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Four Reasons Why You Should Add Greenery to Your Home

houseplants

Nature has a unique way of soothing our minds and bodies, and incorporating houseplants and greenery into your living space is a surefire way to improve your overall well-being. But if you still need convincing, we’ve got some fantastic reasons why you should add greenery to your home.

1. Add Beauty and Style to Your Home

One of the most prevalent reasons for integrating plants into your home is for beauty and style! Greenery and nature serve as charming living decor. Each plant adds its own unique color, texture, and shape, making your interior design more dynamic and visually appealing.

Adding greenery is an effortless way to upgrade your home aesthetic and showcase your personal style. Consider making dramatic floor-to-ceiling living plant walls or finding creative ways to use decorative planters inside your home to take advantage of nature’s beauty.

2. Natural Air Purifiers

Did you know that certain houseplants have the remarkable ability to filter toxins and pollutants from the air? Several of these plants include spider plants, snake plants, and peace lilies. By adding some of these plants to your decor, you’ll be breathing cleaner air in no time.

3. Reduce Stress and Promote Relaxation

There’s a reason why you feel calmer and more centered when you go for a walk in the park or work in your garden. Surrounding yourself with plants can decrease stress levels and promote relaxation. Bring those benefits into your home by adding greenery and creating a space that encourages relaxation and mindfulness.

There are endless possibilities for incorporating nature into your home for stress-relief rituals, from creating a reading nook with a fiddle-leaf fig to designing a Zen-inspired meditation corner with ferns.

4. Boost Your Mood and Mental Health

Having plants in your home can have a positive impact on your mental health. The consistent care and nurturing that plants require can create a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, making it the perfect activity to break the cycle of negative thoughts.

Plus, houseplants can cultivate a much-needed feeling of connection to the natural world, especially for those who spend long hours indoors or have limited access to parks and green spaces. This can improve your mental health more than you may realize.

Embrace the Green Life

There’s no denying the numerous reasons why you should add greenery to your home. Houseplants have the power to significantly improve your quality of life.

With a wide variety of low-maintenance options available, you can easily find the perfect houseplant to suit your lifestyle and aesthetic preferences. At Bloomin’, we recommend our Pocket Garden Seed Paper. You can use this product to create a beautiful and functional kitchen windowsill herb garden. Embrace the benefits of greenery and elevate your home’s atmosphere with nature’s touch.

3 of the Best Locations To Start an Orchard

apple orchard
Ever wondered what are the 3 best locations to start an Orchard?
Bloomin’ provides tips and tricks on getting started!

If you want to give back to the Earth and provide yourself and others with fresh fruit, starting an orchard is the best way to go. When planting numerous orchard trees, you’ll need quality land to encourage growth and nurture the trees, and certain locations will make the best options. Read on to find the best locations to start an orchard and begin your mission of planting numerous trees for the world.

Start with an Open Flat Land

You’ll need plenty of space to plant the trees for your orchard, and some of the best lands will be flat plains with low-cut grass. The open flat land will make the planting process easier, as you’ll have an easier time digging holes and have better visibility of your work.

The open space will also give you more freedom to design the orchard how you want. You could create diagonal lines or make an array of horizontal and vertical lines for your fruit trees and start your orchard the way you want.

Elevated Areas

Since fruit trees require large amounts of sunlight, an elevated area is a plausible location for your orchard to receive most of the sun’s rays. The elevated areas near mountains, hills, and cliffs will have orchards because of their height and proximity to the sun. Search for wide open spaces near the higher points of a region as a great location to start your orchard.

While these areas are great for trees to gain more sunlight, they will typically feel colder and may have harsher winters with more frost. Figg trees and pear trees thrive in cold weather and are some of the best fruit-bearing trees for a backyard, regardless of the home’s elevation. Your orchard will grow better with the right trees to handle most conditions.

Land With Well-Drained Soil

The soil is essential to the tree’s growth, and you’ll need to ensure it’s well drained for the best location for your orchard. The pH of the soil should be between 6.0 and 8.0 for most fruit trees to grow. The soil should also have enough moisture to keep the trees healthy, but not too much moisture since that leads to rot.

Well-drained soil is important to ensure the trees don’t suffocate from the flooded air pockets that allow the tree to “breathe.” The roots will die off, and the rest of the tree will follow, making the location of the land important to ensure the soil won’t flood.

A subtle incline on the flat land will help the trees remain in good condition and give them the right amount of water when it rains or when you water the land. One of the most important things you need when starting an apple orchard is quality soil with a good pH level. Testing the soil with a basic testing kit will help you find the perfect spot to start growing.

Your orchard should have the best conditions to ensure you have a bountiful line of trees that bear the best fruit. Search for these locations and begin plotting and going for a place where the fruit grows well and the land looks excellent.

What Food Products Are Best and Worst for the Environment

honeycones

Look what we have here. A list of what food products are best and worst for the environment. We chose some of these foods because they significantly impact the environment. Keep reading to learn what foods pose the most environmental risk and what you should look for while grocery shopping.

The Worst Foods for the Environment

At the grocery store, you might view the label to check for “organic” or “farm fresh.” While these labels support diets, they don’t fully support the environment, and realistically, “organic foods” aren’t entirely organic. Many still use pesticides to help fresh produce last longer. Here are two of the worst foods for the environment.

Chocolate

Chocolate is a worldwide favorite, and it comes in many tasty varieties, but what’s this you’re hearing about it being terrible for the environment? The cacao plant chocolate derives from requires lots of water to help it grow, leading to deforestation on tropical islands and severe biodiversity loss.

