Meet Sven

On Saturday, my mom and I went to our virtually yearly visit to the wonderful world of Ikea. Many people have gone missing in this colossal store, but despite this you can find everything you've ever dreamt of for your home there.

Even though we wanted a little bit of everything, we stumbled upon little things we found kind of cute, like strangely-shaped ice cube trays, new curtains, and other trinkets. I even found some solar-powered desk lamps: the base of the lamp consisted of a solar panel that would charge up and then the light would work. I thought this was so innovative and really forward-looking: the average customer can already begin to make better choices at an affordable price.

One of the things I wanted to do for my social context class was buy and care for a plant. I found a baby plant and a tiny pot, and the whole thing cost about $3, so really affordable for what I was hoping to get. According to the label, I bought a Tropisk. It looks like it can be a really nice-looking plant (as far as nice-looking plants go) when it gets bigger, with long stems and wide green leaves (as seen on the right). The instructions for taking care of it call for light but not to place it in direct lighting, to let it go dry, then to basically flood it, and repeat. When I showed it to my dad, he suggested I call it Sven since I got it from Ikea. I liked the idea. Sven it is.

The watering method actually reminded me of drip irrigation. This entails watering crops in a specific way. You would wait for them to get dry, then give them ONLY the water necessarily for their survival. This saves water, and seeing as how the agricultural sector uses a huge amount of water, whether from wetlands or other communal water areas.

I was wondering how much of a difference houseplants can make on an air-filtering basis compared to trees. I did a little research and if I'm understanding the information correctly, the advantage of trees lies in the fact that they have more leaves. Trees and plants filter the air by converting CO2 into O2.

Let's take a look at an example. At rest, an average person consumes 53 liters of oxygen per hour. An average houseplant, if it has about 30 leaves, produces approximately 5 mililiters of oxygen per leaf. My plant has...13 leaves :(. It only produces 65 mililitres of oxygen per hour. I would need approximately 815 house plants to produce the amount of oxygen I would need in only one hour. To put things into a different light, one single tree would produce more oxygen in only one season than 10 people would inhale during the entire year. So advantage: trees. In other words, if I planted one tree now, and waited maybe 10 years for it to grow, it would produce, seasonally, enough oxygen for the four members in my family as well as my neighbour's to consume in one year.

Want to know more?

All images were found on Google.

Plant info: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/newton/askasci/1993/biology/bio027.htm

Tree info: http://forestry.about.com/od/forestandtreeuses/ss/trees_value_3.htm