7 indoor plants that are tricky to kill

Recently I read one of those “5 surprising habits of happy people” type articles, and one of the five “happy habits” was keeping plants in your home. No real surprises there, of course. Plants are good for your physical and psychological health: they filter and purify the air inside your home, they give you something (low maintenance) to care for, and they make your home look and feel lovely!

I know the trend is all for succulents and and their cacti cousins these days but, actually, most succulents need full sunlight, or at least more sunlight than the average room can give them. They are happiest outdoors. But there are plenty of other plants that love the partial-shade atmosphere you can give them in your home. They will survive and thrive, and help make you happy in the process.

I've taken the camera for a walk around my house and here are seven of my favourite indoor plants. So far I have failed to kill them which is an excellent indication of their hardiness!

↑↑ Fittonia: It has stunning, patterned leaves and gorgeous green “blooms.” It grows gently and sways and thickens beautifully. I have a couple of these, one propped up on an upturned cup inside a tall, narrow vase; and the other in a repurposed stationery holder beside my bed, to make the air sweet for me as I sleep. Where to put it: grow in a warm, humid position with indirect light

↑↑ Super Atom: This plant has glossy, lovely, fat leaves. Do you remember the old “elephant ear” plants we all had around the house when we were kids? Imagine a miniature version with leaves in the same shape, but without the “shredded” look of the elephant ears. That’s not describing it very well. Just look at the photograph above (it’s the one in the apricot planter). Where to put it: ideal for well-lit areas indoors

↑↑ Magic Bean: (It's the one on the right, in the gold pot). How great is the name of this plant! I love it when people who name plants have imaginations and childhoods and they combine the two for the joy of the rest of us. Also, the bean-like thingumies at the base of this plant that clearly gave it its name are quirky and pretty and fun! The rest of the plant is like a rainforest canopy, if you happen to be the size of an elf or fairy. Where to put it: tolerates low, filtered light OR full sun

↑↑ Zanzibar Gem: I love the look of this baby. It’s so glossy and dramatic it doesn’t quite look real. Sometimes when Scout is playing she likes to pretend she’s going to “The Lost City,” and I think when she gets there she will find lots of Zanzibar Gems. Apparently, this plant also “thrives on neglect” when grown indoors, and is almost impossible to kill. Where to put it: just about anywhere. It will tolerate low light and cope when you forget to water it (I don't have a pretty pot for mine yet so it's just on the floor)

↑↑ Sago Palm: Beautiful little fronds curl out from the centre of this palm, a bit like a fern. I like how compact and “designed” it looks, quite classy and predictable (at least my little one is). On the other hand, according to my mother (who knows pretty much everything there is to know about plants) the leaves can be toxic so keep it up high if you have babies in the house. Mine is on the hearth. Where to put it: tolerates low light

↑↑ Air plants: There are about a million different types of air plants (ok 650), so describing them is pretty tricky. I have some spiked ones and some fluffy ones and a weird curly one (in the little yellow pot next to the Super Atom above) and some clumps of moss. They look pretty in terrariums, and in decorative dishes, vases... just about anything! People say they don’t need watering but you do have to look after them. I give mine a bath by submerging them in water for an hour once a week, and mist them if the weather is particularly hot or dry. Where to put them: a bright room but not in direct sunlight

↑↑ Parlor Palm: The name of this plant is instantly old-school to me. It reeks (the name, not the plant) of Great-Aunt-So-And-So’s sitting room, complete with Iced VoVos and proper teacups in saucers and ceramic ducks on the walls. It’s also graceful and frond-y and looks pretty just about anywhere you choose to place it. Where to put it: anywhere you like, except direct sunlight. Tolerates low-light areas

Some tips about keeping house plants

* If you keep the plants in the plastic pots they come in, that will give you a much wider choice of "pretty pots" to display them in - you don't have to worry about drainage or anything like that. You just slip the plastic pot inside the bigger, pretty one. That also lets you change your mind as many times as you like. If your pretty pot is cloth or porous like some of mine, line it with a plastic bag so it won't be ruined by any moisture

* Rather than walking around the house with a watering can, once a week I take all my plants to the bath or out onto the balcony and give them a big drink together. That way all the water can drain away without risking my floors and furniture. Once the dripping has subsided, just pop them back into their pretty pots

* When I bring each plant back from its bath I try to rotate it around so that different leaves are facing the light. That way it will grow evenly.

