I’m trying something new in an effort to share some of the cool things I come across as well as lighten the load for me (writing 5 full-length posts a week for nearly 2 years is starting to take it’s toll). Basically, on Fridays I’m going to be sharing some links and quick ideas for you all to take into the weekend. Let me know what you think…

Great Blog Reading

• Homemade EarthBox – Mr Brown Thumb shares how he made his own self-watering container with $2, a garbage bag and a rubberband.
• What Makes a Good Gardener? – Author and blogger Gayla Trail pontificates on what qualifies someone as a “green thumb.”
• How to Make a Planter Out of a Wooden Pallet – This isn’t a blog post, per se, it’s an Instructibles post, so I’m not really sure where that fits in the scheme of things. Regardless, it’s an interesting idea for making a nice looking planter out of found materials.
• The San Francisco Garden Show: Container Drama – Christina shared her photos and thoughts on all the beautiful and interesting container designs at the SF Garden Show.
• Review of Upside Down Planters and EarthBox – Paula Lovgren provides a thoughtful review of her experience with the Topsy Turvey upside down planter, and the self-watering EarthBox.

Loving These Colors

I keep on seeing yellow, orange and silver in gardens and find it a really beautiful, subtle color palette

Book I Can’t Wait to Read

Alys Fowler’s Garden Anywhere. I received the book as a Hanukkah gift, but haven’t had time to read it yet. I flipped through a copy at the San Francisco Garden Show, and was kicking myself for taking so long to actually crack open the cover.

I’m Lusting After…

The uber modern Roost Copenhagen terrarium containers available at aHa Modern Living.

In the News

• Michael Tortorello examines several indoor herb garden kits in his New York Times column. I always enjoy his thoughtful commentary on edible gardening from a newcomer’s perspective.
• Cindy McNatt, garden writer at the Orange County Register, provides a bunch of useful tidbits and trivia about growing tomatoes.
• The topic of master gardeners was really popular this week. Google found 1260 articles about master gardeners published in the last week.
• A new community garden opened up in Tempe, AZ and replaces a vacant lot with flowers and vegetables. Although the concept is a bit different than most community gardens, the produce grown in the garden will supply local restaurants.
• The Guardian examines edible flowers and the various flavors they can add to a dish.

Know about something that should be included in next week’s grab bag? Send your tips to fern at lifeonthebalcony.com.

I think we can all agree that the people who work for NASA are pretty smart. Right? In the 1980s those smart folks turned their attention to plants. Specifically indoor plants. NASA scientists wanted to know which plants did the best job of improving indoor air quality?

Houseplants have an advantage over outdoor plants when it comes to purifying air. Indoor plants are adapted to tropical areas where they grow beneath dense tree canopies and get very little light. These plants evolved to efficiently capture light, which means they must be equally efficient when processing the gasses necessary for photosynthesis. Scientists believe this gives indoor plants better ability to absorb the harmful gases exuded from pretty much everything that is mass produced theses days, from furniture to flooring to wall paint.

Here are the plants that the NASA scientists found to be the best at removing toxins commonly found in indoor air:

1. Philodendron scandens `oxycardium’, heartleaf philodendron
2. Philodendron domesticum, elephant ear philodendron
3. Dracaena fragrans `Massangeana’, cornstalk dracaena
4. Hedera helix, English ivy
5. Chlorophytum comosum, spider plant
6. Dracaena deremensis `Janet Craig’, Janet Craig dracaena
7. Dracaena deremensis `Warneckii’, Warneck dracaena
8. Ficus benjamina, weeping fig
9. Epipiremnum aureum, golden pothos
10. Spathiphyllum `Mauna Loa’, peace lily
11. Philodendron selloum, selloum philodendron
12. Aglaonema modestum, Chinese evergreen
13. Chamaedorea sefritzii, bamboo or reed palm
14. Sansevieria trifasciata, snake plant
15. Dracaena marginata, red-edged dracaena

The scientists who conducted the study found that different plants do a better job of removing different toxins, so it’s best to use a variety of the plants listed above. You need at least 15 plants per 2000 square feet of space to provide the best benefit.

NOTE: Several of the plants on the list are toxic to cats, dogs and small children, so do your research first if you share your home with smaller critters.

Photo Credit: Crows to Burnbaby

Can you imagine the wonderful smell of jasmine scenting your home? Not to mention how beautiful it would look!

Jasmine is easy to grow indoors so long as you don’t overheat your home or allow the soil to dry out. Try to keep temperatures below 65 degrees F while the buds are developing. Perhaps you have a room you don’t heat, or a particularly cool bathroom to keep the jasmine during that time. Jasmine likes bright, filtered light, so a lot of bathrooms are perfect, especially since they like things a little on the humid side.

Feed your Jasmine once a month during spring and summer with half strength liquid fertilizer that is low in nitrogen. Or, if you prefer, give it slow release fertilizer in early Spring and forget about fertilizing all together.

If your Jasmine needs a haircut, trim it back immediately after blooming. If you wait too long, you risk cutting off the buds that will turn into next season’s flowers.

