I only have one official resolution for 2014 (eat more salads), but I do have various other goals that have been percolating for a while and that I feel motivated to work on since it’s the new year and all. One of those goals was to acquire some air purifying house plants and actually attempt to keep them alive. I think I first saw a list of good plants for indoor air quality on Pinterest, but you can just search “nasa house plants” (apparently NASA did a study) for pages upon pages of pretty much the exact same info. Here‘s Wikipedia’s contribution.

To kick things off, Dave picked up a spider plant for me a few months ago when he was at the hardware store. It sat on the dining room table for a few days since I couldn’t figure out where to hang it, but then Pollux (our cat who likes to attempt to eat plastic, among other strange things) kept nibbling at it. Spider plants aren’t toxic, but a little googling turned up some reputable sources saying that spider plants can have a similar effect to catnip on cats. Since my goal is to improve our indoor air quality and not have hallucinating cats, we hung the thing off the end of our pot rack, since we still didn’t have a permanent location picked out.

There it stayed, and I attempted to water it, but it just kept getting more and more bedraggled, until finally it ended up looking like this:

Sigh. Anyway, we decided to take a do-over, so over the weekend we picked up two new plants. Another spider plant:

And a devil’s ivy/golden pothos:

This one is toxic if eaten, so I’m going to keep a close eye on it and if it starts dropping leaves it’ll be kicked to the curb right away.

We’re sticking to hanging plants at the moment, and you can see in the pictures that we did manage to settle on some permanent locations where they can hang. I hope to expand to some floor plants eventually, but for now pots full of dirt would just be instant baby-magnets. I think I could maybe make room for a palm in the cat room though, since Dakota doesn’t get to go in there anyway. Peace lilies are supposed to be good in bathrooms and gerbera daisies are supposed to be good for bedrooms, so maybe I could mount some sort of small shelves in those spaces to get them off the ground and out of the reach of small children?

I’m not good at keeping plants alive, (I even managed to kill an aloe plant!) but these smaller ones at least aren’t too expensive, so it’s not the end of the world if I have to occasionally replace them.

Oh, and since my dad will complain if I don’t include a picture of Dakota, here you go, with the house plant tie-in, even: