How To Care For House Plants

How to care for house plants. You need to look at your plant that you have and see what sort of leaves it's got. The thicker the leaves, the less water it needs.

So, something like this which is a Yaka and a Dracaena and a money plant are very fleshy and they retain a lot of water or they hold it in their stem. So you need to water those less frequently than you would a palm or a fern. This is a fern.

These are great in a bathroom or somewhere like that because they'll take a lot of moisture from the atmosphere and you need to water those probably twice a week depending on the size of the pot and where you got it. And how warm the environment is, is very important to how often you water a plant. The best way to tell is by touching the soil.

If you touch the soil and you can feel a slight bit of dampness that is wet, it is damp. It doesn't need to be soaking. And this is slightly damp and I wouldn't water that for at least a week or week and a half.

The best way to keep the moisture in as well is to cover the top of the plant with some sort of covering. This one here has got some bark clippings, I suppose, or coconut bark. Moss is very good.

So you'd place that around the edge. This would be very good to put on orchids as well because they lose a lot of moisture. To know how to care for each plant, the best thing to do is to check where it's naturally grown, where it comes from and emulate that environment.

So, ferns grow in sort of damp, wet, mossy woodlands and tropical places as well. So again, you'd need to know what area your plant was from. This particular one grows in rain forests and money plants are a slightly succulent variety, so they would grow somewhere that was probably a little bit dry of water, and again, you just emulate their environment.

So, it might be an arid area where there's no moisture in the atmosphere or like a fern where it's a woodland, it would need to be very damp and humid. So that's why they say bathrooms and kitchens. You feed plants according to the instructions on your particular house plant food.

This one is once every two weeks. Don't over feed them, it won't do the plant any good and you'll burn it. There's nitrogen in plant food and you'll get nitrogen burn.

Also, when you feed, make sure that there's not direct sunlight on the plant. Don't ever put the water or the plant food on the leaves because again, that will burn. Most plants don't like direct sunlight.

In the winter, they can take it through a window and in the summer, you'll need to keep them away from the window otherwise they'll burn. And again, it's just looking at the plants, if it's variegated, it needs a little more light but dappled. A dark green plant can take more sunlight than a lighter plant.

Though, a light plant does need light because it has less green in it which is the bit that is needed for photosynthesis, so it will need some bright light. I think that's about it really. That's how you care for house plants. .