Sparks in the Soil

How to Grow Fresh Air

Incredible concept, isn't it?  But when you think about fresh air as being an absence of CO2 and other toxic chemicals, and the presence of clean, new oxygen, it suddenly does sound like something you can "grow your own."  This video from New Delhi scientist Kamal Meattle shares the 3 indoor plants that literally saved his life--his lung capacity had been reduced to 70% by his city's thick, poor air quality.

Granted, you need several of each of these (4-6 per person in a household) for it to make a difference.  But it might just be the best decorating decision you'll ever make. 

Have you noticed a change in your home's air quality because of house plants? 

Does Prayer Work on Plants?

My 4 tiny cloned New Dawn roses graduated last week from their zip-top baggie greenhouses to genuine pots of genuine topsoil....in the big scary outdoors! The plants' emergence from the protected cocoon of my living room, and then my covered porch, and now into the sunshine has me excited, proud of them--and a little nervous.

As you know if you've been following this process (re-trace the whole experiment here and here and here.), the rose that I cloned is very special to me, and the parent plant is at a home at which I no longer live.  So there's a "one-shot deal" feeling to the whole thing, like if I do something wrong and lose the roselings, the fat lady has sung.

So given these stakes, I've found myself wandering over to the pots and saying encouraging things to the plants.  I might even call it praying over them.  It goes something like this, "If there's a force out here that watches over growing things, please watch over these fragile stems.  Send their roots down and their stems up. Help me help them. Please."

It's awkwardly said, and probably crazy-looking to my neighbors.  But I'm certainly not alone in talking to my plants--and in the healing-power-of-prayer scientific community, there are even studies that suggest that praying over plants might help them grow stronger.

Consider this from Spindrift Foundation, a research group that studies consciousness and prayer.  Researchers Bruce and John Klingbeil, former Christian Science practitioners who were dismissed from the church because of their research, have done experiments on plants from mung beans to soybeans to mold to yeast, in which a control group was given normal growing conditions, and an experimental group was given those same conditions plus a "treatment" of prayer.

In the mung bean experiment, the prayed-for group of beans showed 85 percent more sprouts than the control group.

I'm curious to learn more about this foundation and their research methods, but meanwhile, do you pray over your plants?  Do you pray to God through your plants?  Have you ever had plant prayers answered?