Our Little Forest

This is a very belated post, almost two months old. Ace and myself went to an awesome plant market and bought plants for the new pad. Joining us were Chris, Angel, Jeff, and Joe. We all stocked up. The idea came to us from a very interesting TED video entitled, "How To Grow Your Own Fresh Air". In case you are unfamiliar with TED.com, here's a quick summary. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is a small nonprofit which holds conferences with the brightest minds in the world. They deliver brilliant, thought-provoking, insightful, or funny presentations, all of which are available to view for free on www.TED.com. An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore was originally a TED talk. Check out the website; no matter what you are interested in, i guarantee you'll find something amazing.

Anyway, in this video, Kamal Meattle discusses how you can create clean, healthy air in your home with three different plants. In fact, you could be in an airtight bubble and these plants would keep you alive forever.

Taken from www.elephantjournal.com:

The Areca Palm (or Chrysalidocarpus lutescens) is does great air cleansing work during the day. About 4 shoulder height plants per person should do the trick.

The Mother-in-law’s Tongue (or Sansevieria trifasciata) takes over by converting CO2 to O2 at night. You want about 6 to 8 of these waist high plants per person.

The Money Plant (or Epipremnum aureum) does the job of filtering out removing Formaldehyde and other VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds).

Turns out, these plants are everywhere in Beijing: Restaurants, shops, on the side of the road... even US/G has a few Areca Palms on every floor.

Therese and I bought three Palms, 5 Tongues, and 4 money plants, which is almost what you need for one person. We figure it's better than nothing. The gigantic plant market we went to was possibly the most pleasant place in Beijing. The air is so clean, clear, fragrant, perfectly humid, refreshing... i feel like it's worthwhile to go there, buy some ice cream, and just walk around.

Here i am, courtesy of Jeff's iPhone, totally blissed out on plant air, posing with our newly purchased foliage.

Oh yes, we will definitely do that again.

~Kev