Tag: houseplants

Bringing Home a Houseplant

K. Schall DeYong

It’s a good time of year to add new plants to your houseplant collection, and the garden shops know it. Their doors are wide open, and their shelves are brimming with bright green beauties. Before you buy one, there are a few things to consider.

For one thing, you’ll have to consider the amount of natural light in your home. If your home is well-lit, you can grow just about any houseplant—just make sure to tuck shade-loving plants away from the direct light of a south or west-facing window. If you don’t get much light inside, look into plants that do well in low-light. A few popular low-light plants are ZZ plant, snake plant, and spider plant. If you can’t stand to be limited by lighting, it’d be worthwhile to get yourself some plant lights.

When you’re choosing your plant, look really closely for pests. Sometimes it’s easy to see that a plant is unhealthy if it’s got yellowing leaves, brown spots, or wilt, but pests aren’t as easy to spot. A few common ones that pick on indoor plants are aphids, mealybugs, and spider mites. Spider mites are around a lot in winter because they thrive in dry air, so watch closely for those this time of year. They’re tiny, practically invisible little bugs who build little silky webs on plants. Sometimes you have to sit and stare for awhile, eyes peeled, looking for a sign of movement. It’s worth it to be certain. You don’t want to bring pests inside to spread to other healthy plants you already had. 

Once you’ve picked it out and made sure it’s healthy, ask the vendor if they have any information available on how to care for that particular plant. If you do pick out a plant that you’re not familiar with, don’t leave without finding out what it’s called. That way, you can at least look up how to care for it later. At specialized plant shops, they’ll be able to give you more detailed advice. Even if you’ve researched the plant ahead of time, it’s worth it to ask if they know when the plant was last watered, fed, or otherwise messed with.

When you get home, don’t tuck the new additions in with the rest of your collection just yet. It’s a good idea to keep the new plants isolated for a week or two. Setting them apart will remind you to pay special attention to how your new plants are adjusting to the air in your home. It also gives you more time to notice pests or disease that might spread to other plants.

If all goes well, your new plant will bring fresh, green life indoors. Spring flowers and new  growth is well on its way now, but if you don’t have it in you to wait another week for the color to come back to the landscape, you’ll have to go out and get your greens yourself.

Looking After Houseplants in Wintertime

K. Schall DeYong

At this time of year, our houseplants are especially precious. Our homes are sealed tight against the cold of the outdoors. Only our plants breathe life into the stale air.

It’s also this time of year that many of them are most delicate. They’re probably not growing quick as they would in spring or summer, so it can be easy to forget to check on them. It might also seem that since they’re safe and warm inside, they should be treated like they’re not experiencing seasons at all. That’s flat-out wrong. Plants need a different kind of care in wintertime.

Pumping the central heat all winter makes for unnaturally dry air that’s a strain on most plants. Your cacti and succulents might be okay with it, but keep a close eye on everything else—especially if you’ve got anything that hails from the rainforest or jungle. For these guys, you’ll need to either park them near a humidifier or make a habit of misting them with a spray bottle. Bathrooms are usually a great home for plants that crave humidity. You’ll want to consider your individual bathroom before you move any plants in there, though. Since they’re usually one of the smallest rooms in the house, bathrooms might be extra cold, extra dry, or fluctuate dramatically between both when the heat kicks on and off. If that’s the case, you might want to stick to the misting and keep your plants in a more consistently warm room.

Pinpoint the drafts in your house and move your plants out of these danger zones. This doesn’t just apply to the chill creeping in from outside—keep your plants away from blasting heat vents, too. As for the cold drafts, only the most tightly sealed window is a good place for a plant to overwinter. If your windows are breezy, move your plants to a new spot and find them a different source of light. You may need to purchase artificial plant lights to get the job done. Don’t overdo it though—plants don’t need summertime sunlight hours during winter, and some plants don’t like direct light at all. Research your plants’ preferences before you get them settled into a permanent lighting situation.

