterfall actually it's perfect because if you ever wanted to like do a nice gentle rain on your plants you could use that one not that one that one like would just probably blow all the soil on your plant uh-huh with the little light that you're getting through here which again you're getting this kind of northeast exposure but it's a little bit further back and kind of this alleyway so we'll have to go with probably a lower light plant yeah but it also bounces at least some of the light back into this area ever so slightly so it'll probably give the plants like a second chance for a little bit of light so I think I have a really good sense of your space but I would like to get a little bit of a better sense of the types of plants that you like so would you want to go to a plant shop and just check out some of the stuff and you could tell me what you're thinking that sounds great let's do it Damon and I took a walk to his neighborhood plant shop plant shed which is a family-owned and operated foliage and floral shop in New York City that's been around since the 1950s [Music] so what I mean let's take a little look around is there anything here that that you gravitate towards or maybe that you've seen that you particularly like we have these in my house in Colorado yeah yeah these are cool these are snake plants and what I like about them is that they really go vertical you could put them in some tight places what I like is that these leaves are so like rigid it's almost like they're wood you know but it's inside you're not it just floppy yeah now this would actually be a really good plant for your place especially because you have that really large you know northeastern window and then it's a little bit darker but these actually can grow well in a range of light are there any specific places in your house that you could actually see this working yeah well you know it's because it's kind of severe kind of on that on the platform near a piano could be good you know cuz it has like a simple cut to it like you're thinking because I was thinking the same thing around around your piano now this is a tree that I was actually thinking this is quite small but these could get I have one that's about 14 feet in my house I was thinking that this could be a great possibility I know you want like a redwood or a spruce tree nice it might be a little challenging but this is a ficus layer Otto this is a fiddly fig and oftentimes these are what people get when they want a large tree and you have such a high ceiling that this could actually grow into something up to be a veritable size and could have like quite a span of canopy too as well so we could see if they have something that's a little bit larger yeah get a sense for that look yeah are these succulents these are succulent and that requires a lot of Sun yes I think so we're not in a succulent game I would say that if you were to do succulents I don't see anything that might be here but you know huar Thea or gassed area might be there a little bit of a darker succulent that might be able to be right in your window you do have a crassula like that Jade right in your window and that's a succulent but those I would definitely be putting right up against your window the Jade is not terribly happy all the time it could it could enjoy a little bit more Sun now these these may be a little bit of a harder one for you but these don't require a tremendous amount of light and I was thinking something like this to create that like a jungle vibe in your bath room something really dense like that with it the kind of black stands yeah it's like layers of it yeah and then you can see that they're quite small but why is it but if you get a bunch of them you could have this you know you'd almost like could run your hands through these when you're in the tub yeah you want it to be physical in there you want to feel like it's like you're brushing against the you can go against the leaves in the forest yeah exactly little things like this are kind of cool that have a different this one I think would work in a little bit more of a terrarium setting so if we decide to go on the guitar en route for you this could be a very cool like addition to to your terrarium and have a little bit of shock of color which you don't always get you know we and we could create like a terrarium especially if we have a light on the terrarium a situation where we could actually have that in one of the darker corners of your own that would be cool because I like some of these things that have like a darker hue to them also sometimes like color but it like a dark background like a the black pants that really appeals to me I think that's fun yeah this is a peperomia cap errata these are also very very easy plans to actually take care of as long as you don't overwater them this could also be like great desk plants like things like that some things that like we could have as like cubby holes on your shelves there's another one back here that has like kind of the red undersides I love these like unusual color scheme like in some little quadrant for these I'm with you on that one especially because like a lot of times plants are not in flower so being able to get like a different kind of coloration like on the foliage for instance is important kind of in the house because things are not always like these orchids and bloom yeah I'm not always in them you know sometimes we have different types of weather patterns for ourselves now these plants are actually also very good these are aglio Nima's these are very good in lower