Tag: Plant care

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.

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.
There is a lot of soil sticking to the stick, so the soil is wet.

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!