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<\/a><\/p>\nIt’s an air plant.\u00a0 I bought several of these to decorate my beach room.\u00a0 I know, I know.\u00a0 A beach room?\u00a0 Have the kids grown up so much that I am actually decorating my rooms in themes?\u00a0 Themes other then Big-Enough-To-Put-the-Exersaucer-And-Still-Walk-By-Room or the Room-With-Chocolate-Milk-Stains-On-Carpet?\u00a0 My, how time flies.\u00a0 Can you believe we’ve already moved on to a bunch of pony wallies and an astronaut wallpaper border in the kids’ bedrooms?\u00a0 And the Dump-Your-Clean-But-Unfolded-Laundry-Here space at the top of the stairs is now the beach-themed sitting room.\u00a0 Well, Beach-And-Wii-Playing sitting room.\u00a0 Which is as close as we get to adult decorating (and a beachy decorating theme is as close as we’ll ever get to owning a beach house!).<\/p>\n
I can’t tell you how it exciting it was to buy these pretty air plants that remind me of the spiky sun loving varieties found on the coast.\u00a0 Well, actually they’re Tillandsia Bromeliads.\u00a0 Proponents of Tillandsia bromeliads will tell you that you shouldn’t call them air plants.\u00a0 Because they don’t really live on just air.\u00a0 I think those proponents must not own any other plants, though.\u00a0 If they did they would realize air plants are so easy to take care of that they might as well live on air alone.<\/p>\n
After all, they don’t need any soil.\u00a0 Nope, you can just plop them in any pretty container you have around the house.\u00a0 Sure, you can use some decorative planting materials like the sphagnum moss I used here:<\/p>\n
Or even something fancier like these terrariums<\/a> on Etsy:<\/p>\n (Where do the people on Etsy get all the time and energy for their creations?\u00a0 Do they not have children?\u00a0 Dogs?\u00a0 Other Halves? A public library that allows you to rent the entire 1st and 2nd season of 24 on DVD for free?\u00a0 I mean, how can you have that much spare time??)<\/p>\n Anyway, without the soil, it’s not like owning a plant at all.\u00a0 After all, when the aforementioned kids, dogs, Other Halves, or even “I Don’t Know” knocks them off their ledge, there’s really nothing to clean up.\u00a0 You do have “I Don’t Know” at your house, right?\u00a0 The guy who sneaks around causing damage whenever you’re not looking.\u00a0 When I ask the kids who spit out a half chewed sucker onto the mud room linoleum where it is stuck like concrete or who ate the last of the vanilla wafers designated for school snacks or who was the last one in the freezer and left the door open all night long, they always tell me it’s him.\u00a0 That guy really gets around.\u00a0 Usually when he knocks over a plant, he might try to hide it, but I always I find telltale signs of dirt clumps under the couch or fertilizer spikes rolling loose on the windowsill.\u00a0 Never mind the time he stuck a plant back in upside down.\u00a0 But with air plants, I might just find them sitting in their pots in a different order.\u00a0 No spilled dirt.\u00a0 No broken stems.\u00a0 No damaged roots.\u00a0 Happy, happy, joy, joy.<\/p>\n Air plants do require watering, but it isn’t in the usual way.\u00a0 It doesn’t involve the kids pouring so much water in the pot that it floods all over the counter or side table.\u00a0 It doesn’t involve having to buy water saucers that are always just a couple inches wider than the surface you plan to set the plant on.\u00a0 It doesn’t involve moving all the plants onto the deck so they can safely overflow and then hauling them all back in.\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 All you do is pluck your air plants out of their container, hold them under running water in the sink until they’re wet, then shake off any excess moisture and plop them back in the pot.\u00a0 I’m serious.\u00a0 I’m not making this up.\u00a0 If you keep them in a closed container, you might want to set them on a paper towel to dry off good before putting them back in.\u00a0 Sitting in moisture can make them rot.\u00a0 But other than that, you’re good to go.\u00a0 And they don’t even need water that often.\u00a0 Mine have been taking 3 weeks to start feeling dried out.\u00a0 3 weeks in between waterings!\u00a0 O.M.G.\u00a0 I told you.\u00a0 They’re not like plants at all.<\/p>\n Of course, they do need sunlight, but since they prefer filtered bright light they’re perfect for the house.\u00a0 Even if you have a space that is just a little too dark for air plants, you can fool people by mixing real ones with fake ones.\u00a0\u00a0 The long dark green spiky plant here is actually an air plant.\u00a0 But the light green round lobed plant is not.<\/p>\n I just put the light green plant in there so that it seems like it must be an air plant, too.\u00a0 That way\u00a0 I can use some of it in a different location and people won’t think it’s fake.\u00a0 I have a photo mantle that just doesn’t get enough light to keep my air plants happy.\u00a0 So I switched the real air plants out with some of the fake stuff.\u00a0 See?