light conditions so if something like that ever spoke to you that could be just feel a little bit more like office plans to me they do feel I got expense I have to say probably because so many people use them in the because the office doesn't have a tremendous amount of light every graduate I want to work at home so we can't do that after our exploration at plant shed I had a real keen idea of what Damon might want for his home he gave me his budget restrictions and we agreed that I'd come back the following day to get started I will only have five hours in his space though before he comes back home so I should be able to get a good start on greening up his space but we'll see how much I could get done [Music] all right it's day two at Damon's place and we just got the delivery in from plant shed some really beautiful plants we are actually constricted by the size of the elevator so even though I really wanted to get a larger ficus lerato than not the larger fiddly fig because his space could definitely use a large plant this is about the size that we could actually get into the elevator so he'll just have to be patient and watch the ficus leotta grow because and it will grow because he has really perfect light for this northeast exposure is actually better than the light that I give my ficus lerato at my house because mine's close to a Southwest facing window and actually gets burned all the time so this will actually be good for him here so I can't wait to see this grow so I got these really nice pots and I thought that we could actually do some greening up on the shelf space because this does get some ambient light not a tremendous amount so we have to go with some plants that would be a little bit more comfortable in lower light situations I'm definitely gonna go with synapsis pictus which is silver pothos or otherwise called satin pothos because I know from my experience in my home that's actually growing in the interior of my space and it continually grows with surprisingly little amounts of light and because again this is an ambient light this is a northeast facing window you do get a little bit of a flood of it it's not going to grow a lot but it will be fine and I think will thrive in this section but of course we'll have to see I'm gonna treat this a little bit more like a cash Poe so just a decorative planter and we'll just have this guy sitting on top he's a little bit tall for this one but I think as he starts to spill down because it is a little bit more of a hanging plant you're not even going to be able to see the nursery pot that he's in so I'm going to be planting up some rhipsalis and this is a type of epiphytic jungle cactus so Damon already actually has jungle cactus growing and window here's a Shamburger ah which is a Thanksgiving cactus so I took cue from him because that seems to be doing pretty well and I'm and I know from my experience that rhipsalis actually grows well in my house and lower to kind of indirect light conditions again because this is like growing in the under stories of for us and so it's getting a little bit more like dappled light so we're gonna try these type of rhipsalis out upstairs in his bookshelf but because these are apathetic they have a little bit more of a well draining mixture so what I'm gonna do in this planter is able to take some s Poma organic potting mix just regular potting mix and some of their peril ight which is more of a puffed volcanic stone which I'll show you soon and a little bit of their bio tone starter because this is just like a little bit of natural plant food that it has like some helpful bacteria that you could use in when your potting plants and because these plants actually came to me through the mail I just want to make sure that I'm doing them a little bit more of a better opportunity at growth so I'm just gonna pour in a little bit of the potting mix and a little bit of this perlite barely just like a little bit more one-to-one ratio I could always add a little bit more I'm also going to add a little bit of this bio tone just a little sprinkle is gonna be perfect so I'm just mixing this up and getting this nice consistency here and you'll smell a little bit of the aroma of the the bio tone which has this like kind of earthy organic kind of smell if you will so I'm just going to take these out temporarily and just fill in a little bit in the base here just so that there's at least about an inch or an inch and a half to two inches of soil down below for the ripsaw roots to grow into put this right in here and lay that in and now I'm just gonna add a little bit more of this soil mixture in here again this perlite actually helps build up a little bit more of the aeration of the actual potting mix now if you just use the potting medium that is fine too but if you're somebody who has a tendency to overwater then I would just err on the side of having something that has a little bit more of aeration in the soil and perlite does just the trick I'm going to switch over to my handy dandy spoon just really love using kitchen utensils to do potting feel like we are sometimes a little bit more effective especially for smaller plants then sometimes the trowel czar and I'll just worry about the mess later because planting is a messy thing and you just have to go and plant and worry about the mess later so I'm just gonna water this a bit and then I'm going to take it upstairs I like leaving it on the edge here because you could actually see the plant from both sides so as you're kind of walking out and as you're coming up and as you're looking up you can actually see this plant on all the sides [Music] so Damon had mentioned that he wants a plant up that way so I'm gonna take this Samuel cloaca semi fully up there but I didn't get any planters or many planters for the plants that we have because I wanted to see really what their size was but I did get this kind of basket here and I have a little water tray down below and this is kind of like a really affordable way to actually plant plants instead of actually getting a large you know ceramic planter that could cost a pretty penny and I find that these baskets actually look really good sometimes they're folded so their shapes might be a little odd when you actually take them out as this one is a little bit odd but they start to actually round up and this is kind of a good way to display a plant and we're gonna put this Oh by this light unfortunately with this space there is not a lot of light that's coming through here so you do get a little bit of the ambient light but because of the ceiling it's actually quite dark here so we are going to need to augment this with some grow lights and we have some awesome grow lights that just came out on the market these are GE LED lights now you notice that there is two different ones and I'm going to show you the difference between these two there is one that's more of a balanced light spectrum and there's one that's more of the advanced red light spectrum so if you're growing a plant here that does flowers and fruit then you'd probably want to use this one we're going to put this one in just for giggles because I want to show you how it differs from this balanced light spectrum which is the one that is going to be for seeds and greens because this is more of a foliage plant I mean it does flower it's probably not going to flower up here but people really buy Zizi plants or Samuel cloaca Samuel folia for their foliage and this is a type of plant that actually does grow well enough in the interior so I have this lamp here you can actually see that this increases so as the plant grows you don't want it directly right up to the light you probably want it within 6 to 9 inches away from the light because that is going to give you better light because if you have it too far away to start the plant is going to stretch and get really leggy so you want it within 6 to 9 inches so let's use this one first this is for flowers and fruit this is the advanced red light spectrum I like actually how it's all cardboard packaging because then you could actually recycle all that and then you'll notice that this light has a little bit of a wider base so this is probably about three and a half inches just so you know because a lot of lighting fixtures don't have this flare they're a little bit thinner okay so that's pretty tight so you could see this is giving off a little bit of a red light and again this is for seeds and fruit but this is actually quite reasonable now I have my par meter here I'm going to hold this up because I am curious actually what the par value is going to be for this Wow and you can actually see that this is up to around 2,000 it's kind of bouncing between 1,500 and 2,000 unit moles per meter squared per second so this is actually almost basically full sunlight that you're giving these plants as I pull the par meter away you can see that this is already going to be moderate light which is actually going to be totally fine for the Zizi plant I'm gonna turn this off now you can see the balanced light spectrum has that same shape I'm just going to screw this into the lamp the other good thing about LEDs is that they are they might be a little bit more expensive on the front compared to incandescent light bulbs but LEDs are just more energy efficient over the long term and you don't want just an incandescent light bulb that's not going to be powerful enough for a plant so you want a proper grow light there you go now this is a little bit more of a warmer temperature which i think is probably going to be the way that we want to go because this is in a living space so I'm going to hold this up and you could see that very similar this is actually going to be this is actually closer to 3000 when I'm holding it up so it's kind of bouncing back and forth between 2,000 and 3,000 when I'm holding it directly up to the light and I actually really like the look of this look light and so sometimes when you have grow lights they kind of have that like purplish or blueish hue but they're just getting better and better and this GE light is absolutely perfect to have in the home yep so if you have it at this height it's getting a bit more moderate light and you will actually probably see over time the Zizi plant kind of trailing a little bit more towards the light because this is going to be a stronger light force then actually that window way over there [Music] so this is the bio orb which has its own light and humidity and even misting system so this will be perfect I think for one of the darker rooms because it'll be able to generate its own light and then he'll be able to have a little green space within a contained area like a terrarium like this so this took me some time to construct and plant so if you're curious on how I did it you'll be able to tune in to a future episode so I have this all planted up and you can see just how lush it is I absolutely love this thing I'm going to be carrying it upstairs but I don't want to fill it up with water yet so because it's just going to be too heavy so I'm going to just take this up oh that looks so cool look at that imagine