* The weekly bath is pretty much all I do for my plants. Apparently some will benefit from liquid fertiliser or something, and I really should read up on that but, generally, if my plants can’t survive with just a watering and a bit of rotation, I don’t have them in the house. I’m busy!

How about you? Are you a plant person? What do you like to grow and what are your top tips?

Make this, naturally: blue & botanical Easter Eggs

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Here's a lovely, last-minute tutorial for dying Easter eggs a stunning blue, and creating pretty, stencilled patterns out of leaves and flowers. Do you want to give it a go? There's still time!

The idea for this project came from my friend Pascale, who does it every year with her children. When they were little, she said, they would gasp with wonder at the patterns created on the eggs. Even now, as almost-grown-up teenagers, they still ask to make these decorative eggs every Easter, hunting through the garden for the "perfect" flower or leaf to create their stencil.

Pascale told me she would use egg dye to create a rainbow array of stenciled eggs, but I couldn't find any in our local shops and from past experience I hadn't had a lot of luck using food dyes. Instead, I found a tutorial for making a brilliant blue dye out of red cabbage, and it turned out to be incredibly easy.

What you'll need:

* Hard-boiled eggs * 1/2 red cabbage * White vinegar * Table salt * An old pair of pantyhose

This project works best on white eggs. If you can't find any, here is a super easy tutorial for whitening eggs, using only white vinegar. If you're going to do this (I did and it worked really well), make sure you hard-boil the eggs before whitening them - it will make them a lot less delicate when you come to rub the colour off.

Step 1: Make your dye

1. Roughly chop up half a red cabbage into pieces about the size of your fist. Toss them into a large saucepan, then pour in two litres of water, and bring it to the boil. Reduce to a simmer, and let it bubble away for half an hour.

2. Strain the now-purple water into a heat-proof bowl, and discard the cabbage. To the water, add four tablespoons of salt and four tablespoons of white vinegar, then stir it around until the salt dissolves.

Step 2: Prepare your eggs

1. While you're making your dye, hard-boil your eggs (and whiten them as per above, if needed)

2. Take a walk around your garden, or along your street. Look for small leaves and flowers in pretty patterns that catch your eye, and gather a little collection to take back inside

3. Cut off pieces of the old pantyhose, about 10 centimetres long each. Tie a knot in one end.

4. Now take one of your leaves or flowers and press them against one of the eggs. Put the egg and plant into the piece of pantyhose, and pull it tight before tying a knot at the other end (see below). Repeat this step for as many stenciled eggs as you hope to make

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Step 3: Wait for the magic to happen

1. Gently submerge your pantyhose-egg in the bowl of dye. You might want to mix things up by submerging some non-stenciled eggs, too, so you have a variety of plain and patterned eggs when you're done

(Pro tip: if your eggs are bit old and you find they're floating, pour the dye into a taller, more narrow vessel - I used a large vase - then once the eggs are all in the dye, lower a piece of cloth over the top. I used a Chux wipe. As the cloth soaks up the dye, it submerges, pushing the eggs down with it without marking or scratching them the way a more solid weight would do)

2. Leave the eggs in the dye for as long as you like. About an hour will give you a lovely, pale, blue. Several hours or overnight will turn them indigo

3. When you take the eggs out, gently cut them out of the pantyhose, and lift away the plant. It should reveal a beautiful, stenciled pattern

4. Place the eggs on a wire cake-rack to dry completely, before using them for your Easter decorations

Two final words of advice:

1. After about 24 hours, the dyed eggs turn from blue to more of a turquoise or aqua. They're still beautiful, but bear this in mind if you're being all strategic with your colour scheme

2. Ideally you'll want to do this project on a warm day with the windows open: our house really stank of cabbage!

Happy Easter dear friends, if this is something you celebrate. What are your plans? We're off to visit family in Bendigo, then helping to host an Easter egg hunt in our local park, followed by a roast lunch for 13 friends in our home, and then a day off on Monday to recover. See you on Tuesday!

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My people

On the weekend as I walked home with Mr B, pushing the double pram with two tired but happy children whose bellies were full of yum cha and ice cream, we got chatting about “tribes."

