Girl with a Green Thumb: 500 Plants in an Apartment
- Matthew
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Summer Rayne Oakes is an environmental scientist who has more than 500 plants in her Williamsburg apartment. Now the girls have pretty green thumbs.
longtest---------- longtest---------So you know how these days it’s cool to have a little succulent plant? It’s like a statement that says you’re too busy to take care of a pet, but you’re still responsible enough to keep this plant alive in your apartment. And if you have more than one you pretty much consider yourself to be a modern life gardener.
Well hold your horses. You’ve got nothing on this girl from Brooklyn, New York.
Summer Rayne Oakes is an environmental scientist and her Williamsburg apartment is home to more than 500 plants. Now that girl has quite a green thumb. Lucky her, I can’t even keep a cactus alive.
Summer says it all sort of started when her roommate moved out and she realized that she can do whatever she wants with this place and really make it her own. First she bought one plant, a pretty big 1 meter high Fiddle Leaf fig (that thing is huge now, about 4,5 meters). Then she kept getting more and more plants. At one point Summer and her father embarked on a project to create a mason jar plant garden.
Eventually she came up with an idea to get herself a herb garden. I mean, we all sort of wish we had one, right? It’s such a cool idea. To be able to have fresh herbs at hand to add to your meals.
She then went further and decided to get herself a vegetable garden. One problem though – she doesn’t own any land, and it’s not like she has a backyard to grow her veggies in. Summer came up with a pretty creative solution. She converted her closet into a kitchen garden. Now she has fresh, home grown, organic veggies.
Once Summer started growing her own vegetables, she noticed that those started attracting some nasty bugs, so now she keeps some beneficial insects, that keep the plant killing insects at bay. It’s a bit terrifying, yet kind of neat. It’s like she’s got her own little eco-system going in her own apartment.
It might seem a bit overboard for a regular city dweller, but it looks like she created her own little jungle paradise in her house and she loves it. “I think that the only way I’ve really been able to survive in New York is by surrounding myself with plants”– says Summer.