<\/p>\n I am so amazing.\u00a0 So tricky.\u00a0 So\u00a0 clever.\u00a0 So…wait a minute.\u00a0 I\u00a0 think I just exposed my secret online.\u00a0 And you thought that only happened to famous people!<\/p>\n So I was already in love with my air plants for all their astounding qualities.\u00a0 And then it happened.\u00a0 One of them bloomed.\u00a0 It actually bloomed!\u00a0 Like some miraculous flower.\u00a0 A flower that doesn’t need dirt or weekly watering or 12 hours of direct sunlight that can only be found way down in the vegetable garden.\u00a0 A flower!<\/p>\n This picture really doesn’t do it justice, though, because\u00a0 I was so stunned by this incredible development that it took me almost a week to recover and think straight enough to take a picture.\u00a0 That and the fact that “I Don’t Know” had borrowed the camera and it was a week before I finally found it under a pile of sweatshirts on the window seat.\u00a0 I’m not sure what “I Don’t Know”\u00a0 was up to but this is one of the pictures that was on the camera:<\/p>\n Anyway, by then the flower had lost a lot of it’s magnificent purple hue and delicate blossoms.\u00a0 I just hope I’m able to recreate all the right conditions for it to bloom again.\u00a0 After all, in order to get it to bloom I had to do….oh, that’s right, NOTHING!\u00a0 I bet I can manage that again \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Now you’re probably wondering why I am rambling on and on about air plants on a farm <\/strong>blog. (How dare you!\u00a0 I thought we were friends.)\u00a0 But it actually is relevant.\u00a0 Because my beloved air plants remind me a lot about our latest addition to the farm.\u00a0 It’s this little guy right here:<\/p>\n That’s Little Bit.\u00a0 And that’s where we found him—at the local animal shelter.\u00a0 We went there to find a barn cat and we found 2 adorable kittens.\u00a0 We really liked those kittens.\u00a0 But Little Bit had no intention of letting us leave without him.\u00a0 He grabbed us through the bars and refused to let go. He purred like a lawnmower.\u00a0 He played with us in the playroom like if it was totally normal for him to be hugged and squeezed and petted and mauled on by 4 children every day of the week.\u00a0 I figured we better go with the cat that liked kids instead of the kittens.\u00a0 Just my incredible Spidey senses at work there.\u00a0 Sometimes I am practically psychic.<\/p>\n All the way home I described the long tedious adjustment process it would take for Little Bit to be our barn cat.\u00a0 For the first 3 weeks he’d be confined to a kennel in the barn and let out to go to the bathroom and be handled and played with 3 times a day.\u00a0 That way he would know where he lived and where he was supposed to stay at night.\u00a0 We’d keep cat toys in a special bin in the barn and they were to be used and returned after each play session so that the other animals didn’t destroy them (or eat them).\u00a0 We would gradually introduce him to the animals but he wouldn’t be left alone with the pony or the guardian dog for about 6 weeks or until we were sure they wouldn’t hurt him.\u00a0 We would keep a water sprayer in the barn and on the deck so that if we ever saw him chasing a chick or duckling we could immediately squirt him.\u00a0 He would have his own food and water in an area where no other animals could reach it (I had no idea where that place would be).\u00a0 Since we would not be using a litter box we would have to scoop up his droppings to keep the milking room clean and sanitary.\u00a0 Just thinking about it was exhausting.<\/p>\n Right.\u00a0 Here’s how it actually went down:<\/p>\n Day 1.\u00a0 Let Little Bit out of kennel 3 times a day to play.\u00a0 He had a blast climbing through crinkly leaves in the woods and sneaking up on moths and grasshoppers.<\/p>\n Not to mention batting around pony poop balls.<\/p>\n Day 2.\u00a0 Let Little Bit out of kennel and played with him.\u00a0 Then left him loose the rest of the afternoon.\u00a0 Peeked at him a few times during the day and saw him and Bruno hanging out peacefully.<\/p>\n And chilling with Candy Corn.<\/p>\n Day 3.\u00a0 Left him loose all day and night.\u00a0 Woke to find him sitting on the deck.\u00a0 Which is a perfect place for him to have his own food and water.\u00a0 Isn’t he clever.<\/p>\n Day 4.\u00a0 Realized we had yet to find any cat feces in the barn.\u00a0 Have no idea where he’s going to the bathroom but it’s obviously not in the milk room or the barnyard.\u00a0 Yeah for Little Bit!<\/p>\n Day 5.\u00a0 Discover Little Bit doesn’t like his cat food as much as dog food.\u00a0 Look at ingredient labels and find out they’re pretty much the same thing.\u00a0 So let him have dog food and don’t have to mess with buying any separate feed for him.<\/p>\n Catch him drinking water out of the automatic water trough.\u00a0 Didn’t know he understood that there was water in there or knew how to reach it.\u00a0 No longer need to keep separate water for him.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n