waking up to that see if I could get the lights on and everything oh wow it's so cool look at that so I just want to show you what's under the hood here so you could see that the humidity chamber is right here and I actually could still you know stick my arm in here because I do want to add a little bit of moss in the back just to kind of cover up some of that coconut coir and I think that you know live moss is just so cool to have but difficult to keep in the home unless you do have a terrarium setting so I'm just gonna add a little bit of live moss into here you can see I don't want to block your way and it's not adding this like really nice carpet in the back so cool this will actually keep some of the moisture in so you probably need to water this a little less because this moss will actually create its own little microclimate in here or help create a little bit more of the microclimate and there you have it and here is some water kind of leftover that you could put in the top up here I would prefer I would probably use distilled water to be honest with you because you don't know what kind of water is in your pipe so a lot of times our waters our water is fluorinated or chlorinated or has some heavy minerals in it that can gunk up the system so I would probably just get distilled water for this this looks great I'm super excited about how this actually turned out and so you could see the Phalaenopsis orchids here some rabbit's foot fern some photo Nia photo Nia here peperomia and Pylea and a ludus yeah discolor look at that I mean I would love to wake up to this every morning and because Damon doesn't have a window in his bedroom this is a really nice option so Damon doesn't have a tremendous amount of light in his kitchen he does have a little window here but it's kind of in an alleyway so I thought I'd be a really good idea to get him an herb garden for his kitchen now he doesn't do a lot of cooking but I'm hoping this maybe inspires him to do it a little bit this is one of the better units that I've seen unfortunately this is just in beta right now so this is by a brand new man known as ecosystems Iko systems and this is okavanga and they are probably going to be doing a crowdfunding campaign for this but if you like what you're looking at like I like what I'm looking at then sign up for their newsletter because this is super cool I just love the wood finish and they have this kind of magnetic glass up here that you could take out and so if you have a pet that happens to like to go on your countertop this is great because it kind of keeps the pet away it is magnetized also here so you could actually that's where you fill up the water right around here and it goes down into the base right here and also works by capillary action very similar to what we saw with the bio orb so if I just take this off you could see that this little micro tomato is has this little ceramic almost like like hot dog bun and the water comes down here and soaks up and the plant actually soaks up the water so it's in a soil based system which is kind of cool and again this keeps actually the humidity going in this particular device as well so I really like the way that that looks now he already had this post growing here and just I kind of want to take a look at where this is going because I see that it's draping down here oh my goodness I don't even know how I could get down there I'm way too short maybe I could get it from this side now the other thing we could do is clip this and then I could put this into some water and then propagate it from there I think that's gonna have a better chance doing that so I'm gonna clip this at a 45 degree angle and this will be the clipping that's a really nice sturdy plant right there again I want to keep it up on the countertop because that's not gonna get any light I think that looks pretty good hopefully it inspires them to cook so I'm just filling a little bit of the soil up so that it has a little bit more substrate to work with and its roots and again I have a little bit more perlite in here because I want this to be airy so that the roots are not asphyxiated here so what's happening in here Wow Wow look at this when I say it's all roots take a look at this this has no drainage either so this has been just goes to show you how resilient these plants are because he says this has probably been growing in here for about a decade which is unbelievable so I'm just gonna do a little gentle fertilizer this is a spa m'as organic indoor fertilizer super gentle you can see it's only two two tubes nitrogen phosphorus and potassium so you're not really going to over fertilize anything but basically it's one per pore per quart so you just do a little shake and you pop open the top and basically it's one pour per quart there's a number of bacteria back here very beneficial bacteria so that gives a little bit more of life to the soil or the substrate that the plant is in since the soil substrate is already wet on the inside I don't have to like thoroughly wet the soil because typically what I would want to do is put in enough water so that the water comes out from the the base but after having checked a lot of these plants these plants are already pretty wet because this is a little leggy what I might do is actually just give this a good snip up to about here and this one doesn't even have leaves so I'm gonna snip that right up to the edge so I'm just gonna continue to work on this just a little bit longer and after I finish that will be pretty much ready to kind of show Damon a little bit more of the