Find the Best Indoor Plant Spots in Your Home With a Shade Trick
When you want to decorate your home with lush green plants, it’s important to consider how much light they need . Different plants thrive in different environments, so you can’t squeeze everything into one window and hope for the best. Instead, you should evaluate the specific needs of each plant and find a place with enough light to keep them happy.
Determining how much light a particular spot is receiving is trickier than it sounds, especially if the recommendations in your Google results don’t make sense right away. What is “bright indirect light” anyway? If indirect, how else can it be bright? I need a light meter to figure it out, or what?
Fortunately, no. As plant scientist Christopher Sutch explains in this video from YouTube’s Digg channel , the “shadow trick” makes it easy to determine the level of light in your home:
To try it yourself, just place your hand between the plant and the light and then look at the shadow. (If there is no surface to cast a shadow on, take a piece of paper directly in front of the plant and place your hand a few inches in front of it.) Its definition and shape will give you an idea of how strong or weak it is. light in this place:
- Dark with a clear, sharp border: Bright light
- Fuzzy at the edges: medium or indirect light
- No shadows: in low light
Once you get a basic understanding of the quality of light in different parts of your home, you can stop worrying about whether your plants are getting enough sunlight and focus on what really matters: resisting the urge to over-water . (And, of course, buy more plants.)
This article was originally published on January 25, 2017 and was updated on April 15, 2021 to reflect the current Lifehacker style guidelines.