Nyc Apartment Transformed 500 Plants
In a small 1,200-square foot New York apartment, Summer Rayne Oakes proves you can surround yourself with greenery just about anywhere.
Although space is at a premium, her home is filled with 500 plants and there is not a garden bed in sight.
“I’m lucky that I have windows on both sides of my house, one south-facing, which gets a lot of light, and one north-facing,” says Summer in an interview with Modern Farmer. “In the windows is where I have more of the light-necessary plants, like ivy, which I can’t eat, and herbs.”
The city apartment features living walls, edible plants, succulent pots and hanging gardens. Summer’s knowledge and love of agriculture steams back to her childhood, growing up on a small farm in rural north-eastern Pennsylvania, which was home to chickens, goats, and an orchard.
Summer has also worked as a model, manages a website dedicated to detoxing from sugar, and works with Foodstand – an organisation who aims to “to connect a community of good eaters”.
Her apartment is an honest attempt at injecting the farmhouse ethos into the restricted space.
“I think my ultimate goal is to, like, homestead in Brooklyn,” she says. “But I might have to move to a different place because I don’t know if my landlord would take to bees on the roof or chickens.”
Summer also grows her own herbs, some greens, and the more challenging edible plants like pineapples. In showing her produce she says, “I kind of harvested them a little too soon but I got the cutest mini potatoes from my potato plants,”.
Some of her plants provide enough produce, but others she admits are more of a novelty than anything else.
Watering the plants takes “about a half an hour every day, which I view as more of a meditative experience,” says Summer. “And then once a week I probably spend a good hour, hour and a half doing composting, clipping back, that kind of stuff.”
Some of her plants provide enough produce, but others she admits are more of a novelty than anything else.
Watering the plants takes “about a half an hour every day, which I view as more of a meditative experience,” says Summer. “And then once a week I probably spend a good hour, hour and a half doing composting, clipping back, that kind of stuff.”
Why have plants taken over her apartment?
“I think that the only way I’ve really been able to survive in New York is by surrounding myself with plants,” says Summer.
Photographs by Aliza Eliazarov.
Story appeared on Modern Farmer.
