My new home has a bathroom with no daylight at all, and I have very little experience with house plants. Can anyone recommend a plant that would survive or even thrive with just artificial light? And would I need to get a special light? HELP!, my bathroom looks really forlorn with no (other) life in it.
Ignore these people. Yes, you can grow plants without natural ligh (just think of commercial cannabis growers). Bathrooms usually hav higher humidity than other rooms in the house and most houseplants wil flourish . Yes, you need special lights (ordinary lightbulbs offer to much heat and not enough light for plants). Use a fluorescent strip o bulb (I don't know about the wattage to use/distance it has to be fro the plants, but I'm sure you can find this out elsewhere on th web/this forum). Put it on a timer so the plants get light for se number of hours. The problem is that the fluorescent light might no create a very welcoming ambiance in your bathroom, but who cares, whe you'll have beautiful plants to look at
The message from "ollysugar" contains these words:
You're not going to leave the bathroom light on all the time, surely? It's probably on some kind of sensor to switch on and off as people enter and leave so the room, maybe two hours of light in 24, not enough for any plant. Get a silk or plastic one. . Janet.
The OP could put a specialty light on a timer to give an 8-10 Hour photo period... but with the "not much experience with plants" comment, I think i'm with the folks who recommend plastic. (silk is harder to wash and with high humidity, I expect the plants will need cleaning once a month.)
The point about humidity is well made. Most people who have bad luck with houseplants & feel like no matter how they try they have a "black thumb," the culprit is actually the low humidity inside houses which suits hardly anything but succulents. Plants in the bathroom would have a much easier time of it.
Grow-lights might be harsh & weird for human comfort, and full-spectrum lighting might be given a try because it can be comfy for plants & people alike, though it needs to be either a larger tube OR left on longer to equal the same amount of UV as a grow light.
I've thought of turning the rarely-used second bath tubs into a glassed-in jungle for tropical plants & Jackson's chameleons -- only thought of it, I never would.
generally cost under 500.00 to buy and install. This will add nice value to your home, add natural light to your bathroom and allow you to have a house plant or two.. ;0)
IME if you're depending on artificial light in an occupied room you want to use plants that have low light requirements. Yes, you can provide enough light for most plants artificially, but it may be uncomfortable to spend any amount of time in the same room. Most "house plants" are comfortable with fairly low light levels.
Humidity gets high occasionally in a bathroom, but most people don't use the shower (the main cause of humidity there) more than once a day. The rest of the time the humidity is pretty close to the rest of the house unless you leave the door completely closed. Even then, the room is not airtight (presumably), so the humidity will decrease when the room is not in use.
Providing additional humidity in the house is really a good idea during the winter, and not just for the plants. Heating the house can really drive down the humidity to the point where it affects human health and/or comfort.
If you used sliding glass doors, maybe you could install a shower head and put the plants at the far end of the tub. How many people can take a shower in a jungle? I assume the chameleons would stay around the plants so you wouldn't be stepping on them?
Part of an article I clipped from a local paper about house plants that need less light. Aglaonema, Dracaena, Nephthytis, Pothos, Snake Plant, Spathiphyllum.
They need some light and I hope you success in working that out. You might try alternating plants with better lighting locations as well as adding a grow light for the plant you choose.
Would not recommend any of those plants for no light and high humidity conditions. Even they will soon etiolate and die if they don't rot and stink first!!!!
I've grown Dracaena deremensis 'Janet Craig Compacta' in salamander tanks for thirty years. The humidity is always 100% & the roots are always submerged & they LOVE it. I started with one plant way-back-when & have never had to buy another, as it spreads like mad in wet gravel & no drainage at all, with no actual soil, & fertilized by nothing but salamander poo (with a bacter-based filter system that cycles water through the gravel, so that the broken-down salamander poo makes great plant food). The only problem is having to cut them back every few months they do so well, & when they are about five years old the plants are so thick & woody they're difficult to trim back effectively for a small vivarium, so have to be replaced by their own clipped tips, which root with 100% reliability.
dps wrote in news:422eea9e$0$560$ snipped-for-privacy@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu:
Okay, everybody who has stumbled into the shower early in the morning and grabbed an oddly shaped piece of soap and screamed like a little girl after lathering up with what turned out to be a sleeping chameleon, raise your hand.
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