Just because your indoor plants are safe from the cold doesn’t mean that they don’t need their wintertime rest—even the biggest cacti in the hottest deserts have a dormant season. Let your plants take their winter sabbatical by ceasing efforts to encourage growth. Don’t feed and fertilize plants during winter, and reduce your regular watering schedule dramatically. Most plants will do well if they are watered only when the top inch or two of soil is completely dry. They need a lot less when they’re not growing, and too much water can cause root rot or other disease. To be extra kind to your plants, use room temperature water so you don’t shock their roots with the frigid stuff that first comes out of the tap. By changing the way you feed and water your plants, you let them experience a winter of sorts. This helps them to complete their natural cycles so that in springtime they’ll grow faster than ever or possibly even flower.

Don’t repot during winter unless it’s urgent. Since your plants aren’t growing, it’ll be a lot tougher for them to take root in new soil. You should only repot if the plant is at risk in its current home due to disease, pests, or some other issue with the soil.

51216228_548342269003589_3689981561349865472_nWhen spring arrives and the danger of frost has gone, move them back to the windows.They’ll stretch out in the sunlight and grow again. Until then, nestle them among your pencils, in your bookshelf, on your kitchen table—wherever they need to be to stay warm and get a taste of indirect light. They might not look as photogenic spread helter-skelter, but let their green splendor all throughout the house be a constant reminder of the life all around you. Such is the nature of the wintertime garden.

Holiday Guests

K. Schall DeYong

Each year, those plants that are too loved to be lost to winter are tenderly collected from the backyard or balcony and brought indoors. They congregate in our window sills or among the mugs left out on the kitchen table, and on cold, grey days we welcome their company. Come December we invite a couple of holiday guests to our growing indoor winter garden.

The bright red poinsettia is one of these visitors, and it’s a strange one to have received this honor. In the United States, the poinsettia is so closely associated with Christmas and wintertime that its own natural habitat seems to us like a mismatch. Poinsettias come from Mexico and need to be treated like the tropical plants they are. They prefer a hot, wet environment, so they should be kept away from drafty windows and misted regularly. It’s a lot of trouble to make the bracts turn red like that, and that task is usually left to the experts. But anyone who’s got patience and a willingness to fail can have a crack at getting this year’s plants to redden again next Christmas.

It’s a complicated process: After the season’s over, the leaves will fall. When that happens, cut the stems down to just a few inches high and keep the plant pretty dry and out of the sun. In early May, freshen up the compost and put the plant in a new pot. After repotting, water thoroughly and regularly whenever the soil starts to feel dry. When new shoots appear, choose the four or five strongest and remove the rest so they don’t have to compete for space. Now the poinsettias will grow, but they’ll only turn red again if you carefully manipulate the light. The last week of September is game time. The plant must be kept in complete darkness for 14 hours each day. To make that happen, you have to cover the poinsettia with a dark plastic bag from early evening til morning every day for eight weeks. Then treat it like normal again. If all goes well, your poinsettias will be red again in time for Christmas.

Since the early 1900s, one family has dominated the poinsettia industry by mastering the plant’s complicated cultivation. The Ecke family developed a way to grow a bushier, more attractive plant and kept their technique top secret for for decades. In the 1980s, a graduate student named  John Dole cracked the code and published his findings. They finally had some competition after that, but to this day they rule the poinsettia industry. The Eckes are also responsible for the popularization of the poinsettia as a Christmas plant in the United States. They began referring to it as “the Christmas flower” and went to great lengths to send them to popular magazines and television shows to be featured during the holidays. Paul Ecke Jr. was so determined to have the plants featured in women’s magazines that when they told him that their holiday photoshoots took place months ahead of time, Ecke Jr. specially cultivated a new group of poinsettias that would bloom out-of-season in summertime.

If you’re one of the people that brings these living decorations into your home each year, you don’t have to be bothered by the absurdly early Christmas displays pushing into your peripherals from the moment Halloween is over. The live poinsettias will only blush red for this brief season, so when they start to pop up in the grocery store, and the fir trees are riding around town on the roofs of the family cars, those who take them in know that Christmastime has truly arrived.