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If you’re new to growing or caring for houseplants this full and in depth guide takes you through light, watering, soil, feeding and the mistakes you’re likely to make.
Spider plants are some of the most forgiving houseplants you can own, and that’s true when it comes to pruning as well. You cannot prune a spider plant badly enough to kill it. You can be as decisive as the situation calls for – taking off a third, a half, even more in a single …
When I got my first orchid, many years ago now, I killed it within the first couple of weeks. It was a beautiful purple Phalaenopsis from the grocery store and my experience and failure with it left me convinced orchids were just fancy plants meant for people who had real gardening skills. But where I …
If your fiddle leaf fig leaves keep turning yellow at the edges and you’re not sure what’s going wrong then you’re not alone. Fiddle leaf figs can be a bit dramatic and yellowing leaves are some of the most common ways to show you they’re not happy. The first time my fiddle leaf fig started …
If you’ve bought a fiddle leaf fig I can guarantee you that it will, at some point, just stop growing. It will stop growing any new leaves without any obvious problem you can point to. It’ll just sit there, looking perfectly happy but doing nothing. I was sure I was doing something wrong for weeks …
Spider plants get taken for granted a bit. They don’t cost a lot, you find them everywhere, they’re famously easy to keep alive – and it’s that ease of keeping them alive that means how impressive they can be when given conditions they like rather than conditions they merely tolerate gets overlooked. A spider plant …
Snake plants are usually one thing or the other. Either very full and lush looking with extremely upright leaves or they’re looking a bit pathetic. They don’t seem to have much in between. My first one was sadly a bit pathetic looking. It was pretty much impossible to kill, I’ll give it that, but it …
Most spider plant owners have a certain way they want their spider plant to look. The mother plant up high on a shelf or in a hanging basket with long stems coming over the sides. Each one of those having its own little baby plant. And then there’s the reality. Which tends to be a …
Orchids are stubborn about telling you what they need. A lot of plants will make a big deal about showing you how they’re feeling. Peace lilies are the classic example of a plant that reacts very dramatically when it’s unhappy. Orchids though will sit in the same pot looking perfectly fine for years. That is …
A few years ago I nearly threw out a perfectly good orchid. The leaves had gone all wrinkled so I assumed it needing more water and so kept watering it. Unfortunately the leaves got worse. When I finally tipped it out of the pot the roots were brown and mushy. The plant hadn’t needed more …
The first time I saw thick roots growing out of the side of my monstera I was sure something had gone wrong with it. There they were, sticking out into the air, reaching for what seemed like nothing in particular, and they looked a bit alien being there next to all the green leaves. So …