9UNP1279HD_Patti_Nagai_WordPress

- Welcome everybody to the September meeting of the Dodge Country Master Gardener Association. And tonight, we have Patti Nagai. She's gonna speak about gardening, brightening your indoor space with living plants. Gardening year-round, she says, can be a joyful experience, or a big mess. And she's gonna to tell us which it is. She's here to tell us which it is. She's the Horticulture Educator from Racine County UW-Extension. She's gonna talk about selection and care of house plants. She's gonna talk about tropical foliage. She's gonna talk about citrus. 

She's gonna talk about herbs. Plants can create a healthier and more beautiful indoor environment, but only if they're in the right place and if they're cared for to stay insect and disease-free. She wants you to brighten your indoor space to enhance your quality of life through the natural therapy of nurturing a productive and healthy plant. So please join me in welcoming Patti. 
(applause)
- This is one of my favorite topics to talk about, because I am a year-long gardener, and I'm assuming that you're here because you are year-long gardeners as well, or you would like to be. Now, in this room, I'm sure we have plenty of people who have killed many house plants. I will be the first one to raise my hand and say, "Yes, I have done that." That's totally okay. We're going to present to you today some of the plants that you can select that hopefully will make it a more positive experience for you. 

I'm gonna give you a few tips about how to take care of the plants that you have, and how to deal with any little pests that might come your way over the course of the year with your indoor plants. And we're going to discuss a lot of different care factors that will hopefully bring you lots of success when you decide to bring plants into your interior space to make your house healthier and more beautiful. One of the reasons that we bring plants in is for the color, and I'm sure that all of you have this sort of magnificent color in your homes, right? It's fabulous, these are amazing hanging baskets at Chicago Botanic Garden, and although they're probably not on the scale that we would have in our own homes, there is a lot to be said for bringing a flowering plant in the house. What I want you to take home from this slide is it's okay if these flowering plants become disposable plants. Because sometimes color is very seasonal, and if you get to the point where it's not doing well for you anymore and you decide to throw it away, don't feel bad. You're doing a great job supporting our green industry in the state, and so, go for it. Bring color into your home. Sometimes it's about form. And again, I don't know that you're going to have topiaries of elephants or dinosaurs or birds in your house, but it's a fun project to play with. 

And form can come in both the topiary style as well as just in the natural form of those interior plants. It might be textures that you're interested in. And with this you need to be kind of careful with interior plants because some plants are not very friendly on the interior. If you've ever grown some of the Phoenix palms, you know the ones with the really long thorns or cactus, you know that there are plants that grow very nicely inside, but have really painful textures. Sometimes we're looking for very soft textures, we want ferns, we want that combination of color, form, and texture to bring into our homes in the same way that we might plant a garden for our exterior. And in this case, you can see, this is a multi-planted planter with many different types of color, texture, and form in one planter. So it really is a mini garden within one interior planter. You can do this in your house too, but it's a little bit more complicated to take care of a planter that has a lot of different things in it. So why do we bring plants inside? Most of the time when I ask people why they want to bring something inside, aside from the "I just want to garden year-round," is that visual enhancement. 

In a lot of interior situations, plants are looked at as another form of interior design. So you see the plant rental companies, you see plants in office buildings, doctors' offices, malls, and in most cases those plants are placed there with the idea of, this is part of the entire interior design. We want that color, form, texture. We want living things in our space. But it's very much a design element: we want it to look better. But we also know that plants, in general, provide a huge amount of well-being. Whether you are viewing plants, whether you are actually planting them, whether you are, you know, walking around in a garden space or taking care of a small houseplant on your window sill. We know from many years of research that this is very good for you. It's good for you and it's good for everybody around them, around these plants, to see a healthy, living, growing plant. It makes us feel better, it makes us a little less stressed, it can help us heal faster if we're recovering from an illness. 

Plants are very useful in many different ways to help with our emotional health.

