House plant permaculture

Here in my cube I have two rubber trees and a dracaena plant.  One rubber tree is about 13  feet tall, the other is about 6 feet tall.  My cube is 6'x8' so the trees reach over the aisle and my neighbor's cube.  Everyone here thinks they are great.

Can anyone think of any good companion plants for these?  There is plenty of space in the pots for additional plants.  They would obviously need to be tropical plants.

Something that stays fairly small and fixes nitrogen would be ideal.

  things grow on the soil of plants on my balcony without me planting them but nothing grows in the pots of the plants i have in the house  but maybe they could. rose macakskie.

You have some of the better fresh air makers. Other recommendations for fresh air are: Snake Plant(Mother in Law's Tongue) and Money Plant.

http://greenspaces.in/blog/ted09/


The book I have and these sites/videos are focused on cleaning the air and don't mention nitrogen fixing. It would be interesting to find out which of these do fix nitrogen.


Maybe someone knows of some low growing nitrogen fixer that survives on as little light as a house plant. Some kind of clover?

(I have some notes from a recent SKIP/PEA design session and I want to put them somewhere on permies ...)

Here are some of the standards I have for houseplant stuff:

No plastic
no terra cotta unless at least one side is glazed
no cement (this includes tufa)

It must be a proper pot with a hole in the bottom, with a proper dish under it
The person doing the watering MUST be able to see if there is any water in the dish

I kinda like to make a round of watering that is about a third of the water that the plant might take.   And then circle around an hour later giving the plant that much again.   Then come back every hour to add some more water until there is a bit of water coming out of the bottom.   Then go at least a week until the next watering (three weeks or more for succulents).

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we recently went to good will and got some weird containers that we can put a hole in the bottom to turn them into plant pots.  And we found a few plates that will do well as trays under the pots.  Here's a link to the type of drill bit for putting holes in the bottom of ceramic coffee mugs.

Pickle jar lids make pretty good trays!

Here's a link to some potting soil we are gonna try soon.

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I wonder if very many people have done polycultures in pots that have done super great.  Maybe post pics of the polycultures that have gone past a year?

For stacking functions, besides being beautiful and cleaning the air, I'd love to see a great list of plants that do well inside a house with other uses such as culinary or medicinal.  Aloe is one that jumps to mind.  I've never done great with herbs indoors, but that is probably mostly on me.  I do have some large potted rosemary plants that do well enough in my unheated sunroom.