WOMAN: Plants are my saviours.
Plants take me away from the busyness of my life.
They take me away from the noise of the world
and I can just focus on one thing.
My mind is very busy.
I'm constantly making lists in my head.
But when I'm taking care of my plants, all that noise is gone.
I'm Nora.
I'm a mother of three, and I love indoor plants.
How many plants have I got?
Oh, my goodness.
People ask me that all the time.
And you know what I say?
I don't know.
I don't know how many plants I have
because I've never counted them.
Because what is the point of counting?
Am I going to say when I get to 400, I'm going to stop?
No.
(LAUGHS)
I just don't know.
I don't want to know. (LAUGHS)
This is my fifth bedroom,
which I also like to call my grow room.
I have most of my plants living in here
and it's a lovely controlled space
where I've got all my beautiful babies living their gorgeous lives.
I just love it.
I've got most of my plants in this one room
because it's easy for me to keep them safe.
I've got a busy household.
I've got three children.
My youngest is six years old.
She loves to play around and I want to give her that space in the home
where she feels she can do what she likes to do
without running into Mummy's plants.
So I keep all of my plants in here,
but it's also easy for me to control the conditions for the plants.
I can provide the lighting that they need and I can also provide
the humidity that they need in a very well controlled space.
I love to bring my background into how I grow my plants.
I've got a science background,
I did a medical degree
and I've gone on and done a PhD in epidemiology and public health.
So I love researching and I love how that actually can be applied
in the plant space.
So when I'm growing my plants, I love to try different things
because plants need different things, different kinds of light,
different kinds of medium, different kinds of fertilisers.
And I like to apply that to see what happens when I do certain things
to a plant and how I can make that plant grow better.
I grow my plants a little bit differently from other gardeners,
and I'm very uncompromising about that.
No soil.
I grow my plants in clay balls.
These round brown balls are called LECA balls,
and 'LECA' is actually an acronym
and it stands for Lightweight Expanded Clay Aggregate.
So they get a bunch of clay, put it in a very, very hot environment,
and they pop like popcorn
and they're very porous
and they easily suck up liquid.
So of course, growing without soil, some people might think,
"Well, how are the plants growing without nutrition?"
You've got this pot here that doesn't have a hole
actually holds the nutrient solution.
And when I say nutrient solution,
that's a mixture of water and your fertiliser.
So this plant always has water and fertiliser
and is always feeding
and can look so beautiful because it's always got food.
Hydroponics is generally a very scary term for a number of people
because when you think about hydroponics,
you think about pumps, you think about pH
and all sorts of equipment that people use when growing their plants.
But what's really different about semi-hydroponics
is it's like hydroponics light.
It's like the easy version.
You know, you get the best of both worlds.
You've got your plant living in that nutrient solution,
thriving so well,
but nothing is moving.
There are no pumps,
so it's all the fun of hydroponics, but less work.
I love growing my plants in clear pots,
and the clear pots allow me to have easy access to the roots.
I can see what's happening with those roots,
and I add that ventilation.
I put all these holes easily with my soldering iron.
And the reason I do that is because I want my roots to breathe,
and my beautiful Oxalis Triangularis just loves it, living there.
One of the very important things about having indoor plants
is providing the light that they need.
Because remember, plants grow outside and they've got the lovely sun.
So when you've got your plants indoors,
having a simple thing like a grow light is really important.
But a grow light doesn't have to be anything expensive.
I've got my grow bulbs living in just a normal indoor house lamp
and I just put that in there and I shine it on my plants
and my plants are able to grow
because they've got that full spectrum of light that they need
that they would be getting from the sun.
This is my Calathea Orbifolia.
This is one I'm really, really proud of.
This plant has just taken off so beautifully.
The leaves usually don't get this big
and most people's leaves are very crispy edges.
But this beauty is just going from strength to strength
and those leaves are just pristine.
I share a lot of my information online.
I've got a YouTube channel called the LECA Queen
and I share a lot of my semi-hydro journey there.
Hello, plant people.
Welcome to my channel.
Thank you for joining me.
It is not easy.
I had to learn everything from scratch,
from how to operate a camera,
how to work sound,
and just basically how to film, how to edit.
The learning curve is steep
and sometimes can be very, very painful.
I remember one time I recorded a whole session
where I was extending the moss pole of my monstera,
and it's a really, really big plant,
it's something I can't redo,
and when I sat down to edit, there was absolutely no sound.
It crushed me. (LAUGHS)
But, you know, these are growing pains
and I think I'm a bit better than that now.
With semi-hydroponics, you really cannot get away from science,
because plants are beings
and they have cells
and all the systems that beings need to actually get nutrition.
So important things for plants - photosynthesis, respiration.
These are all things that are really important
that we don't really talk about during indoor gardening
because it's a bit sciencey.
And that's where I think I come in with my science background.
I'm always trying to explain why I do what I do
and always have, like, a scientific basis for that.
And I'm not just doing it
just because that's what other people have done.
And I'll fill that up a third of the way
so that those roots are not submerged in the nutrient solution.
I'm watering my plants along the side
and I'm not actually watering the balls themselves
because that nutrient solution at the bottom
is going to get sucked up right to the top
through capillary action.
So the clay balls that are at the top are still going to be moist.
I've got my plants and I think those will always be my first love.
And then I've got the YouTube channel.
I love both aspects of it.
I'm learning so many things
that don't have anything to do with plants, which is awesome.
But plants, they're the OG.