layout that we have not everything's like exactly ready because we still have to go and get some planters but I think it's gonna be ready enough at least with the placement so he could see see whether he likes a little bit more of his house by home [Music] [Music] all right so we are finished to greening up this space there are some things that I really wanted to get to but just ran out of time and Damon is coming up the elevator right now so I have to show them what we did come on so what have you been up to oh my goodness well I have to say it was a lot of work in a little bit of time and we really tried to stay within your budget so it might not be everything that you wanted but there's gonna be some things that you I'm excited let's see what you got these are something you're gonna be very familiar with these are epic rent amore em these are the posts that you have growing in the kitchen uh-huh growing in the back over there I did put a bird's nest fern here with one of the the planters which is a lower light plant it's called a bird nest fern because of the way that's structured but these will eventually start to vine out and then you're going to have that kind of woodland look that you were looking for got it so these sorts the same plant exactly that I have you know the places so it'll handle this kind of light yes low light and the infrequent watering yes it should be it should be fine and I actually kept I didn't repot them I actually kept them in their nursery pots so if you go down here you can see that they are just in the pot itself and so the you know the reason for that is you could just water them and take them out maybe you could use the planter at another time if you want if you didn't like those planters so nothing is you know permanent here if you if you don't like it but I have them in their nursery pot and it's sometimes nice to do that because sometimes plants need about two weeks to acclimatize to people's homes got it now pothos is a little bit easier to acclimatize because they're so as you've seen they can survive me they survive you know they could survive just about you know the the coming of apocalypse we did kind of green up this little space here so you may recognize york libya which was actually in the kitchen i pulled it up here because i think it's gonna be a little bit happier with a more of a north east facing light and the ficus Liberata here is i know like you could do so much with this vertical space and this will actually get quite large now you're probably going to have to call me back to snip it a little bit because as it grows and I've seen mine grow and I never I never sipped my back it just gets very lengthy I can hang out of it both tall and wide so you might actually be reading underneath a picture it's not a bad thing this is your formerly known as philodendron but now so Matta filum here from your friend and I I just pulled it here it was you know kind of under yeah that little section I'm quite sure whether you were going to leave it there or not but I think closer to the window is going to make this really happy and these do get quite large does it make a difference to have these guys getting that direct Sun for an hour in the morning as opposed to even on the other side of the room or are they kind of happy regardless yes because the light comes in this way right I think it's gonna really like that especially because the morning light is a really nice gentle light typically if you were in you know more of the Southwest facing direction you would get kind of a little bit more of a hot afternoon light and that could actually burn these plants but that morning light is going to do these babies really good okay great this is a peperomia so these are peperomia obtrusive Folio variegata so these are a semi succulent plant these are diminutive plants so they are not going to get quite large okay so they're gonna stay relatively compact they might get a little bit longer and sometimes they get a little bit more architectural as well but for the most part they're slightly slower growers what's the watering for these once a week is gonna be totally fine for these guys for all of these do just water them like until some water comes through to the tray and then that's how I know it's enough yeah that's a really good point just watering so that it water is like really thoroughly now you'll get a feel to because you know one of the ways to feel it is like you get it get a sense of the pot and how heavy it is when you actually water it thoroughly and then if it feels a little less weight than typical it's almost like developing a sensitivity for it yeah I see so this has its own saucer there mhm so I'll see the water in it yeah how about something like this this isn't it's a nursery pot this is in the nursery pot so what you would want to do is just water this there and there is a basin underneath this between this and this alright and you want to see the water actually go through to the bottom of the basin this doesn't have a hole in it so there's gonna be no water that falls onto your hardwood floors but what you want to make sure is that it's not necessarily sitting in water so if you feel like you've watered it thoroughly and you see water in the end the basin you could actually remove it remove the basin and tip the water out because you don't necessarily want the roots sitting in the water got it however if you get really good at watering watering it till it's about 3/4 of the way full with water like meaning the soil is about 3/4 of the way filled with water is going