Environmental health. I'm sure most of you know that plants give off oxygen and they take in carbon dioxide, which is what we, what we exhale. But the other thing that plants do is take in a huge amount of toxins from our air. And NASA has known this for many years and has done a tremendous amount of research. Some of the earlier research was done in the sixties and seventies, but it has been going on for a very long time. But what they've generally found was if you just even had one or two medium plants in 100 square feet of living space, it would be enough to cleanse the air of some of those pollutants that come with interior space. And the tighter that houses and buildings get, the more chance there actually is for interior pollutants. They come from your carpet, your paint, varnish, they come from furniture, mattresses, curtains, blinds, and just the building materials associated with any kind of structure. So there are a lot of interior pollutants that plants naturally take in. 

And some plants are better at that than others. The ones that are really good at it tend to be the ones that are really dark green and can grow in very low light. Isn't that a nice thing to know? Because what are the light levels like in your homes, in your interior spaces? For the most part, we live in a pretty low-light environment especially here in Wisconsin over the winter. So, you know, plants, there are plants that can grow in your house in almost any area of your house even during those winter months. So we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the best plants for those sorts of locations. But they clean the air, so plants are great for environmental health. So how do we choose the plants that we put in our houses? Do you go to the grocery store and see the pretty flowering azalea and go "Wow, that looks really nice" and put it in your grocery cart and bring it home? 

It's okay if you do that, 'cause I do that too. I find great plant deals at the grocery store, especially with those flowering plants that are gonna bring me some really nice, beautiful color. Sometimes at a very much-needed time of year, when you don't expect to see a flowering hydrangea or azalea or orchids, all of these beautiful plants. You can buy them in a lot of different places. But what you really need to think about before you invest in a plant, and it may be an eight-dollar grocery store plant, or it may be a $300 large, tropical foliage plant. But you want to invest your money wisely, but more importantly, you want to be able to bring that plant home and be successful with it and have it grow and thrive and not go through that sad, sad stage of death, you know, in your home. Because that is really bad feng shui, that's not good for anybody. So make a good selection. So you do want to pick a plant that's visually appealing. You need to make sure that it's available in our area, and sometimes over the winter months lots of things aren't available. 

It needs to be the right price. And I wasn't exaggerating when I said you could pay $300 for an interior plant. You could very easily pay more than that for some of the large palms that are really slow-growing. Size. Make sure you're buying a plant that really fits your space and you're taking into consideration how much it will grow over time. There are some plants that you can't do anything about once they get a certain size, and I just saw a notice on Facebook for somebody who has a Norfolk Island pine who, they had it outside over the summer and now it doesn't fit in their house anymore. And you can't prune a Norfolk Island pine. It just, it doesn't work. So make sure that you're selecting a plant that's the right size for your location. And, along with that, make sure your location is suitable for a plant. 

You need to know what your light level is like, and what the care is going to be involved for that plant in the location where you want to put it. So, I have a few plants that I want to show you and talk about and some of them, you're gonna say those are so common, everybody knows about that. And there's a reason they're common. They're common because they're difficult to kill. And so, they're not so expensive, they're difficult to kill, and they mostly do really well in interiors. So, pothos is one of the first ones I want to introduce you to, if you haven't grown pothos before. Epipremnum pinnatum. Now this is not philodendron. It is in the same family with philodendron, but it is not philodendron. And a lot of times when we see pothos at our garden centers, local greenhouses, or even in some of the big box stores, you'll see that it has a lot of variegation. 

This one does not have quite as much variegation. And the reason for that is that pothos can grow in a wide range of light levels. When you bring this plant home and it's a marble queen with lots of white on it, and it's really bright and fresh-looking, and you put it in your interior environment on top of a bookshelf with no light above it, that marbling color, that whiteness, will eventually go away. Because the lower the light levels, the less chance you have of maintaining any kind of variegation. It doesn't mean you can't grow the plant there or that it's not healthy, it's just the plant is going to adapt to that light level and the way they adapt to it is by getting rid of that variegation and making more chlorophyll. So eventually you're gonna end up with a plant that has no variegation at all. So, they can handle a lot of different levels of light, but in general, the darker green the leaf, the lower the light level the plant can handle. Moist to dry. The biggest problem with this plant is people overwater it. This is a plant that you can go for weeks without watering, and it actually will be just fine. 