That morning I’d spent two hours at the Melbourne Museum in the company of a lovely bunch of women, some of whom I’d met before and others who were relative strangers, although we’d been in touch on Facebook and on blogs and, in most cases, by snail mail.

We were all part of an alumni group of folks who had participated in "Blog With Pip," a month-long online course that helps beginner bloggers get started, and helps more seasoned bloggers shake things up and improve them a bit.

It wasn't the first online course I’d ever done, nor the first group of alumni or otherwise that I’d been part of, but never before, not once since the Internet, had I experienced any genuine desire to “meet up” with members of an online group. But these people I did want to meet. I looked forward to it, and I loved every minute of it. I’ve met up with members of this group before, and I hope I’ll join them at other events in the future.

So as Mr B and I walked home that day, we got to thinking about what made me feel like these were “my people,” and why it was so easy for me to enjoy their company.

In the end, we figured the answer was as simple as “like attracts like.”

I chose to do the Blog With Pip course in the first place, over all the other blogging courses and lessons I could have pursued, because I admired the teacher Pip Lincolne. Her blog Meet Me At Mikes was one of the first blogs I'd ever read (I came across it when she hosted a sail mail project, of all things, in 2010); she is a talented and prolific author; we share similar interests (craft, creativity, colour); and she has a kindness and a sense of ethics and justice that I deeply admire.

I’m assuming a number of other people chose Pip’s course over all the others for much the same reasons, so right there we already had a lot of interests AND life views in common. Easy friendship! Lots to talk about!

It’s nice when you find your people, isn’t it. How do you find YOUR tribe?

Onwards to the pictures.

↑↑ Scout decided at the last minute that she wanted to join me “with the ladies” but then when she got there she was shy. And then she wasn’t.

↑↑ What's going on here is that I’m taking a picture of Pip taking a picture of Carly’s boots. Because, THOSE BOOTS.

↑↑ As we wandered through the indoor/outdoor rainforest, everyone pulled out their cameras to start taking photographs, and I gave Scout my phone so she could take photos too. Here she is taking a groundbreaking close-up of... a pole. She also took this picture of a waterfall using "Mummy's big camera."

↑↑ There is a weird taxidermy room at the Melbourne Museum, which is creepy and educational in equal measure (not pictured here but I'm just saying). I never can quite decide how I feel about it. Also a cluster of indoor windmills. A real Egyptian mummy (so cool!). And this truly bizarre human-map of… um, I can’t remember. Arteries, I think?

↑↑ It’s almost ANZAC Day. A few of us sat down to write remembrance / thank-you notes to men and women who have served in a protective capacity. I wrote a thank-you to my brother-in-law, who sacrificed and lost more than anyone should have to to keep the people of Timor safe.

Meanwhile, the photo at the top of this post is a not-so-shy-anymore Scout, getting a cuddle from Michelle while they looked at butterflies.

ps. Here's a roll-call of who was there, if you want to visit their blogs and say hi. Props to Jacquie from Bird and Fox who created this list - I have shamelessly copied it. You can read her impressions of our outing, and see her lovely photographs, here.

Jacquie - bird and fox Yvette - bear loves dove Emily - squiggleandswirl Carly - Tune Into Radio Carly Pip - Meet Me At Mike's Kate - One Small Life Michelle - Girl Gone Home Also Catherine, who has a blog yet to come (we can't wait!)

Weekend links

Do you have plans for the weekend? We are going to a black tie thingy on Saturday night and I need to buy a dress and buying a dress is no fun at ALL when you are a) on a budget and b) under significant time pressure. Am I right?

#firstworldproblems

Right now I'm looking down the barrel of a fairly good weekend-balance between being social and enjoying some family down-time. I hope. We are notorious for over-committing around here, but maybe just maybe this weekend we'll get it right.

What I WANT to do is to spend time doing the everything and nothing that so often make up the best of family time: playing exploring cuddling baking dancing tickling painting eating reading laughing gardening kissing. You know, just... stuff.

What are your plans? I've collected these links for your weekend reading/viewing pleasure:

Before there was Google, this is what people searched for (and how they did it)

These indoor clouds are breathtakingly beautiful

(Dear Santa) I am in love with pretty much everything in this store

How to stop yourself from crying, on any occasion. Have you tried this?

