As a guerilla gardener, I make sure that plants grow not only outside my home, but also indoors…in places you wouldn’t always expect.  Like, the shower.

Case in point…this staghorn fern along with a couple of air plants living off the steam and mist of my daily bathing rituals.  It’s kinda like having a greenhouse but not really because I didn’t put the effort into building anything.

The process of creating one of these and making sure it stays alive is already a lot of work, I swear.

First, I started with a wood frame that I found off the street.  Sounds gross but I swear I stole it from a clean homeless man.  I then purchased some air plants from a local nursery, along with some plant glue which allowed me to fix the air plants onto the inner part of the frame.  It got sticky and really messy and I got glue on my sink, which I just got out using some pliers, so I recommend doing this outside with gloves.

The wood you see in the center of the frame is actually separate from the air plant frame.  Attached to the wood is some sphagnum moss which is held to the wood slab with some chicken wire and metal staples,  found at a local hardware store.  I hammered the chicken wire and metal staples to the back of the wood slab, creating a pocket in which to stuff the moss and staghorn fern, found at Plant Systems.  Hammering the metal staples onto the wood was very dramatic and involved my boyfriend’s hand-eye coordination skills because seriously, I wasn’t about to hammer my finger into anything but a piece of chocolate cake that I had later in the day.  It was important for the moss to be soaked in water before placing it on the wood because the staghorn fern would only stay alive if it could grow next to a damp place, so I soaked that moss like I was washing a big head of curly hair.

Now, after all is said and done, I water the fern when the moss gets dry, making sure that both the fern and the moss stay damp constantly.  Bright light is also important, which is why I’m also trying to grow a staghorn fern outside my door:

Looks ominous because I shot this picture at 3am , but it actually makes my place that much more inviting, I swear.

For more tips on indoor gardening, I recommend checking out this site.  If you have questions, again, ask me.  I’ll probably have questions for you, too.

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