Another pretty house plant is a vine grown from a sweet potato placed in a hyacinth glass or bottle of water.
For the dining table center piece, the next time you have grapefruit for breakfast, save the seeds, and plant them quite thick, about one-half inch deep, in a shallow earthen flower pot. Keep well watered. It may take six weeks for the leaves to peep through, but they make a beautiful green decoration for the house in winter.
Sweet Potato Vine
Do not forget your strawflowers which you dried in the Summer. They look pretty with the Japanese air plant, which stays green so long without water.
Watering House Plants
Immerse the pot in a bucket of water, and leave it until it stops bubbling. This done twice a week is far better than daily sprinkling. Neither is it good to keep water in a saucer under a plant; the roots do not like a constant soaking. Wash the leaves from time to time, and when the weather is warm enough, give them some fresh air.
Tobacco dust will keep away green lice (aphides); so, also, will Persian insect powder. Blow either on with little bellows, or “air guns.”