Anyone who would like to try can start and maintain an indoor moss garden if they wish. It is EXCEPTIONALLY easy because moss will grow on the surface of most media and many materials, and requires little more than the grower keeping it moist (with a daily or twice daily spritz) and perhaps adding a drop or two of fertilizer (I use Foliage-Pro 9-3-6) to a quart of water from any of the following sources: distilled, rain, snow melt, dehumidifier or air conditioner condensate, or water that's been routed through a home reverse osmosis filtration system (what I use).

I started playing with moss outdoors a few years ago because I can't help trying new things. It wasn't someone else's pictures/ work/ ideas that inspired me to see what would happen; rather, I looked at to Mother Nature and reasoned it can't be that difficult since it's virtually everywhere from shady bogs to bare sidewalks in full sun, and I was right. It IS very easy.

Immediately below is something I started about 3 years ago, and this isn't too long after I started it in spring - maybe it's around the beginning of summer because I see there's a Ficus pumila (creeping fig) cutting starting to grow up the right side of a pear stump I dug up after I cut the tree down.

I leave this outdoors during the winter as the planting will reawaken once it warms and gets hit with some rain. I'm not sure why I planted a Ficus on it because I knew it would be outdoors. The next year I took a cutting from a hardy bittersweet vine and added that just for interest, but there is no reason to include anything living other than the moss in the composition. The plants above and below with the somewhat shingled look are liverwort that arrived on its own.

I have other miniature gardens (currently out in the cold) which were constructed with a little soil, an empty food container, pot, shoe, ....... and some moss I found growing nearby, some of which came from the soil surface of some of my bonsai trees.

I currently have only one little moss garden growing indoors, started in late summer '21. Getting images of it for this post was on my list of things to do today, so here is what it looks like:

The moss is growing on a small piece of a stump I picked up somewhere. The 'pot' is a mini loaf pan I bought at a dollar store and drilled a drain hole in. The soil it's in is gritty mix, but almost any soil that drains reasonably well will work. You can grow moss on nothing but a piece of wood (and I have) with no soil whatsoever. If the soil you intend to use drains poorly, add gravel or other ballast to the bottom of the pot and use a thinner layer of soil above. A perched water table in an inch of soil will dry fast enough indoors to prevent extended periods of soil saturation which could prove to be limiting.

Same planting from the back:

The little plant growing in this one is also a cutting from a Ficus pumila. Here are the end views:

While the plant needs a daily spritz to be at it's best, a grower can leave for a week, month, or several months w/o losing the planting. The moss will seem to have died, but resurrection depends on no more than remoistening it and keeping it moist. I'm not sure how long it would take to actually kill it, or if it could even be done by allowing it to dry, as the spores would likely still remain viable.

You can even prepare a moss starter puree from hydrated or dehydrated moss. Simply mix a few handfuls of miss with a can of beer, plain yogurt, or buttermilk, and whiz it up. Adding a tablespoon of corn syrup or sugar (corn syrup is better) to the mix will help it stick; this, because you'll be painting it on whatever you wish the moss to grow on. Paint it on. Let it dry. Start spritzing. Have fun.

Al