water, light and love.
It's mid-winter (here in Oslo) and the snow and cold has won the fight over the trees and flowers in the parks and gardens. There is something quite beautiful about the extreme cold, the snow, ice and baron scenes but there is also a certain comfort in tending to house plants to keep them well and happy through these cold dark days.
"The smell of lemon blossom or the joys of picking fresh herbs from your hydroponics when it is dark at 3pm sheds a little light onto these shadowed days."
Image from ELLE Decoration.
Indoor gardening has become much easier in recent years due to better shared knowledge on what to grow and how to grow but also due to some amazing indoor gardening kit. We are perhaps a little fanatical here at noctu HQ with our indoor garden but the great thing is that you can do as little or as much as you like.
IKEA moves into indoor gardening with hydroponics
Most importantly, for us at least, is that it gives us the opportunity to teach our kids about plants and growing plants and foods all year round. With some patience and care they can learn how to grow these plants and share the joy of cooking with them. Sustainable gardening and food production is the future, and the more we can teach our kids the better prepared they will be for the future. Perhaps the small changes made here will lead to a new forward thinking generation with more knowledge and respect for what they eat. We are by no means self sufficient and do not pretend to be saving the world but we are just enjoying the small benefits of home growing.
We are also, no experts in the field but with a little google here and there, you can find most of the answers you need. We have decided to put together a few loosely connected stories which touch on the "home gardening" topic to hopefully inspire and encourage some more home growing.
They say start small so to begin we have found this great article "12 Edible Gardening Hacks" from Garden Therapy, where there is a list of really easy hacks to grow your own produce in a cost effective and easy way. (We did the pineapple one and it worked a treat!)
Next on our list features an infographic about which indoor plants give us the best air filtration. Our friends at inhabitat recently published this interesting article - "Top 18 houseplants for purifying the air you breathe, according to NASA."
Next on the agenda is some tips for those who don't have enough light to support the growth of some of the higher maintenance plants and edibles. Our first and only port of call to solve the light problem is IKEA with their newly introduced range of grow lights and mini green houses. We have these littered around our apartment growing all kinds of yummy things, They are a cheap and effective way to grow indoors and a fantastic entry level way of learning hydroponics. There are of course many other options here but we believe this is the best starter set for its money and ease of use.
To end we will take a look a few larger scale applications to get the creative juices flowing. Two of our favorites are "Green in the City" and "ReGen Villages by EFFEKT."
"Our modern lifestyle is utterly unsustainable and this calls for more resilient solutions for the future," explained EFFEKT partner Sinus Lynge.
Both of the above projects show real change and innovation within our rapidly developing world. Both projects offer a rare reflection on how we treat the world and offer some hope for positive changes in our approach to how we live and produce our food. It is up to us as the consumer to change our mindset of how we grow and eat our food, our actions and perhaps more importantly the actions of our children has the opportunity to turn things around and someday make the world a little healthier than it is today.