to be better for this particular plant got it so the basin is just there so I can dump out water if I overwater exactly do you don't want to put so much water that's like kind of sitting in a puddle I wouldn't do this no you wouldn't do that it's like a baby in a wet diaper too long so here we have some more peperomia and then we have a little shock of color uh-huh with the orchid and these orchids are going to be very happy here because they do need a little bit more light and then if it's a little bit cooler towards the evening hours do you like turn the heat down at all if it gets too hot in here the buildings in charge okay the baby's on all the time in winter and never in the summer so these will reflowed better if it gets a little cooler at night so that's some so be having it a little bit more towards the window where there could be a little bit of a draft could actually be good for these now the weight of water you'll notice that it's in this kind of like little plastic container the best way to water these is like once almost every two weeks where you just let the tap water if you have or filter water sit and then you dip it in the water and let it sit in there for like an hour or so and then pull it out and then let it completely dry out you could also maybe you do that in here but you don't want to again sitting in water for too long you'd want to actually pour this out so that's you know a little even less frequently than you're probably watering your plants got it we got one of your snake plants that you oh yeah that looks great Vienna so this will get larger and it may even flower might not flower in this light I'm not quite sure yet but they do get like long stalks with inflorescences which is kind of like just interesting separate from these new stalks come up yeah another stock will come up with a little flower on top or like a stock of flowers we have just a really neutral planter I I stayed really neutral with the planter is just kind of like gray matte white and you can move this around but I think having one next to your piano is quite nice I just didn't want anything hanging over your piano god forbid that it gets like goo on your Steinway exactly right the goo has a better use yeah being on the piano yeah exactly this I didn't change so much in fact it might not look as green but I did take some old stalks out of this so some of them were pretty leggy and so I just kind of cut them back and manicured them a little bit pretty leggy you said yes it's a lady if it has many stars well it has like you know a long stalk without any pretty good yeah but you might actually see some of them Bush out I did change out one because this one actually had no plant in it whatsoever it was just um sitting in a pile of wet soil and it looked like it had a plant in it because one of the plants are sitting down so I just switched it out with the synapsis pectus but you could actually see how this one's like really bushy compared to these that have like started to scramble so this this is just a young version of the same plant actually no this is a completely different genus this is synapsis pictus it's otherwise known as satin pothos but it's actually not even in the same genus this is epic Brenham and this is acid abscess totally tolerant to lower light conditions in the same way that EPIP Wrentham and these philodendron czar and since they've done well enough here I decided that like you could go with little synapses and actually see if that works if for some reason it doesn't work you can always get another cutting of an epic run um and actually put it there but I'd like to kind of trial it out and it gives it a little bit more of kind of like a just different variation uh-huh the other thing that I did over here is actually fertilized so the soil was already pretty wet but I ended up using this fertilizer which I'm going to give to you and have here this is super easy it's an organic fertilizer and you just need to do one pour per quart got it how often do you do that I would keep this to maybe every month to two months in the growing season so spring summer and fall and then I do think that these will be a little bit happier because I do see some of this like yellowing of the leaves is the yellow from not enough nutrients or too much water and not enough water or what it's a you know yellowing leaves could be multiple signs and it could be it's definitely not that they're getting too much light it's probably it's probably one where they haven't had nutrients or that they have been sitting in water or both you know so it's it's really hard to tell but I do know that like these could survive in water for quite some time but even after a while if they don't have any more nutrients they will start to lose their coloration got it looks good so here in the kitchen is something that's really special this may inspire you to cook this is in Okavango systems its beta testing so this is not even something that you could get on the market so you are okay it's something that's a little bit more special but you have all these different types of plants and you could actually take this off and you could start to see and eat and so what what are these we got basil we have sage we have dill we have I can't remember what this one with is but we have some lettuce and then we have these little tiny Tomatoes that's a great and they they will turn red but they're tiny they don't get much bigger than this like cherry tomatoes yeah but they don't get much bigger than that how long does it take to grow a tomato in in your