Turning my bedroom into a tropical jungle

I've always been drawn to tropical plants, with their lush foliage, exotic fruits, and large sizes. Only one problem: I live in Portland Oregon. We get roughly eight months of overcast skies and cold, wet weather every year. Most of the amazing tropical plants I love could never survive an Oregon winter outdoors. So...what to do? Create the jungle indoors of course!

It all started innocently enough. I've always loved papayas. The papayas we get at local grocery stores are pretty pathetic looking, and extremely over priced. For the last few years, I've been daydreaming about how cool it would be to grow my own papayas here in Oregon. Obviously certain challenges stand in my way. If it were easy, we'd have local papaya farmers selling their bounties at farmers markets. We don't. So I finally got off my ass, bought one of those pathetic papayas, and dried out some seeds for planting.

I planted a bunch of those seeds in a large pot on July 24th 2017, and left it in the backyard to get plenty of sun during the germination period. The last couple months have been very warm. I'm sure those little bastards felt right at home because to my amazement, the first of them sprouted 18 days later.

I now have 10 papaya tree seedlings tucked under a full spectrum LED bulb in the corner of my bedroom. As you can see, they are doing pretty well so far! Fun fact: papaya trees can be male, female, or bisexual, and it is impossible to determine their sex until they flower.

Of course I couldn't just stop with papayas. My roommate and I decided to check out the Portland Nursery after she noted that my indoor life was dreadfully devoid of greenery. Turns out they have an amazing selection of tropical plants! I came home that day with the following plants:

This one was unlabeled, but it looks like it could be a parlor palm. Feel free to enlighten me if I'm wrong and you know the correct answer.

This was also unlabeled, and I have no good guesses as to what it might be. Someone suggested it could be a hoya, but there are so many varieties of hoya that I really can't say. I just got it because I liked it.

No indoor tropical paradise can be complete without a peace lily.

This is a baby dumb cane. These can get pretty big and showy. I got the little one to save money and for the fun of watching it grow.

Another tropical jungle essential here. The golden pothos. I put it in a big pot to let it really grow wild.

Of course I love all my babies, but I have a feeling this one is going to be my favorite. This is a swiss cheese plant. These suckers grow up the trunks of trees in the wild, and can get up to 70 feet tall! They have giant serrated leaves, and also flower and produce edible fruit, but rarely do so indoors. Fun fact: all parts of this plant are poisonous. Even the fruit is poisonous until it ripens. Eat it too soon, and you'll regret it. Once ripe however, I hear they taste like a wonderful blend of pineapple and banana.

Those are just the plants I got that first day we went to the Portland Nursery. I also decided I need to try my hand at growing bananas indoors...because why not? Banana plants have large beautiful leaves, grow quickly, and come in dwarf varieties suitable for indoor growing. I ordered two dwarf cavendish banana plants from fast-growing-trees.com. These poor things were packaged and shipped via Fedex Ground from South Carolina to Oregon. After spending 4 days on the road and in the dark, they looked a bit worse for wear upon arrival. But sure enough, after transplanting, watering, fertilizing, and giving them the light they need, they are growing vigorously.

That honkin' huge leaf at the top? That's new growth since I received my banana plants only 4 days ago! There's already another new leaf unfurling inside the trunk of the plant.

This one was damaged upon arrival. Those bigger existing leaves are drooping because they are broken at the stem. The ripped part of that new leaf at the top was level with the tip of the trunk 4 days ago, so even this poor little plant has significant new growth. I'm optimistic they'll both do well.

Today, my roommate and I took another trip to the Portland Nursery. Being the party animals that we are, we got there 20 minutes before closing time, and we closed it down. I came away with this little beauty, which I've been contemplating getting for a while:

This is a congo rojo variety of philodenron. It can grow quite large under the right circumstances and produces fragrant flowers.

But wait! That's not all! The office I work at is teeming with potted tropical plants. Many of which are large fiddle leaf fig plants. I got permission to take a cutting from one of them, and I currently have it in a jar of water. I read that they are easy to propagate via this method, so once it grows roots, I should be able to stick it in a pot and grow my own tree. This makes me happy because decent sized fiddle leaf fig plants are super expensive at the nursery. Here it is:

Waiting for roots to sprout on this fiddle leaf fig cutting so I can grow my own tree.