This post is for people who have been fans and/or customers of our site for a long time. It’s also for people who arrived here for a reason, hoping that they would find houseplants to buy (if you arrived here for the first time and were not expecting houseplant store, you can safely skip to the next post). The rest of you, however, probably arrived here today wondering: what happened? Where is the houseplant headquarter site I’m so used to?
Well, we’re still here. We’re just different. We’ve decided to stop selling houseplants through our website. To be honest, we weren’t making much money anyway, since most people get their houseplants from real stores in their area. Not many people buy them online.
Also, we simply did not enjoy our business model anymore. We felt that by just selling houseplants, we weren’t really making much of a contribution to the world. Sure, we were giving people the plants they were looking for, but that was it. It was basically retail sales, except we were selling a product we loved, at least.
But liking the product we were selling was not enough. Instead, we thought we should help people. Naturally, we wanted to help people as it related to their houseplants, so we started to wrack our brains for ideas on how we could do that. What angle should we take?
Once we hit on the right idea, we couldn’t believe it had taken us so long to think of it. For the past few years, we’ve been growing our own houseplants, as well as fruits and vegetables and herbs and many other kinds of plants, in our own indoor garden. Like many other people, we do not have space for an outdoor garden or a greenhouse, so we converted our small basement into a little garden. A closet or any other spare room would work for this as well, though.
A small indoor garden
We bought pots and soils and nutrients and everything else we needed. We started with cheap fluorescent light bulbs that we got from a local hardware store, but those are only good for very small gardens, so we soon switched to an HID lighting system.
If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it. We’ll go into that in other posts. Suffice it to say that it works very well for growing plants, but it is expensive in terms of electricity costs and it gives off a lot of heat, which means you also need a cooling system. The cooling system costs more money and consumes more electricity, which costs even more money.
We quickly realized that LED grow lights were the way to go. Sure, they cost a lot more upfront, but the savings in power costs and from not needing to replace the bulbs and not needing additional cooling equipment, more than make up for the initial outlay. In fact, after only a year, we were already saving money over our previous HID lighting system.
Once we got used to the LED lights, they also grew so much better than our previous lights. Our houseplants are growing amazingly well in our little indoor garden and the same goes for the fruits and vegetables and herbs and everything else we are growing.
And you can’t even imagine the feeling you get, watching your own plants grow in front of your very eyes! It is so much more rewarding than buying a houseplant from a store and just having it.
Yes, we enjoyed all of our plants, even those bought from a store, but I have to say we love the ones we grew ourselves so much more. And, of course, we also really love all the fresh fruits and vegetables and herbs we get to eat straight from our indoor garden.
No more worrying about any pesticides or other contaminants. We know everything we grow is organic and healthy and unbelievably delicious. Seriously, you can’t even begin to imagine how good these taste. I don’t think we can ever go back to buying groceries at a grocery store after enjoying the homegrown versions. They beat the pants off any farmer’s market veggies, too.
Anyway, I just realized I’ve been rambling a bit; all I really wanted to do was let you guys know that we’re still here, but we’re different. If you’re looking for houseplants to buy, I’m sorry you have to look elsewhere. But if you think you might enjoy growing your own plants in your own little indoor garden, stick around.
Check out the rest of our site and see if this might be something you would enjoy. We will talk about a lot of random stuff too, like a new ceramic to-go mug one of us bought to make drinking tea easier and more convenient.
If this site is something you might enjoy, we can definitely help you. Most of the answers will be on our website soon enough. Anything you can’t find here, please feel free to get in touch with us and we will be more than happy to help you get started growing your own houseplants indoors with your very own LED lights and your very own seeds.
If you’re just looking to buy some houseplants, here is a good site for you.
I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now, but it just seems so daunting to get started. Do you think you could write a step-by-step kind of post to help out someone like me? And maybe include a cost breakdown to give us an idea od how much it would cost to set up a garden like this. Thanks!
Thanks for the comment, Carmen. We actually have an huge guide planned that will go over exactly what you are looking for. Look out for it sometime later this month.