Basement Dwellers: Low-Light House Plants That Have Survived
In my last post, I said I’d talk about the low-light house plants I’ve been keeping in my basement bedroom & bathroom. So here is the first installment on that topic. This is just a basic list of all the plants I have in my room, there are 15 now (including propagations), and when I purchased them, followed by individual photos of each plant.
I do have a couple of lights set up now, but I only did that on December 5th, so most of these house plants have survived until then on the ambient light in my bedroom, mostly from the windows. I don’t have the overhead light on very often, so that’s not giving them much. My bedroom has two very small windows, one facing west, and one facing north which is under a small patio. The bathroom has one small frosted window facing North.
Bedroom Plants
Cylindrical Snake Plant - 13 June 2019 (has put up a little baby recently)
Chinese Money plant - 26 August 2019 (split into 3 pots 31 October 2019.)
Air Plant 1 - 21 September 2019
Flapjack Kalanchoe - 26 October 2019
Air Plant 2 - 30 October 2019
Marimo Ball - 2 November 2019
Spider Plant - Potted Mid-November 2019 (propagated, not purchased)
White Fittonia Nerve plant - 23 November 2019
ZZ Plant - 6 December 2019
Snake Plant - 25 December 2019 (propagated, not purchased)
Mexican Firecracker Echeveria - 27 December 2019
Air Plant #3 - 27 December 2019
I had also purchased a Silver Sparkle Pilea on 26 October 2019, and that plant did not survive. I think it died to my negligence though, not lack of light. I’ll write more about that once I find another one and can test again, and give it better care than the first one received.
Bathroom Plants
Goldfish Plant - 21 September 2019
Fern 1 - Mid-September 2019
Fern 2 - Mid-October 2019
Snake Plant - 12 October 2019 (propagated, not purchased)
Regarding lights: I currently have 4 LED Navlinge clamp lights from IKEA. They look like this, and I have them aimed at each little grouping of plants in my room. I also have a Phillips HF3510 Wake-up Light near my Fittonia and two of the Chinese Money Plants (you can see it in the photo of them). This light also stays on all day, with the IKEA lights. The plants in the windowsills do not have any extra lights.
Just as an FYI I had watered everything just before I took all these photos today, that’s why there is water in many of the saucers, and also why the air plants look drenched.
These are just my low-light house plants that are in my basement suite. Upstairs, in my parent’s part of the house, we also have a TON of other houseplants. I’ve mentioned before that we’re orphan plant collectors, and nothing has changed. We recently acquired a whole bunch of new plants from friends that were moving away. So hopefully in the near future, I’ll get a post up with an inventory of our light-loving plants.
Also, yesterday, while I was in Winners, someone stopped me and asked me if I had a Youtube channel. I said yes, because I do, but I assumed she had me confused for someone else. But no, she said she’s watched my gardening videos, and that I should definitely make more! So surreal and also so cool.
So, now I’m actually planning to create my last two gardening videos. I had shot plenty of footage for two videos back in September, but I haven’t edited them. Thanks for saying "Hello!” Jenny! I’ll get those last two vlogs posted, and hopefully, soon I’ll be making more videos about gardening since we’ll be starting our seedlings indoors in the coming weeks.
Cheers!
Bri