tigershakti09

How to Take Care of a New Plant

When you bring home a new plant, it is important to treat them carefully to avoid accidentally spreading pests or deseases they might carry to your other plants. Read on to find out exactly how you can make your new plant happy while keeping your existing collection safe.

This plant is called “Philodendron Red Anderson”. I bought it online from Etsy. I love buying plants from Etsy as it is a great platform for finding plants at a reasonable and affordable price.

The first thing to do with a new plant is to check the leaves for pests.

I always treat all new plants for pests just in case. Even if I do not find anything in a preliminary search. For this plant, I wiped the leaves with a neem oil solution. Neem oil is a natural pest prevention/treatment for plants! Check out my post about how to make a neem oil solution here!

If your plant is from a big box store or is in a very poor potting mix, I recommend repotting it as soon as possible to get it into a better soil mix. The soil from commercial nurseries is often poor and can lead to drainage problems.

The last step is to isolate your plant. This step is not strictly necessary, but I like to keep my new plants separate for a week or so to make sure there are no pests that survived that could be passed on to the rest of my plants.

Cloches are a great option when space is limited.

Those are all the steps to take for bringing a new plant into your plant collection. Comment your planty questions down below! Check out my Youtube and Instagram for daily plant content.

Neem Oil: The Best Way to Eradicate Plant Pests and Diseases Naturally

While there are many different ways to deal with pests on your plants, neem oil is by far the best option for dealing with them. Unlike many other pest treatments available, neem oil is both effective and natural.

According to the EPA, cold pressed neem oil has no health risks as it is derived from plant material. It is also perfectly safe to use on outdoor plants as well as houseplants with no negative effect on the environment or pollinators.

Neem oil can be purchased in a concentrate form or in a pre-made solution. I prefer to buy a concentrated bottle of neem oil and make the solution myself as it saves both money and plastic.

How to make neem oil solution with a bottle of concentrate:

Mix 1 1/2 tsp of neem oil concentrate per 1 quart of water
Add 1/2 tsp of mild liquid dish soap per quart
Shake until both the neem oil and the soap are mixed together with the water

Using neem oil solution is very simple! All you need to do is spray the affected plant down every 10-14 days until the pests have been eradicated. This solution can be used to get rid of or prevent all sorts of plant bugs and pests, including mealybugs, aphids, and spider mites! Neem oil can also be used every two weeks as a preventative or treatment for and mildew diseases (ex. Powdery Mildew).

That is everything you need to know about using neem oil to protect your plants. Neem oil is a great option for both outdoor and indoor plants!

Building an Ikea Greenhouse Cabinet-free printable!

Greenhouse cabinets are great ways to make sure your tropical plants are thriving in their optimal conditions. Learn here how I built my greenhouse cabinet and find useful links and lists for making your own! At the bottom of the post you will find a printable PDF with links to all the materials you need to make your own greenhouse cabinet.

My goal for my cabinet is to create a humid environment for my tropical plants as most tropical plants require humidity levels that are not usually maintained in houses.

The first thing I did was to chose which Ikea cabinet I wanted to transform. There are many different options, but I chose the Milsbo Tall Ikea cabinet in the black color. It is big enough that it will fit all my plants in the years to come, but it will not take up too much space in my plant room. If you are looking for a smaller cabinet, the Ikea Baggebo and Rudista cabinets are good options too.

The next important thing is to get weatherstripping for the greenhouse cabinet. Weatherstripping is an adhesive strip that seals the cracks of the cabinet to retain humidity. If your cabinet is black, then use this black weatherstripping. If it is white, you can use this one. Matching the color of the weatherstripping with your cabinet is not required! This is purely a personal reference.

Another important thing to add is a small fan. Fans will provide air circulation which is important with high humidity in order to prevent fungal and bacterial deseases on your plants. Here is the link to the fan I used.

The most important thing in your greenhouse cabinet will be grow lights! These will provide the light the plants will need to grow. I like and used the Barrina grow lights. Depending on how wide your greenhouse cabinet is, they have 2ft wide ones and 1ft wide ones. the grow lights come in multiple different colors, but the white light is my favorite as they light up a room without being blindingly bright.

If you want to maximize your greenhouse cabinet’s vertical space, consider hanging grid organizers in your cabinet. These will allow you to add extra shelves/space for more plants.

Those are all the materials needed to build a greenhouse cabinet. Attached at the bottom is a free PDF with all the links to the materials mentioned.

