Plants are friends

As you may know, the academic year just started and everyone I heading back to school and to uni. I am, too, after being at home for almost 3 months I am now back at my place, facing a lot of challenges, having just recently started at a new uni. So I felt the need to change things up a bit, and those changes started - naturally - at my place. I love decorating it, rearranging furniture, get new things, just to make it as comfy and nice as I want to. It's an endless process of improvement for me!

One of the new things at my place are my plants. I never had many of them at my place since I often spent  2 weeks to a couple of months at home and having many plants here was just difficult. But now I was like "I don't care I want plants, I will make it work" and got myself some cute little babies (= plants) and planted them into glass containers, to make them look like they're growing in terrariums.

This, however, just can't be done without preparation. Since there is no place the water can go from the containers, like it could from the holes underneath pots, it will stay in the pots, leading to a decay of the roots. So I made my research on how to plant my new friends into terrariums without having this ugly problem, and here's what I found out and how I did it!

These are the plants I bought. I got most of the from a garden centre, and some from IKEA. I thought I went a bit overboard with them, but I am actually planning on getting a couple more...  

The first things wou will need are glass containers, pebbles (I took them out of our garden) and - the trick - active charcoal. It will prevent the water that will soak through the soil and stay between the pebbles to develop smells and microorganisms that we don't want in our pots, like algae. The water will stay clean! So after you filled the ground of your container with pebbles, you add a layer of the charcoal. I got mine from a store that sells supplies for aquariums. The charcoal is there used to keep the filters clean, but we can also use it for our terrarium.

Next you will need your soil - since I mainly bought plants that don't need much water, like succulents, I bought soil for cactea and added it to the pebbles and the charcoal.

And this is what it all looked like after I planted my succulents! I used some pebbles, seashells and a pine cone as decoration and really like that idea. I probably used more soil than I necessarily needed, but maybe they will grow nicely like that! We all know that plants in little pots with just a little bit of soil will never really thrive, so I am excited to see how my plants like their home and also each other. You can't just plant whatever plants you have next to each other, but cactae and succulents have similiar needs so it should be okay to have them together.

This is my second terrarium. It is smaller but higher and I just put one rather big plant into it and also decorated the pot with some little things. Again, I used a lot of soil here, but at least I don't need to feel bad for forcing my plants into places where they can't grow well.

These are a few of my other plants and things I have around my apartment.  I really love that one on the right, it has nice fluffy leaves and just looks so soft! I hope it grows to be a big plant. Since the pot is sealed as well, I used the same technique with it as with my terrariums. I also love that zebra figur made of soap stone that I bought at the British Museum in London. The Buddha is just a little reminder for me to do my meditation and that branch is to, eh, attack murderers... No, you will laugh, but I brought it here all the way from Italy because I liked it so much. I am not weird at all.

These are the rest of my plants. All of them are a new addition to my family, which until now just consisted of me and my "money tree" (the 4th plant), a crassula ovata from which we have several ones at home as well. They can grow to be pretty big plants, like little trees really, and are easy to take care of (it lived happily for 4 weeks without water!). The two little spikey things on the left are currently on my desk and they are from IKEA. You would think that they don't like being in those tiny pots, but believe it or not, one of them is making several new little spikes! It's so cute. I might get them other pots at some point though.

Here you also got a little sneak peak into my apartment. I am planning to make a little apartment tour (even though my apartment is rather just one big room with with a kitchen and a seperate bathroom, haha), but since I've been working on making it a really nice and cozy place, I thought I'd share it here at some point!

I hope you liked this rather different post. It's far from the deep emotional stuff I used to post on here, but I kind of liked writing this! Have a good day y'all!