A couple of weeks ago, my largest jade plant took a tumble off the windowsill. It had been getting imbalanced, I just hadn’t realized quite how much. I’d rotated the pot to help it even out, but the weight on one side was great enough to bring the whole thing down. With the fall, the plant lost branches along one side, making it too uneven to survive as is. I decided to cut it back, to pretty much dismantle it and plant each of the small branches as cuttings.

After gathering up the little limbs that were scattered on the floor (I just threw out the leaves; there were too many to accommodate), I had 9 new pots worth of plantings. It didn’t take me long to get them into the pots, but I’m still working with the light in the house and finding enough places to help them grow. The east- and west-facing sides of the house have deep sills, and those sills have been where I’ve kept plants up until now. With this profusion of pots, I moved a small shelf in front of a south-facing window upstairs, and I have a couple of rows of plants hanging out there. I imagine that I’ll be checking and shuffling them around for some time until I’m satisfied.

The mass repotting of the jades provided an opportunity to repot a couple of other plants that had been needing attention. I divided my aloe plant, which had grown from a tiny sprout ($2 at the Ikea checkout counter) to two huge plants crowding each other in the pot. Now they each have their own pot, and they just crowd each other on the windowsill. I also repotted a pot of variegated pothos cuttings that I had plunked into a pot full of dirt from my yard nearly 10 years ago, when I didn’t have any potting soil. The intervening years hadn’t been good to them: they still had only their individual roots and nothing like what you might call a root system. Now they’re luxuriating in potting soil, and I have high hopes that they’ll grow long and prosper. Somewhere down the line, I’ll hang hooks in front of the south-facing windows and hang the spider plants in those. For now, though, everything is doing fine, and that’s good enough for me.

Best of all, there’s still plenty of room in the house to introduce more air-filtering plants and become as sophisticated as future space shuttles.