But if you go in there and lovingly water it every day for two weeks, it will be dead very quickly because it can't handle that saturated root ball. So make sure that when you water, you water completely and let it drain. The insects to look for on this one are mealybug and scale. Mealybug tends to be the biggest problem with pothos, so you want to make sure that you know what those insects look like and to never bring a plant into your house that has them. We'll talk about those in just a minute. Heartleaf philodendron. So this is the real philodendron here, and there are lots of different types of philodendron. The cutleaf philodendron gets to be enormous, so make sure if you're gonna buy that one you have enough room for it to really grow. And then compared to the pothos. You can see that the heartleaf philodendron has very much heart-shaped, little bit smaller leaves, much darker green. 

Very fragile-looking little stems, whereas pothos has stems as big around as my finger. They're huge, thick stems with root nodules all up and down them. So, philodendron's a little bit different. Both of them are excellent plants for the interior if you need a place for a vining plant to hang down, these are great choices. English ivy is another choice for a vining kind of plant, and there are a lot of different kinds of ivies. There are also Algerian ivies and various types. This one happens to be variegata. This is just like the hedera helix that grows outside, except for it's a smaller-leafed variegated variety. This makes a fine interior house plant. Again, with the variegation though, if it's not in high enough light, it will lose that variegation over time. 

The biggest problem with all of the vines in this ivy family are spider mites, and they're kind of tricky because spider mites, when you initially get them, you might not notice them because they're so tiny. And then by the time you get to the point where you have brown, crunchy leaves and spiderwebs all over the plant, it's almost a little too late to do anything about it. So, the solution to discourage mites and other insects is to wash your plants on a regular basis. And I have an example of how to do that in the coming slides. Chinese evergreen, or the aglaonemas, are a really beautiful group of plants that grow well in very low light and can thrive in many different types of interior environments. There are a lot of different cultivars of aglaonema now. Some of them are much larger than others, and they come in a lot of different colors. So, you'll see some with red, pink, cream-colored patterns on the leaves. You will see some that just have the silver and the green, and this one is called silverqueen because it's, you know, that silvery color. But there's also an emerald gem, which is more of a dark green color, and then they have this whole series of Monet Rembrandt that have all these beautiful pink and dark burgundy kind of colors. 

But you do need to remember what I've told you about the variegation. The more variegation you have, the higher the light you need for it to successfully maintain that color pattern. So, get it in a nice, bright location. That doesn't mean that it needs full sun. These interior plants that we're talking about today, and probably almost everything you would grow in your house, are understory plants. That means they grow in very dense shade in the tropical rainforest or in a heavily forested area. But that light level is still probably higher than what you have in your house. So, but they like bright light but not necessarily full sun. They will, they will burn. You can get leaf burn on these from too much light. 

These also are susceptible to mealybugs, so it's an insect that, if you're going to be growing houseplants, you need to become familiar with because the mealybug is a nasty one to deal with. Snake plant, sanseviria. Sanseveria is a fun plant to grow because it is the most tolerant plant of any I know. If you need a strong vertical element in your interior, there is nothing more vertical than a snake plant. And they get very tall. An interesting fact about them, though, is that they are, if they are in a happy place where they're really growing, I have seen them break pots. I have seen them break concrete pots because they divide from the bottom and spread out, and they are incredibly strong. The real problem with these, though, is again, people like to love them too much. And if you overwater this plant, the whole bottom will rot. The top will stay standing upright, maybe for months. 