Don’t forget that while Jasmine is not toxic to kitties, it is to dogs. Even if you are a better housekeeper than Martha Stewart, flowers and leaves will fall to the ground before you have a chance to clean them up. But your pup will find those leaves ASAP.

It’s not really possible to grow roses indoors. I had a client that insisted on having a white tree rose indoors and even with bright light from a south-facing window, the rose was always stretched out and weak. Even worse, it was impossible to control the aphids, who loved the warm indoor air and lack of predators. One possible alternative, if you had your heart on an indoor rose, are scented geraniums. While they don’t produce flowers that look anything like a rose’s, rose scented geraniums have leaves that smell like rose flowers. You can also use scented geranium leaves to produce a rose scented syrup to use in your baking.

Photo by justsk

Not all scented geraniums smell like roses, and for that matter, none of them are really geraniums. Technically, most of the plants that gardeners call “geraniums” are technically pelargoniums. Pelargonium graveolens is specific branch of the pelargonium family that are all scented with wonderful essential oils, like mint, lemon, rose, chocolate, coconut, nutmeg, etc. It’s not a big deal if you don’t have a good memory for scientific names, and which plants are “real” geraniums and which are not. But some gardeners like to get snooty about subjects like this, so I thought I’d throw the info out there and save you the embarassment if you run across such a gardener.

How to Grow Scented Geraniums Indoors

Scented geraniums grow pretty quickly, and they’re also a little pricier than typical pelargoniums, so start off with a small plant in a four inch nursery pot. It will cost you less and it will grow into a nice bushy speciman in no time. Choose a container that is six inches wide and deep to transplant the geranium into. Make sure to use potting soil (not garden soil) and position the scented geranium so that it is one inch below the rim of the pot. Place the pot in a sunny window and water it whenever the soil dries out. Fertilize your scented geranium with an all-purpose liquid fertilizer once a month.

Using the Leaves in Baking

There are a number of ways to use scented geranium leaves. The easiest way to use the leaves is to toss a few into milk and slowly warm the milk over the stove (don’t allow it to boil), strain the leaves out of the milk. You can use the rose scented milk in tea (I really like it in green tea).

You can also use rose scented geranium leaves to make a rose syrup for use in anything from lemonade and cocktails to buttercream frosting. These rose scented cupcakes are particularly cute, not to mention yummy looking.

Rose Scented Geranium Syrup

• 2 cups sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 cup washed, chopped geranium leaves

Mix sugar and water in a saucepan. Stir over high heat until sugar dissolves. Reduce to a simmer, cook about 10 minutes, until syrup thickens. Remove pan from heat and add chopped leaves. Steep for up to an hour. Strain, cover, and refrigerate. Use within two weeks.

Maybe you have an aloe plant that was happy growing on your balcony this summer and now you need to bring it inside, or perhaps you’re looking for a useful and beautiful plant to spend your gardening energy on during the winter months. Either way, aloes can be grown inside, so long as you provide them with enough light and don’t over water them.

Photo by cromacom

Choosing the Right Plant

If you’re growing aloe purely for it’s intriguing form, then by all means, pick whichever plant you like. There are all sorts of different aloes, and they’re all attractive plants. But if you’re growing Aloe to make a skin salve, you want Aloe vera (sometimes also listed as ‘Aloe barbadensis,’ ‘Aloe indica Royle,’ ‘Aloe perfoliata,’ ‘Aloe vulgaris,’ ‘Chinese Aloe,’ ‘Indian Aloe,’ ‘true Aloe,’ ‘Barbados Aloe,’ ‘burn Aloe,’ or ‘first aid plant’).

What Aloe Vera Needs

To keep your Aloe happy indoors, you want to provide bright sunlight, preferably from a South facing window. Hopefully this spot is also a comfortably warm temperature. An unheated sun porch, garage, or shed is probably not a good choice, as most Aloes don’t like temperatures below 40F.

Plant the Aloe in fast draining soil meant for cacti and succulents, and water your plant only when the soil is dry. Likewise, make sure to use a pot with a drainage hole, don’t use a self-watering pot. If you see the leaves start to shrivel or flop over, you’re waiting too long in between watering. But do not over water! If your Aloe is constantly sitting in soggy soil it will rot and die.

Make More Aloe Plants

When grown inside, an Aloe plant will most likely not bloom, but it will make little offshoots called “pups.” When the pups are about 2 inches long, use a sharp, clean knife to cut them from the mother plant. Make the cut right at the base of the pup. Place the pup in a pot with new moist soil and it will start to grow its own roots shortly.

How to Use Aloe Vera

Aloe has two kinds of juices and only one of them soothes skin burns. First, obviously, if your burn is really serious, don’t treat it with Aloe, go to the doctor. Now to the “juices.” The green surface layer of Aloe exudes yellow/green sap. Don’t use that part, it’s a skin irritant. To use Aloe on a burn, remove a leaf, cut it open and place the exposed center flesh of the leaf directly on the burn and hold it in place. The center flesh has the “good juice.”

