Plants bring a vibrant touch to a home of any size. But you may feel that small apartment living precludes having plants. Not so. You can be an indoor gardener, even in a small apartment. Living with plants can brighten your habitat and reward even modest efforts.
If you’ve never had plants, start with something easy. Good choices for small apartment living include philodendron, corn plant, pothos, and jade plant. They will tolerate low to medium light and irregular watering. The moth orchid (Phalaenopsis) is both beautiful and a cinch to care for.
For spring flowers indoors in the winter, you can force bulbs. Forcing means tricking bulbs into blooming out of season. This technique is a natural for small apartment living. Just buy pre-chilled bulbs such as paperwhite narcissus, tulips, or hyacinths, and care for them as directed. You’ll have fragrant blooms within 4 to 6 weeks.
But why stop there? A kitchen windowsill might accommodate a narrow planter where you could grow herbs. If you’re more ambitious, grow vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers indoors. In a small apartment, living space for a few garden pots can often be made near a window that will supply the needed light. If not, purchase grow lights or spring for a hydroponic system that doesn’t require soil.
Even in a very small apartment, living rarely takes up all the space. You could put a lovely African violet on your bedroom dresser. Maybe there’s a sunny place for a plant by the kitchen sink. Perhaps you could hang a low-light/high-moisture fern in your bathroom. If you look around, you can find ways to make plants part of small apartment living.
If you’re tired of your small apartment, living in quarters too cramped to have the plants you want, use our apartment search website to find a new home. We feature a wide selection of Austin apartments, Seattle apartments, Dallas apartments, and Phoenix apartments that would give you—and your plants—room to grow.