Turn your smartphone into a polariod camera

Can I live in this home please?

This is for all the photographers: magic hour

You've heard of street art. This is forest art

Charts outlining how we live and think, before 30 and after 30. Hilarious!

Molly Yeh is my new blog crush. The photo at the top of this post? Those are her edible gingerbread terrariums

A whole day for free flowers in the city

I love this art on the wall of a building. It's like we all have x-ray vision

Lost trades, diets, & coming up for air

Life has swept us up lately. Nothing momentous, but one thing is bleeding into the next and leaving little room to come up for air.

I have been making zines and snail-mail packages and painting and posting mail-art. I have also been working on the picture-book I told you about. I sketched up the pictures for the story-boards and then didn’t like them at all, and had to throw them away because even looking at them blocked my ideas for what I WANTED them to do. I think I feel the pressure because I’m not a professional illustrator, and I really want to do my friend’s story justice. I need to find a way to let go of the creative burden and just enjoy the creative process. Do you know this feeling? Does it happen to you? How do you overcome the fear of letting somebody down, when you’re doing something creative?

My little boy has been keeping us up of a night, and not just with nightmares. We don’t really know why. It is probably a combination of teething, and too many grapes during the day (that was definitely the reason on one particular nappy-dominated night), and wanting to crawl around while watching CSI with us at 11pm. Anyway CSI is not THAT great and I’d rather be sleeping and secretly, I think Ralph would rather be sleeping too. He just takes a bit of convincing. Lucky he’s cute.

Mr B and I have been ordering Lite ’n Easy for our lunches and dinners for the past four weeks. We are trying to lose some of our combined “baby weight,” and enjoy the convenience of having the food ready to go. That would be great if you could call Lite ’n Easy food. Which you can’t. At least, the lunches are mostly lovely and fresh, but those frozen dinners! Our theory is that people lose weight because they simply lose the will to eat. Seriously, I can’t spend one more night smelling that food permeating from the microwave, so I’m going to give up. I’ll take away the lessons I’ve learned in portion control and the fact that I no longer seem to desire sweet things after a meal, and make the effort to cook even when I’m exhausted rather than order take-out, and hope for the best. I should probably cut back on the wine at night, too, but nobody’s perfect.

On the other hand, I think anyone in customer service should study the way they do it at Lite ’n Easy. I might not enjoy the meals, but the people on the other end of the phone are wonderful to deal with. Consistently, no matter who I speak to, they are polite and knowledgeable and supportive and friendly and flexible and personable. That’s pretty good, don’t you think? It’s not their fault that frozen microwave food tastes like, well, frozen microwave food.

The cat has a weird allergy that is causing her to scratch her nose all the time. The dog has gone blind. I'm sure you needed to know that.

In other news, we visited the Lost Trades Fair at Kyneton on the weekend and I've never seen so many pre-hipster beards in the one place in all my life. It was a perfect day for a jaunt to the country and the fair would have been lovely, if it were not for the uninvited swarms of European wasps.

We didn’t stay long, but it was enough time for Mr B to discover the joys of letter-pressing and decide that I really needed a letterpress machine to enhance my snail-mail endeavours. So, who am I to argue? I would LOVE to get into letterpress! Would you like your next mail from me to include something lovely and tactile with that classic letterpress debossing? And maybe some kind of illustration I've created on metal plates? I found a nifty little starter number on the internet for $100, to which Mr B responded “Pshaw, you need an original!” He promptly pointed me to an antique (and very expensive) printing press, not letterpress. Now that would be seriously fun, except that we’d have to move to the suburbs to afford a home big enough to house my new hobby. Which might be worth considering. I think the world is almost ready for the Naomi Loves Times.

What’s been going on at your place?

How to make iced tea

On the weekend, a small group of bloggers and one two-and-a-half-year-old girl relaxed in the leafy and floral courtyard of the Travelling Samovar Tea House to chat, giggle, taste tea, and learn about how to brew and blend and make the best of all the (non-alcoholic) summer drinks: iced tea.