And you might not even realize that the bottom is rotted until you smell something one day. And you go, ew, what? Something has died in my house! Or, is that a bad potato? It's a horrible, horrible smell, and you'll sniff around until you figure out that it's in this pot. You touch the plant and the whole thing will fall over, and you'll realize that the entire crown and root system is just a big, mushy mess. So, the top is so resilient, though, and so sturdy and so waxy, that it actually will remain standing with no viable root system at all for months, it can stand like that. You can also take cuttings off of these, though, it's also a fun plant to work with with children 'cause you can take little blocky cuttings off of them and root them really easily. So, make sure you don't water it too much, make sure that you have it in a really strong pot, and that you keep an eye on it to make sure that it's not being overwatered, and also that it's not breaking the pot.

Dracaena is another really good plant for low light conditions, and you'll find that dracaenas come in many, there are many species and cultivars of dracaenas, from the corn plant to the red margin dracaena to this one happens to be a Janet Craig dracaena, which is incredibly tolerant of low light. 

This is the plant that office buildings choose to put in the stairwells, like at the bottom of the stairs where they want to block off a view of something and there's no light in there at all. This is the plant they'll put in here because a dracaena, a Janet Craig dracaena, can live for months and months, as long as you don't water it, it will live with very low light for quite a long time, but it will not grow. So if you want it to grow and thrive, you need to give it a little bit more light than that. But it can actually tolerate very, very low light levels. Whenever you're growing plants in really low light, though, you need to be very conscious of how much you're watering them. So, water is critical for their survival, but too much water is deadly. I mean, deadly. It's the number one reason that houseplants die, whether it's in an office building or in anybody's home, overwatering, there is just no going back from overwatering once that rot sets in. So make sure that you are watching the water level on that very carefully. Mealybug. 

Mealybug. It's like my least favorite insect and the plants that grow really well in low light, that's the number one insect that bothers them. The figs, ficus species. And there are a lot more figs out there to grow in your home other than just ficus benjamina, but ficus benjamina's a great one to grow. In this picture, I have a ficus alii, a ficus benjamana, benjamina, and then a variegated one down here that's a lot smaller. That's another fact about those variegated plants: because they have less chlorophyll, they often grow much more slowly. So, in some cases, they tend to be more expensive because they do grow more slowly, but you need to remember that, when bringing them in your house, they need higher light levels, and they will not grow as rapidly as a plant that doesn't have variegation. The biggest problem that I hear from most gardeners about growing figs in their house is the leaf drop. And I'm sure if I did a survey of all of you, and you've all grown these ficus, you've gotten rid of them because they are just such a big mess because they're always dropping their leaves. Well, the secret to that is to find their happy place in your home and do not ever move them for any reason. 

I have a very large ficus in my upstairs little loft area that I move every year, because I put a Christmas tree there. Every year, it completely defoliates. 
(laughs)
 So I don't follow my own advice, so please do as I say and not as I do. If you can find a happy place for them, they will maintain their foliage. They will have some normal leaf drop because they are a tree. Trees lose their leaves. No tree keeps its leaves forever, you know they do cycle through and they'll get new leaves. But always watch for the new growth coming out. This is a plant that can put out new growth any time of year, so if you want to maintain it, and maintain that level of growth, you need to make sure that you're providing it with adequate moisture and fertilizer so that it can continue to grow. 

And if it does drop all of its leaves, don't do like a lot of people do and throw it away because it may have a lot of life left in it. And it can refoliate fairly quickly under the right light and water regime, it'll come right back. So, be careful. The biggest insect problem we have with the ficus tends to be scale, and scale are sneaky on ficus because they get on the bark, on the branches, on the twigs, primarily. They will get on the midrib of the leaf, on the underside of the leaf, and that's usually when people figure out that they've got an insect problem, when they see them on the leaves. But if they're on the bark, you can't even see them. They just look like part of the bark. What you might notice, though, are shiny leaves. Very shiny leaves or a sticky floor, or anything that's underneath that tree getting shiny and sticky, because scale is a sucking insect and it sucks the sap out of your ficus and then it excretes honeydew all underneath the tree. And so if you're seeing shiny leaves or sticky stuff, there's a good chance that you've got scale on your ficus. 