kitchen bethe box you'll have to test it because it's a beta test let's find out so this I actually snipped off of here it was clambering down there this goes everywhere this thing is unstoppable and you notice that I put another another peperomia and another synapses here where your clivia had been that's right with Olivia by the window now this looks better could you can see more of the tree outside yeah I think so and I think that we could even probably do better and kind of like trailing this around but for right now I just I just made sure that I picked him up off the ground so you could grow up here yeah it looks great alright so the first thing that we're gonna look at are these shelves and we just added a few extra plants here with some of the planters you could see this really beautiful Japanese wine oh yeah is this the same plaintiff in the kitchen yes this is the same plant from the kitchen and also the one that I did a replacement down there so this is another sinned abscess these actually shingle in nature but most people buy them as hanging basket plants so they will start to trail down and this looks kind of like the Christmas characters I have it does it's actually another type of jungle cactus called a rift solace and so these are also a little bit more conditioned for dappled light conditions I am curious to see if there's gonna be enough light for this one so we could see and if it starts to look like it's getting sad we could always move it towards the window so what kind of sadness will it have it'll be yellow will it it will probably start to brown turn brown we have this one up here which is another epic Wrentham so again these do so well in your house that I think that we're just going to have this one and it'll probably end up trailing down in a very similar manner if ever gets to be trailing too much you could always clip it back at a node at a node yeah right just a juncture between yep so you could always just like clip it back there at a 45-degree angle you could just like take right here take this little leaf off put it in some water and you'll have a propagation yeah so over here this one they call it tillandsia but this is recently been put into another one cupola see I it's so at the type of bromeliad this actually starts to turn into flower but you can see that it probably already flowered because there's a second one growing off of it so these grow a little bit more like offsets I see what you mean but I have this one growing in my house that is in a relatively lower light conditions so I think it'll do really well here it looks great there mm-hmm another poster our standbys and and very simple planters just like a little bit more of a Nordic appeal yeah so you'd said that you wanted a plant right here but it is relatively dark in this area so I chose a plant called Azizi plants called Daniel Cole kazamia folia and these are actually good in a lower light condition but I didn't want to make them too sad so we have this grow light by GE just came out with these and these are LED grow lights and this has been on for almost all day and you could feel that it's not that hot uh-huh so it doesn't burn hot oh I see a balanced light spectrum and it's it's actually like relatively Pleasant on the eyes it's not like you're having like a red or blue light it looks great yeah so this what light would this usually have how much if it this could actually handle anywhere from a lower indirect light all the way to a higher light condition so this plant is probably I would always recommend it's like one of the easier plants to have in the home that's great I like it because it has it's kind of like long rigid stand on these firm leaves how how much will this grow this could actually grow pretty high it will start to kind of curl over a little bit so it'll start to get a little bit broader but with the light up this way it might actually not curl as much because this is the direction of the light so it might actually grow up a little bit more so you might have a little bit more of an erect plant and as it grows you want to keep it around six to nine inches away from the light so as it grows just the feta yes you could just lift that up okay cool and what's and watch this here oh so this is like one of the best ways I think you know just keeping within your budget instead of like having to buy planters all the time this is just the nursery pot yeah and there's a basin underneath it and when you water it it'll go into the basin and so even though this is a fabric it's going to act as like a planter pot that you could keep and if you won't ever want to buy a nice ceramic planter on your own you could totally do that but these are just kind of like the affordable way to kind of it looked beautiful it's like person clothing on the on the nursery pot exactly it's a little sweater exactly great looks good this is one of my favorites wow what is this monster this is a bio orb terrarium and I'm gonna have to teach you how to use it afterwards but hey it has a little humidity chamber here you could you could water it along the edges you don't ever want to water it above this white base but like you could water down here and the water actually wicks up through the base of this through the coconut core and will actually water the plants but you you will see it all starts to mist and we can always have a little timer a little digital timer so it kind of turns on and off but this is what you're gonna be waking up to everybody that's incredible it's like it's like kind of sleeping in some Creekside meadow