Those tacky little air plants glued onto magnets and stuck on refrigerators everywhere during the 1980s are making a comeback. And for good reason. They’re pretty, cheap, easy to care for, and don’t make a mess. What more could you ask for in a house plant? A couple months back I saw tillandsia used to make a really neat, modern, vertical “planting” and they have been stuck in the back of my brain ever since.

Tillandsia are “epiphytes” which means that they absorb water and nutrients through their leaves, not through roots, as is typical with most plants. This is great for an indoor plant, because it means that there is no dirt for bugs to hang out in, and no water to get all over the floor.

I was going to take step by step photos of what I did to create this tillandsia “pot” but it was so basic, there wasn’t really anything to photograph. I filled a glass vase with small pebbles and then placed the tillandsia on top, covering it’s roots with pebbles to hold it firmly in place.

Caring for tillandsia is very easy. Simply run a gentle flow of water all over your tillandsia’s leaves 2-3 times a week and then pop it back into place. Every couple of weeks, give it a special treat and completely submerge it in a bowl of water for a few hours. Fertilizing Tillandsia is not really necessary, but it will result in faster growth, better flowers and more pups (new plants formed by offshoots from the original plant). If you want to fertilize, use a fertilizer meant for bromeliads at 1/4 strength once a month.

I know that by May, everyone is itching to spend every second they can outside, but I promised my friend Kyle that I would post about indoor plants more often. Surely he isn’t the only one whose gardening is done entirely indoors?

Photo by edgeplot

Just because you’re potting up some plants for indoor life, doesn’t mean that you can’t combine plants similar to the way you would outdoors. Here are some plant combination ideas for indoor plants:

Caladium and Maidenhair Fern

The bold, graphic leaves of caladium contrast nicely with the lacy foliage of maidenhair ferns. You can start with either caladium plants or tubers. Whichever you select, place it in the center of your pot. The place two maidenhair ferns on either side of the caladium (use four ferns, one on each side, if your pot is large enough).

Money Tree, Croton, and Golden Pothos

“Money Plant” is pretty ubiquitous in Asian markets. Their braided trunks and attractive leaves make great houseplants, and are supposed to bring good luck. Combine them with croton and variegated golden pothos for a lush, colorful, tropical indoor container combination.

NOTE: Caladium, croton, and golden pothos are all poisonous. Use with extreme caution in homes with pets, small children, or adults prone to nibbling.

For a long time I avoided my namesake. I was teased mercilessly about my name while growing up. While I love it now (how much more fitting of a name could a garden blogger have?!), I spent most of my life hating the name ‘Fern.’ Hating the plant came along with hating the name. Afterall, if there were no Ferns, I wouldn’t have had to suffer through all the jokes.

Anyway, enough therapy. Lately I’ve been really noticing Ferns (and the non-Ferns that everyone refers to as Ferns) and how beautiful they can be. The other day I saw a container featuring Foxtail Fern, which is actually a member of the lily family, that I thought would be awesome in a bright indoor spot. Here’s my version:

Keep this pot evenly moist (it might help to cover the surface of the dirt with mulch or stones) and put it in a bright indoor spot or somewhere outdoors with filtered light. I picture it in a round, cylindrical pot that is glazed with a dark bronze color.

Did you receive an Amaryllis as a gift last year? Maybe you were really lucky and received a Cybister Amaryllis. You probably followed the instructions your bulb came with, and now it’s done blooming. Well, you can get it to bloom again if you follow these instructions.

Here’s how:

1. When the flowers fade, don’t let them form seed pods. Cut the flower off, leaving the stem and leaves. They help the bulb collect and store nutrients, giving it the strength it will need to bloom again.
2. Keep the plant in a bright indoor spot, and keep on watering when the soil is dry.
3. Fertilize your amaryllis once a month with half-strength liquid fertilizer.
4. If the leaves start to die, that’s okay. Just remove the dead leaves and start withholding water and fertilizer. Your plant is going dormant, not dying. Everything is okay!
5. When spring comes, and there is absolutely no danger of frost, move the amaryllis outside, in a spot with morning sun and afternoon shade.
6. When new leaves start appearing, add some new soil to the top of pot, but don’t totally cover the bulb. Resume watering and fertilizing like before.
7. Your amaryllis should bloom again by early summer.
8. Success!

If you’d like to save your amaryllis and get it to bloom again next spring, stop watering and feeding your plant in fall, when the leaves start to die. If you live in an area with serious winters, move it back indoors.

Always wanted one of those fancy shmancy AeroGarden to grow herbs indoors? That is, until you found out that they cost $80 and each seed pod module will set you back another $15. Yikes! You’d have to grow a lot of herbs to beat the grocery store price!

But if you’re a crafty type, there’s a solution. Hannah over at This Garden is Illegal has come up with a way to make an indoor grow light setup that costs around $5. Granted, it won’t squirt nutrient laden water at your plants’ roots, but for $5, it’s pretty darn good!