PDF:

greenhouse-cabinet-links Download

How to Grow Snake plants

Snake plants are a great houseplant for beginner or experienced plant owners because they are flexible and incredibly low maintenance. Read on to find out how you should take care of this amazing plant!

Photo from: The Spruce / Alonda Baird

Water: Snake plants do not need to be watered often. If you water them too much, they will rot and die. An easy way to avoid this is to keep your snake plant in a pot with drainage holes, so extra water can drain out when you water the plant. You only need to water your snake plant once a month!

Sun: Snake plants can tolerate and grow in a wide range of light. They will enjoy full sun, but will still thrive in full shade. Snake plants can survive in places with no light for over a month!

Fertilizer: Snake plants do not need to be fertilized often. A good rule of thumb is to use all purpose plant food, like this one, every spring. Make sure you don’t feed your snake plant too much or their roots can get burned!

Snake plants can be grown in many different ways and places, which make them perfect for any plant enthusiast. From beginner to expert, snake plants are a prized addition to any plant-lover’s collection!

How to Grow a Green Thumb

A dummy’s guide to growing houseplants!

Taking care of houseplants doesn’t have to be super hard or complicated. Learn how you can keep your plants alive!

In order to keep your plants alive, you need to make sure you are giving them the right amount of water and light. Different plants need different amounts of each, but you can treat most of your plants the same.

Most houseplants can grow in places with less sun, but if you put them in spaces with higher light levels, they will grow faster. So if you can, put your plants in a spot that gets the most light as possible. When it comes to watering your plants, it is very important to make sure you do not give them too much water. Most beginner plant owners kill their plants simply by watering them too much! Normal houseplants should be watered once their soil is mostly dried out. If you are not sure if your plant’s soil is dry yet, use the chopstick/toothpick method to find out.

How to find out if a plant’s soil is dry or wet. Take a wooden chopstick or toothpick (depending on how big the pot is), and stick it into the edge of the pot until it reaches the bottom. When you pull it out, look at how much soil is stuck to the stick. If the stick comes out mostly dry/clean, the soil is completely dry and ready to be watered. If the stick comes out with dirt stuck to it, then the soil is wet and you do not need to water your plant right now.

There is not a lot of soil sticking to the stick, so the soil is dry.

If you are a beginner to growing houseplants, It is a very good idea to make sure your plant’s pots have drainage holes in them. That way, if you accidentally water your plant too much, the excess water will just drain pout instead of just sitting in the pot and ultimately killing your plant. If your plant is in a pot with drainage holes, make sure you have a saucer or tray under it to catch the excess water that drains out when you water your plant.

This pot has drainage holes, so I put a saucer under it to catch the water that drains out.

If your plant is in a pot with drainage holes and its soil is dry, water it until the extra water comes out the bottom. Make sure you empty out the saucer once you are done watering so your plant is not sitting in water.

That is it! Those are the basic things you need to to know to take care of your houseplants! It might seem super hard and complicated at first, but over time taking care of your houseplants will seem super simple and easy! If you have any questions about plant care, leave a comment down below and I will do my best to answer it!

Check out my Etsy shop here! https://solisandlunacrafts.etsy.com/

Take a look here to learn how I threw nothing away for 30 days!

Plant Swap 101

This week I went to a plant swap hosted by PHS. A plant swap is an event where people bring plants they don’t want anymore or cuttings/baby plants to trade for new plants. Plant swaps are a great way to get plants for free!

Here are the plants I brought to the swap:

And here are the plants that I came back with! (The glass jars are mine)

How to plant swap:

First, you need to find a plant swap event in your area. Ask your local nurseries or look online to try to find one.

You can bring any plants you want to a plant swap-just make sure they do not have any pests or diseases! I like to wrap my cuttings with a damp paper towel and plastic wrap so they don’t dry out.

In some plant swaps, people set up their plants on a table and trade with other people once they see a plant they like. In other plant swaps, everybody brings a certain number of plants and puts them on one table. Then, everybody can just take the same number of plants they brought.

Plant swaps are a great way to meet new plant people and find new plants!

30 days no trash-#3

30 days no trash is a challenge/project I created to raise awareness about the trash crisis and to empower people. This post is about what it means to be zero waste and how you can easily reduce your waste.

To learn more about this project, check out this previous post: https://tigershakti.org/2023/06/21/30-days-no-trash-2/

If you want to learn about what the trash crisis is, click this link: https://tigershakti.org/2023/06/21/30-days-no-trash-2/

What does it mean to be zero waste?

