A home full of houseplants? The cost of bringing your garden indoors needn’t be outlandish
When the days become darker and the weather worsens, working outside can be less appealing.
It’s now that houseplants come into their own, providing flowers, scent and greenery that’s missing out of doors.
If you are tempted to start or expand a houseplant collection, but are put off by the sometimes eye-watering prices, then there are ways to fill your house with more plants at very little cost.
Supermarkets often sell tiny houseplants at low prices and, given care and attention, these will soon mature into sizeable specimens.
Cheaper still is the option to grow houseplants from seed. You should be able to find a good selection of seeds at your local garden centre, even in winter, and you may be surprised at the variety of indoor plants that can be raised this way including Parlour palms, coleus, Weeping figs, coffee plants and even a wide range of cacti.
Other plants, including lemon, grapefruit and pomegranate trees can be started off from the seeds in your fruit bowl and all of them will sprout very easily.
Avocados can be trickier because of the thickness of their seeds, but growing them in water is a simple way of getting them to germinate.
To do this you first need to scrub the skin from the seed, then push three cocktail sticks around the edges of the stone, finally setting the stone so that its base is submerged in a glass of water.
After that, just place it somewhere warm and bright and pot it into compost once roots and a shoot have appeared.
Other ways to expand a houseplant collection is by swapping cuttings or divisions with friends or using offsets from yukkas and similar plants to make more of what you have already got.
Now that the weather is getting colder and the central heating is switched on, it’s important to keep a close eye on all houseplants, which will dry out faster and which may suffer from lack of light.
You might want to set up a routine for moving plants to the brightest spots, although care needs to be taken that they don’t spend the night on the windowsill when very low temperatures is forecast.
All this fussing may seem a bother, but it is precisely this nurturing activity that makes houseplants so much fun to own and if you are checking on your collection daily then you’ll notice tiny changes and be able to tweak your care routine appropriately.