When it comes to decorating the interior of your home, one thing you won’t want to forget about is the advantages of indoor gardening. Having plants inside your house and doing some indoor gardening can help you improve the air and health quality inside your home. While adding some indoor plants will not only look better, you’ll also receive several other significant advantages.
The advantages of indoor gardening include:
- Better breathing
- More water in the air
- Better health
- Improved aesthetics
Since there isn’t much information available online covering the advantages of indoor gardening, we created this article to help you. Below we will discuss why it is important to have plants in your house and what the advantages of indoor gardening are.
Why is it Important to Have Plants in Your House?
Having plants in your home can have several significant health benefits. Nowadays, the pollution levels in the air are increasing daily. Additionally, if you reside in a heavily populated city, then it’s likely that you deal with poor air quality daily. Being exposed to poor air quality can create problems with your:
- Skin
- Hair
- Lungs
- Throat
Poor air quality and pollution don’t only exist in the outdoor world, however. Even if you stay indoors much of the time at your home or office, the chances are that you are still exposed to poor air quality. A term that emphasizes the poor air quality we experience inside our homes and places of work is Sick Building Syndrome. People that experience Sick Building Syndrome are typically healthy, but they work in massive, commercial structures. As a result, they often experience things like:
- Red eyes
- Fatigue
- Nose irritation
- Nervous system issues
- Dizziness
- Terrible allergies
- Sinus congestion
- Throat irritation
If a person has Sick Building Syndrome, they will usually get better when removed from the building, causing the disease for a period. At that point, the symptoms usually decline and return when the person goes back into the building.
Sick Building Syndrome is created by indoor air pollution. Many homes and buildings create this problem because there are toxic emissions that come out of the materials, we use to build structures. Also, those materials, especially in energy-efficient buildings, can attract other problems like:
- Viruses
- Air pollutants
- Airborne mold
Unfortunately, indoor air pollution isn’t just limited to large, commercial structures. This type of indoor air pollution can also happen inside your home, and people spend only about ten percent of their time outdoors, on average. That means that by just staying home, watching television, you could be experiencing air pollution.
There is air pollution inside pretty much every home in the country. That’s because most wall paints, as well as the plastics and electronic products kept inside your home, can break down as time passes and release pollution into the air close to us.
Now that you realize indoor air pollution is a huge problem and can create many potential health risks, what can you do about it? That’s where doing some indoor gardening, especially at home, can help you. Of course, if you are also able to bring plants into your office to improve the air quality, do that as well. But for sure, you’ll need to consider an indoor garden at home since it can vastly improve the air quality inside your house.
Advantages of Indoor Gardening
Now that you understand the need for indoor gardening let’s go over the advantages you’ll get when you start indoor gardening.
Plants Help with Better Breathing
First, an indoor garden can help you with better breathing. Remember, each time you take a breath, you take oxygen in and let out carbon dioxide. When plants are experiencing photosynthesis, they take in carbon dioxide and let oxygen out of their bodies. Photosynthesis creates the opposite use of gas in the environment, making plants a great help to improve air quality when they exist near people.
By starting an indoor garden inside of your home, you can increase the oxygen levels inside of your home. Plants usually stop the process of photosynthesis at night. During that time, plants respire like a person would, taking in oxygen and letting out carbon dioxide. However, there are a few plants that do the opposite at night, meaning they take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen at night.
Plants that take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen at night should be placed inside your bedroom when you sleep. The types of houseplants that typically do this include:
- Succulents
- Orchids
- Epiphytic bromeliads
By placing any one of these types of plants inside of your bedroom, you can ensure that you’ll still get excellent air quality when you are sleeping at night.
Another thing that an indoor garden would be excellent at is getting toxins out of the air, like the formaldehyde we take in because of the building materials we use to make our homes. Since most modern buildings are built to be air-tight, they often trap in the poor air and the toxins. However, you can use indoor plants in your home or office to balance that out. Plants consume those toxins and get rid of them by placing them in the soil where the plant can use that as a food source.
You’ll Experience an Increase of Water in Your Air
Another benefit of the photosynthetic process coming from an indoor garden is the release of moisture vapor into your home. Since plants allow more moisture to be in the air, you’ll experience more humidity around you as well. Plants release all but about three percent of the water they consume. So, if you put many plants together inside of a room, you can bolster the humidity level of that room easily.
By increasing the humidity levels in your air by adding an indoor garden, you’ll cut back on respiratory health problems. Your skin and hair will look healthier. You’ll also decrease the possibility that you might experience a dry cough or a sore throat from dry air. So, as you can see, using plants to create more water in the air at your house has several benefits.
More Indoor Plants Means Less Stress
Interestingly, the more indoor plants in your indoor garden, the less stress you’ll experience. That’s because people handle stress better when they are in a more natural setting. Adding plants to the interior of your home can help you feel more positive overall. By simply adding a plant to the room, you not only improve the air quality around you, but you also improve the atmosphere.
You’ll Experience Better Health
Indoor window gardens will also help boost your mood and give you access to healthy, fresh herbs. By having, say, an herb garden handy indoors, you can experience fresh-tasting herbs each time you cook. Fresh herbs leads to better health since you’ll be eating fresher food.
You’ll Get Improved Aesthetics with an Indoor Garden
An indoor garden will also make the interior space inside of your home look much more appealing. Adding plants makes your help look a lot softer. For instance, many interior designers would tell you to put plants near a sharp corner or a brick wall to soften the look. Softening the look by using an indoor garden will make your home feel cozier.
Final Thoughts
Now that you understand why you need an indoor garden; you can pick up a few plants and start decorating the interior of your home or office. After you’ve started your indoor garden, you’ll achieve several advantages. Those benefits include better breathing, more air in the water, more purified air, better health, and improved aesthetics in your home.