Hey plant people! I just spent some time caring for houseplants today, so I thought I'd write a blog because I got a lot done. :)
First I had to do some Emergency Rooting of a bunch of spider plant babies, because when I was talking out the compost, I was doing a quick check for dead leaves and found a whole dead stem in the mama plant. When I pulled it out, it was holding the majority of the pups, so they would have died if I hadn't realized their parent stem was dried out. So I put a bunch of them in a pot where I had been trying to root another pup, and the rest in water.
Next, I did some maintenance for one of my pothos plants. The soil had become too compacted, and several leaves had turned yellow and died off. So I needed to aerate the soil so that the roots could breathe better. I went in and pulled out any hard clumps, which I've had happen when I used too much compost in the pot before, and replaced it with fresh, loose soil. I also poked my fingers all around to loosen the dirt up. Hopefully this helps! Some of the leaves on this plant are the size of my hand! 😃
After that, I wanted to try and propagate some Boston Fern runners. I have read online that it's very hard, but my plant has a BUNCH of runners looking for soil to root in, so I wanted to try. Advice said I should try and take some roots with the runners, but there was no way to do that without damaging the mother plant, as they were well within the main clumps. So I snipped two runners and coiled them around in some good soil and hopefully that roots? I added a clear plant plot bottom to the top of this glass jar to make it more like a terrarium in there since ferns like moisture. If this doesn't work, I may try hanging a smaller pot with dirt up near the mama plant and just stick some runners in it while still attached to their mama plant, and then once they're established, separate them. We'll see how it goes.
After that, I had to immediately move the spider plant babies I had planted in dirt because Yuan tried eating them. I do have a new pot of cat grass growing for him, but it's just started, so the spider plants looked tempting. Normally if he has grass, he leaves other plants alone. Just a little longer, silly kitty, it's growing for you!
So there was my houseplant care this morning. It feels good to play in the dirt. :)
Edit: hmm, it seems I can't make pictures side-by-side when posting with Ecency, even when I manually type in the code. Am I missing something?
💪😊🤙 yea, some good care goin on! i didn't know there was such a thing as cat grass.. 😉🐱🐈
It's good for them to eat, it helps with hairballs. :) It's usually wheatgrass or oatgrass, I think.
I had hoped I’d have enough energy after I watered the house plants to do some care. But I will be lucky to try starting African violet leaves....
You're doing a lot! You're always so productive in your blogs.
Some days, yeah, other days, like this week, not so much!