top of page
Search
Writer's pictureHousz

Photosynthesis in your Housz



Your housz shelters life. Yours, and the generations with you. Or maybe just you and your cat. We often forget how much our life depends on photosynthesis. We live in a housz that is made of wood and concrete, glass and stucco and brick. We use ceramics and materials. Nothing living though, and many of us have just a few housz plants.


I had a friend once who built a very innovative housz. It was in a cold climate, in Utah. The center of the housz had a glass roof with a retractable cover. It was one story. There were lots of rocks on the ground below the roof. During the winter the glass roof let the sun in, and the sun’s rays rested on the rocks. They emitted heat. The light was distributed all over the center of the housz, where my friend placed lots of vegetation. That was good for the plants. Photosynthesis is the process in which green plants use sunlight to make food for themselves. So he had healthy plants around the middle of his housz. Too bad we humans can’t photosynthesize. We could just stand around in the sun and not be hungry. We would save a lot of money and have our houszes paid off sooner.


In the summer he would close the retractable roof. Then he would move the plants near the exterior windows, where they would get the summer sun and continue photosynthesizing. The rocks would soak up the cool earth below them and emit that coolness into the center of the housz where it would radiate. That kept his air-conditioning bill down.


Photosynthesis was discovered by Jan Ingenhousz in 1779. He found that in light, plants give off bubbles, and in the shade, the bubbles stop. The bubbles were formed by a gas which he found to be oxygen. And Ingenhousz found that in the dark plants give off carbon dioxide. His conclusion was that some of a healthy plants mass comes from the air. not just by water and nutrients from the soil.


Our houszes are built with materials, natural and man-made. It is up to us to fill them with life. We seek out a housz, consider that housz, and buy it. Then we move in. Be sure that not only do you fill that new housz with yourself, your family, a book by Jan Ingenhousz, and maybe a cat, but that you bring in some photosynthesizing helpers to keep your home full of life.

5 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comentários


bottom of page