Scout had begged to come with me and I was proud as punch to bring her along, but she did make it somewhat more difficult to listen and concentrate on everything we were learning. In between supervising toilet stops and watching her twirl around a garden umbrella and having half-an-ear on the shutter-click of 555(!) photographs (of the ground) being taken on my phone, here is what I learned about how to make a delicious iced tea.

Step 1: Choose your "base" (for example, black tea, green, yellow, or something herbal)

Step 2: You might want to blend some fresh or dried herbs in at the brew stage for flavour. For example, perhaps you'd like to add rose buds or peppermint

Step 3: Brew up the tea. Make it a fair bit stronger than you otherwise would because if you're going to pour it over ice, that will dilute it

Step 4: A good tip the Travelling Samovar gave us was to pour strong, HOT, freshly-brewed tea over ice, which will immediately cool and dilute it. Alternatively, you can store brewed tea in the 'fridge for several days, as long as it's properly sealed and you haven't yet added anything else like fruit or sugar

Step 5: Does your tea need sweetening? Experiment with fruit, sugar, honey, fruit cordial… To the yellow iced tea you see Scout making in these photographs, we added a strawberry coulis and some squares of mango for sweetness. It looked extravagant and tasted delicious

Step 6: Try to make your tea pretty. Apparently, we drink with our eyes as much as we eat with our eyes. The ladies at the Travelling Samovar suggest serving the cold tea with frozen fruits instead of ice: not only will it look beautiful, the tea won't become diluted as it warms up

Are you an iced-tea drinker? I confess that before the Travelling Samovar opened its doors in our neighbourhood, I wasn't a big fan.

I mean, there was THAT TEA I'd had in New Orleans that was pretty close to perfection, but other than that, the pre-bottled stuff you can buy at service stations really didn't float my boat. But the subtle, sweet, refreshing and gorgeous-looking teas these ladies serve up (there's easily half a dozen iced teas on the menu on any given day in summer) have completely won me over.

A big thanks to the Travelling Samovar for hosting such a fabulous event, and to all the ladies who came along and made it so much fun. I loved learning more about the history of this drink, and how to make it at home. And at 36 degrees by later that afternoon, you couldn't get a day better suited to the drinking of iced beverages. Just ask Scout, who got home and announced to her father "I DID MAKE THE ICED TEA" along the lines of "I JUST INVENTED PERPETUAL MOTION."

ps. This was not a sponsored event - we all paid our own ways

Taking Stock - January 2015

Well folks, that was January. I assume all the Christmas decorations will be going up in all the shops shortly, because apparently TIME IS STUCK ON FAST FORWARD. What is HAPPENING here? Time to slow down, and take stock*.

Making: Paper gifts to send in the mail Cooking: Pork-and-apple sausage rolls for the kids Drinking: Morning coffee from Cafe Bu Reading: A work briefing paper Wanting: A massage Looking: Tired. And a lot like I need a hair cut Playing: A LOT of role-play games with my two-year-old Deciding: To exercise more Wishing: For more time (so original) Enjoying: My children playing together. So sweet! Waiting: For life to slow down, just a little Liking: The milder temperatures Wondering: Where did I put my sunglasses? Loving: My two amazing, hilarious, snuggly babies Pondering: Gratitude, the need to stop and be thankful that there ARE roses and that I have access to them, before I even smell them Considering: Whether or not to start a small business Watching: An adorable mail art documentary Hoping: The clever folk at the Mac store can find all my lost photographs (ARGH) Marvelling: How incredible children are at soaking up and remembering and learning and applying new things Needing: More chapstick Smelling: The dog. What DID he eat last night?? Wearing: Mum uniform (read: raggedy old clothes randomly decorated with stickers and play dough) Following: 162 blogs, according to Feedly! (And I read them ALL but sometimes I can be a bit slow so if you think I’m not reading your blog, I probably am, but I’m up to about August last year) Noticing: Fallen leaves. Could autumn be on its way? Knowing: I am lucky Thinking: I might have been a saint or something in a past life because I got given a pretty darn good one this time around! Admiring: People who think of things and then just DO things or at least TRY, rather than only talking about doing them Sorting: All the papers and notes in my office. It gets so confusing in here! Buying: Nothing much. Just food Getting: Fresh flowers from the garden Bookmarking: Pages and posts on beautiful mail art Disliking: Bigotry and racism and extremism-related violence. Bit over all this pointless cruelty Opening: A beautiful letter, picked up in the post today Giggling: This morning when I went to get Scout out of bed she had taken off her pants and was wearing her swimming top instead (legs through the arm holes). That definitely had me giggling Feeling: Lucky to have this life Snacking: Plums and nectarines and cherries Coveting: Lovely homewares, like a linen tablecloth, and stoneware dinner plates Wishing: I had enough money to build a garden Helping: A friend get a website going Hearing: Mr B’s two Elvis records, on repeat. (Going. Slowly. Insane.)