until what it what do we have in here we saw this in the store yes so these are the photo nias that you liked so this is a white nerve plant and this is a pink nerve plant this one I thought you'd really like it hasn't really opened out its leaves but you could see that it has this like black velvety sheen with like pink pinstripes that's a ludus eeeh discolor it's actually a type of orchid but it's called a jewel orchid for the color of its leaves these are rabbit's foot ferns and you have some orchids and anthurium in the back and then you have actually have some live moss along the edges oh cool so all of this gets watered the same yes each plant takes the water it needs yes exactly cuz it's getting water from the bottom so as you water you might want to you know you could take this out you could unplug this and kind of take this out that's totally removable and just water along the edge and I would use a distilled water I think that's gonna be probably healthier for the plants or something that's filtered it will just kind of wash along the base and go down and then the fabric will wick it up and the plants will drink as they need I don't think you're gonna need to be watering this very much because in a terrarium setting it kind of keeps its own little ecosystem going so instead of once a week this is you know every couple weeks you you know what you're gonna have to find out yeah because I have never had one of these before so you're gonna tell me you're gonna call me and tell me great it looks really cool we started green it up a little bit I think there's so much more that we could do here but I think maiden hair ferns could be a little finicky for people but I think they might actually do extremely well here and because you have this like fancy spa watering system you might actually just take them here water them let them dry off and then kind of put them back it's like it's a no-brainer for me to actually you know try these out here so they prefer to be kind of misted than to have the soil water they you could water their soil but you could also they would probably love misting as well it's just like an easier thing because if you do that they'll get missed it and the soil will be watered as well so some of them are still in their nursery pots I think that if they survive here for more than two weeks I think get them their own pots so that obviously they're not like you know getting this wood too wet but let's see how you do okay fair enough they look great in here I have one more thing to show you so this is one of my favorite pieces that I got for you this is like a little a Cabana vase and you could just put like you know cut flowers or dried flowers in here but I really love the shape of this is this an iron or what is this yeah it's a it's a type of it's a type of metal I'm not quite even sure what it is but it's so well made and it's heavy it's got like weight to it and it just reminded me of this kind of I love the shape and also reminded me just of like it's not a music note but it kind of has like an element of music looks like a horn yeah and I got you this book because I know you study a little bit more of like Western philosophy but I really wanted to get you this which is I've heard this is like one of the more comprehensive on Japanese philosophy so a third time yeah Thank You little gift to you this is terrific yeah the place looks lovely it's really exciting see how this goes see how you like it see how it fits it in you know move around as you see fit and yeah let me know how how it goes and if we can actually do part two down the line great thank you so much [Music] let me know if you are able to apply some of what we learned from this episode share your experience with your own space in the comments below in the next few episodes we'll take a deeper dive into watering fertilizing pest management and more and if you like this video and want to see more makeovers then give this video a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe to the channel and if you want to be notified as soon as a video is uploaded then click on the notifications bell and as always you could follow me on my personal journey on my Instagram at homestead Brooklyn and on my blog at homestead Brooklyn com there's it's so funny because you have such a ginormous place like there can be so many more plants that we could fit in here to make it look green like doesn't look green the ratio of Grave agreed to get that much green in here it would take a while it's like you know and the thing is you want them like already like growing out I was yeah I feel like I need to bring my plants in here and like throw the well you're used to your place which is which is the covered covered even you can't it can't see any wall oh okay yeah this would be that way I think in about 25 years yeah you know no view part you have a really big window it could be sooner than that yeah [Music]

Channel: Summer Rayne Oakes

Views: 1,630,826

Rating: 4.88588 out of 5

Keywords: Summer Rayne Oakes, Homestead Brooklyn, Plant One On Me, plants, houseplants, indoor plants, garden, gardening, house plants, houseplant care, Houseplant Home Makeover, Home Makeover, houseplant 101, easy houseplants for beginners, houseplants for beginners, plant shopping, shopping for houseplants, how to shop for houseplants, low light houseplants, low light plants, high light plants, basic houseplants, caring for houseplants, Ficus lyrata, ZZ plant, rhipsalis

Id: -Dmvx20Y4YQ

Length: 58min 6sec (3486 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2019