Cheese

Cheese is another item that does harm to the environment. Cheese is a leading cause of increased methane gas levels. Even though cheese is a delicacy we all enjoy, it relies too much on dairy cows, needing at least 10 kg of milk for each production. Those cows release methane gas during cheese production, which is 20 times worse than carbon dioxide.

The Best Foods for the Environment

Some foods are excellent to consume because of their positive production impact on the environment. Here are two you need to know about and buy more of while grocery shopping.

Cereal

Cereal is a very earth-friendly food. All the production process requires is five ingredients: rice, wheat, corn, oats, and sugar. After combining the ingredients, manufacturers add artificial flavors and natural dried fruits. The only downside to production is that soil degradation does happen. However, significant steps are being taken to reduce farmers needing to find new land to exploit and grow on.

Honey

Honey is another completely sustainable item. It’s a food product that gives back to the environment by using less harsh production practices. Bee farms have made it their mission to produce honey that’s entirely real without preservatives. However, before buying your jar of honey, make sure you understand the difference between raw and 100% pure honey so you know which one to look for at the store or online.

How Better Food Processing Improves the Environment

While there are good and bad foods affecting the environment, how they get made does matter. Food processing plants can do their part to improve their manufacturing practices by researching alternative methods of producing high-risk ingredients, such as coffee, cacao, and palm oil. By altering these methods, manufacturers can lower methane gas emissions and reduce the amount of CO2 when they reuse land.

You can eat any food you want, but it’s essential to know what you’re putting inside your body. Start eating more sustainably by learning what foods to avoid eating in the future to improve the environment.

The Beginners Guide to Foraging for Food in the Wild

If you’re foraging out in the wild, there are some things that you need to keep in mind. Don’t simply run outdoors and start randomly pulling up plants, mushrooms, and weeds. You need to have a process and determine how you’ll approach foraging to get the best yield for all your efforts. We’ll help you get prepared in our beginner’s guide to foraging for food in the wild. Read on for some helpful tips!

Be Cautious

Before you start touching a plant, and especially before you begin consuming it, you have to know what that plant is. This is the case whether you’re looking for edible plants or harvesting mushroom spores for propagation. Knowledge is essential. To hone this skill, you can go on “plant walks” with someone who knows the lay of the land. You can also go on certain websites that give you geographically specific plant catalogs for your location. You can also get paper field guidebooks for your reference in the future. Taking these steps helps ensure you stay safe while foraging.

Know the Lay of the Land

Study hard when planning where you want to forage. After learning what’s poisonous and what’s edible, determine where what you want to harvest grows. Additionally, you’ll want to avoid places around factories, roads, golf courses, and places where soil and water have contamination problems. Essentially, focus on foraging in areas that are off-trail and away from human activity.

Harvest Responsibly

The final important aspect of our beginner’s guide to foraging for food in the wild is harvesting responsibly. This is huge because a lot of people overharvest, causing a form of deforestation on the forest floor. To avoid this, you must research certain issues. What are the local land management guidelines? Are there restrictions to where you can harvest or harvesting limits?

Take only what you need, and understand that other people may also want to forage. Keep them in mind. Travel on logs and rocks and try not to trample other flora. Ultimately, you should seek to be light-footed in these areas and leave no trace. If you follow these rules, you’ll be safely foraging in no time!

Interesting Ways To Boost the Environment

Although various industrial and technological developments make it difficult to keep the earth completely pure and natural, any effort toward sustainability and a clean atmosphere can make a difference in the environment. Most people aren’t effusive about making eco-friendly changes to their daily lives, as they don’t feel they can make a significant difference. However, incorporating these interesting ways to boost the environment into your routine and encouraging others to do the same is the best way to make the greatest impact on the earth.

Volunteer in Your Community

Even if you don’t think one person can make a difference, don’t let that stop you from volunteering in your community. Whether you clean up a local park, spread the word about the importance of pollinators, or discourage chemical pesticide use, you can gather a group of volunteers to improve the local environment. Most cities or towns have active environmental groups you can join, but you can start your own by recruiting a few willing participants.

Grow Fruit Trees at Home

It’s no secret that fruit is an important part of your daily diet, but it usually comes wrapped in various forms of paper and plastic at many grocery stores. That said, purchasing fruit increases your overall waste. By planting fruit trees at home, you can have fresh, homegrown apples, pears, or peaches whenever you want. Furthermore, the tree will boost the environment by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing clean oxygen into the atmosphere.

Become a Home Beekeeper

Bees are arguably the most significant pollinators in the world, but their population is declining. Without bees, human life would look extremely different, and not in a positive way. Bees carry pollen from plant to plant, making them responsible for the continued growth and existence of various plants and crops, including many food sources.

You can protect and boost the bee population by becoming a home beekeeper, and you’ll get to enjoy fresh, delicious honey. While it’s not the riskiest hobby, it’s not guaranteed safe—following important beekeeping safety tips can make your experience more enjoyable.

Repurpose Items To Reduce Waste

You probably already know that everything you buy comes in some type of packaging or container. While it’s easy to throw jars and containers away after the product is gone, consider different ways you can reuse them in your life and home to reduce your household waste. Whether you use glass food jars for crafts or transform candle jars into storage for other items, you can avoid throwing empty containers away and use them for good.

After learning a few interesting ways to boost the environment, you can change your daily habits to benefit the earth. One person may not make much difference, but encouraging others to commit to eco-friendly home improvement ideas is the most effective way to produce change. Small differences can go a long way when it comes to environmental damage—no effort is too small.