What’s been happening with you?

* Taking stock is a semi-regular post hosted by Pip Lincolne of Meet Me at Mikes. If you’d like to join in, please do! And let me know so I can see what you’ve been doing, too.

Happy Australia Day

I know, I know, it’s controversial. It’s also a day off together as a family and we get precious little of those so we're making the most of it. To whit: I am eating lamingtons (n.b. the spell checker tried THREE TIMES to change that word to laminations). I’ll be back tomorrow with a really easy project to make your snail mail more interesting.

Image credit: Shelley Brunt, licensed under Creative Commons

Portent of autumn

Lately we’ve been having some strange weather days that feel out of place. Like mid-summer pretending to be autumn. It's still warm, hot even, but overcast, with the kind of glare that makes you put your sunglasses on and, when you do, turns the day too dark to feel in control any more. Do you know what I mean?

The other day as I walked the dog to buy my afternoon coffee it was as though we were locked in an uneasy kind of silence. The soft steps of my sneakers and the clack-clack of Oliver’s claws on the footpath faded away. There was not another soul on the street. Everything around us was still but, up high, the tops of trees bent and twisted and danced to a wind that would play with leaves but not with us.

It felt like a message. I don’t know if it was a good one or something more malevolent, maybe it was nothing more than a portent of autumn.

Image credit: Chelsea Francis, licensed under Creative Commons

Food nostalgia: Mum’s devilled eggs & 80s salad

Talk about food nostalgia! Devilled eggs are one of those dishes that take me RIGHT BACK to my childhood, with the first bite. Do you have a dish that does that for you?

Devilled eggs were a classic that my Mum would pull out whenever guests came over. We had devilled eggs with almost every barbecue (and we had a lot of barbecues). They were right up there on her “tried and true” list, with prawn cocktails.

It was 30 degrees outside when I made these devilled eggs, so I paired them with a simple salad for dinner. I call it “80s salad” because I swear we ate a salad like this at least once a week for the entire decade of the 80s. It was the least sophisticated, least pretentious salad you can imagine. The percentage of ancient grains, buffalo mozzarella or kale was exactly zilch. This salad had iceberg lettuce, friends. Remember iceberg lettuce? And whatever other veggies we happened to have to hand which, in my childhood, meant staples from the veggie patch: tomatoes, cucumber, celery. I added fresh pineapple to my salad, because I found some in the back of the ‘fridge and it was still good.

Mum’s devilled eggs recipe

6 hard boiled eggs 2 tablespoons of chutney (or in this case, 2 tablespoons of Jayne’s homemade tomato relish, which did the job admirably well) 1 tablespoon mayonnaise 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce Salt and pepper, to season

Peel the hard-boiled eggs*, then cut them in half, lengthwise. Put the yolks in a bowl with all the other ingredients, then mush and mix them all together.

Spoon the mixture into the empty halves of the egg whites.

In Mum’s recipe, it says to garnish the eggs with slices of cucumbers, and I am a rule-follower (most of the time), so that’s what I did.

Wash it all down with chilled, cheap plonk. This bottle cost me $10, because I am all class.

* Is it just me, or does anybody else think hard boiled eggs are a LOT more difficult to peel these days? The egg shell comes away in tiny little shards that cut your fingers, and half the time manages to take away giant chunks of egg-white with it.

That didn’t used to happen when I was a kid. Are they feeding something different to the hens? Or did they feed something different to the hens back when we were kids? Every time I make hard-boiled eggs for the kids, these days, I wonder at how difficult they are to peel.

Naomi Bulger, bringing you the hard-hitting news of the nation.

ps. Want more food nostalgia? This is how the Great Custard Controversy panned out.