Having done it before, I thought I’d blog about plants some more, since I can’t think of anything more exciting to read about than someone else’s plants.

Last time I was at Ikea, I picked up a little $2.99 thing of basil. It has a little compressed disc of dehydrated soil; you just add water and it puffs up to fill the container. (This is creepy.) It took a long time, but when I got back from a few days away for Thanksgiving, the basil had sprouted:

This got me thinking, though… I don’t really do much with basil. I bought it mostly because it was $2.99 and it seemed fun, and Katherine convinced me it was a good idea. I think I’d much rather grow Rosemary or Peppermint or something. Garlic would be fun, even. It also seems that basil gets big, so I’m not sure this little pot will hold it as it grows.

This reminds me of a neat Lifehacker post, Three Plants that Give You Better Indoor Air. It seems to be suggested that you need crazy-person amounts of the plants to make a noticeable difference, but a few trips to Ikea (who knew they sold plants at all!?) have netted me a snake plant and an Areca palm, two of the three plants mentioned. (There are actually many more plants than those three that should work, though; check out Wikipedia’s List of air-filtering soil and plants). Another visit to Ikea got me a Norfolk Island Pine, maybe 9″ tall, just as an ornamental tree, not a natural air filter or oxygen-producer.

Lifehacker mentions that rosemary and lavender both require minimal watering, making them somewhat hard to kill, which only adds to my inclination to grow rosemary instead of basil. It looks like rosemary is hard (but possible) to grow from seed, so they’re mostly propagated by cuttings, not seeds.

As long as I’m citing Lifehacker about gardening, check out this neat post about growing something (e.g., moss) inside of a lightbulb as a DIY terrarium. Too bad most lightbulbs I have are frosted… Although it’s apparently possible to work around that. Here’s another page with tons of information on making your own terrariums.