Zero waste is a lifestyle in which a person produces as little or no waste as possible. There are multiple principles of zero waste including: Rethink, reduce, recycle, compost, reuse, recovery material, residual management, and refuse (“What Is Zero Waste? Learn about the Movement & Why It’s Important | Zero Waste”, 2023). We need to rethink how we get stuff, and find ways to exist without using single-use plastic. To become more sustainable, we need to first reduce our waste. We can also reuse our waste by recycling and composting. We don’t always need new things, and instead can fix up old things and make them useful again. We must be responsible with how we deal with our waste. The easiest way to create less waste is to refuse. If someone doesn’t create waste, they don’t have to deal with it.

How can I reduce my waste?

There are many things that a person can use to reduce their waste. There are soap bars instead of liquid soap in a disposable container, silicone baking mats instead of parchment paper or aluminum foil, silk or bamboo floss instead of plastic floss, and more (Kellogg, 2017). Some things someone can do to produce less waste include: buying things in bulk, reusing or donating old clothes, making homemade cleaning products, and going to a local farmers market (Weeden, 2022, Kellog, 2017). There are also stores that sell things in bulk without packaging so it is easier to create less waste. The way these stores work is that the customer brings their own container, fills it up with whatever thing they are buying, and then go pay. Stores like these often sell sustainable alternatives like biodegradable floss too. There are many different ways to live a zero waste lifestyle or just be more environmentally friendly. It is important that we all do what we can to save our planet. Recycling uses less energy than it takes to make new stuff, and it can lower the frequency of natural disasters that happen by preventing carbon emissions (“Why Should We Reduce Waste?”, 2022).

Thank you for reading this post! Check out my etsy shop at: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SolisandLunaCrafts

30 Days No Trash-#2

30 days no trash is a project/challenge I created and did to raise awareness of the trash crisis. To learn more about this project, check out this post:

https://tigershakti.org/2023/06/14/30-days-no-trash-challenge/

What is the trash crisis?

2 billion tons or 4.5 trillion pounds of trash are produced globally every year. This trash leaks greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and is the third largest methane producer in the US (Clifford, 2021). The U.S. creates the most waste out of all the countries in the world, with the average American throwing away around 5 pounds a day. By 2050, it is estimated that there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans (HWH environmental, 2022). Almost every aspect of our lives creates waste. It takes 872 gallons of water to just produce 1 gallon of wine (Christie, 2018).

What can be done about it?

Evidently, we need to find a way to deal with this increasing amount of trash, and one of those solutions is recycling and composting. Recycling trash is actually cheaper than sending waste to a landfill, with a cost of $30 a ton to recycle trash and $50 a ton to send trash to a landfill. The average American throws away 1200 pounds of trash that is compostable every year (HWH environmental, 2022). Composting tackles two problems in our society – it provides a use for food waste, and it makes nutritious soil that can be used to grow organic, healthy food. Also, if farmers use compost to feed their plants instead of chemical fertilizers that degrade soil and pollute water, that is a win-win-win.

Composting can be done at home! You can collect your food scraps and either donate them to your local farmer, or you can create your own compost bin in your backyard!

Being environmentally responsible does not have to mean strictly creating zero waste for a month, it can mean doing small things everyday to make a difference.

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SolisandLunaCrafts

30 Days NO TRASH-#1

The 30 days no trash challenge is a project I created to raise awareness about the trash crisis. For this project, I generated zero trash for 30 days. This post will be the first of a series of my progress and account of this journey. The requirements for my project were that I could recycle, reuse, and compost my “waste” items. While this project might sound easy at first, it is fundamentally hard to do. In a society like ours, it is next to if not impossible to survive and live without having a negative impact on our planet. To get even the basic necessities we need to survive harms our environment. Thankfully, I only have to not throw anything away for 30 days (so easy, right?…).

Stay tuned for part two of this zero waste series!

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SolisandLunaCrafts

Plants You Can Grow In Full Sun!

If you still need to pick a spot for a garden or start one, check out this post:

https://tigershakti.org/2022/12/11/how-to-start-a-garden-p-1/

To learn how to measure sun in your garden, check this out: https://tigershakti.org/2022/12/03/how-to-measure-sun-in-a-garden/

If you have full sun in your garden, (6+ hours of direct sun) you are in luck! That means you can grow almost any plant! Some plants you can grow are:

Veggies: Tomatoes, peppers, squash, carrots, radish, peas, kale, onions, garlic, cucumbers, fennel, lettuce, asparagus, Brussels sprouts, artichoke, okra, gourds, potatoes and sweet potatoes, green beans, eggplant, tomatillos, corn,