Here's another picture of the alii fig. You'll notice that it has much, much longer foliage. This particular cultivar of ficus is much less likely to drop its foliage. It's a little bit heartier than the benjamina. And then as a comparison, this is ficus elastica, which is the rubber tree. This is the alii, this is the variegata, and this is the benjamina where you can see that the variegation. It's interesting that I chose a small leaf, they're usually about the same size. But I just wanted to show you the difference in the color on that one. But lots of different leaf shapes. There's also a ficus that's a ground cover. 

And it's used extensively in office buildings when they have large internal planters where they have other bromeliads or different trees or palms growing. They'll use ficus as a groundcover. And in the South, that's used outside as a groundcover. They use that more than they would use, for example, vinca. So the ficus is a really nice little delicate little hanging plant, as well.

Orchids. A lot of times people are afraid to grow orchids, and I have killed a few myself.

I've also kept many growing for years and years, I've given them as gifts. It's a wonderful gift plant. But it does tend to frighten people because they think it's so exotic. 

And it is a very different style of plant. But if you stick with the phalaenopsis, and that's probably the easiest orchid to grow, and it's the one that's most commonly available, and because of that, it's also the one that's least expensive. So this is a good one to start with and to practice on. The reason that I like orchids, you can get them in almost any color. Once they are in bloom, they typically will be in bloom for at least three months. So they're in bloom for a very long time, so if you're one of those people that needs some winter flowers, an orchid is an excellent option for you because they will hold their blooms for a very, very long time. When you purchase an orchid, make sure you're purchasing one where the buds are somewhat closed so that you have, you can gain the benefit of those flowers for a longer period of time. There are a lot of different ones. Typically, we grow them in a pot that's got some extra drainage holes on the side. They're planted in a fir bark kind of mixture, they're not planted in soil. 

And the reason for that is they do not like to be in soil, they don't like a lot of water because this kind of orchid in its natural environment would grow in a tree. And so they don't need all of that soil. But because of that, you have to be a little bit more careful about how you water and fertilize them. So, typically with orchids, you know, we will fertlize every time you water. But you might only be watering every ten days to two weeks. And you're doing a very, very dilute amount of fertilizer. But that way, they get the right amount of moisture, they're getting a little bit of extra fertility with every watering. And this is one of those cases where it's important to buy orchid fertilizer because it's formulated very differently than some of the other houseplant fertilizers are.

The peace lily is probably the most commonly grown flowering plant, and this is the plant that I get a lot of calls with because it is the most popular plant to give after someone has passed away. It's a very common florist plant to give, and when they come from the florist, they are big and shiny and beautiful and they're in full bloom and they are just gorgeous and people really want to care for them because it's like a memorial to their loved one. 

And they want to care for them, but they realize when they get it in their house now it's wilting, now it's turning brown on the tips of the leaves and the flowers have all died back and it's not flowering anymore, and you know, this is what, this is what they end up looking like. You know, you've got some yellowing on the margins, the leaves are all over the place, different sizes, you've got the browning on the tips and there are no flowers to be seen. What you really want is beautiful, bright green new growth. You want to be able to have, you know, new flowers coming up continuously, and yes, there are some tricks to doing that. I think everybody can grow peace lily in their house. They do not need a huge amount of light. I grow them on my kitchen counter, which is a good eight feet away from the nearest window. And they grow and they bloom and they do, they do great. But they're needy plants. They're very needy plants. 

And if you've ever heard anyone give a talk on houseplants where they say it's winter, it's fall, you should stop fertilizing your plants and you know, let them go kind of dormant because they need to do that. That's crazy. It's not true. These plants are still growing. And if you want them to flower, they need to be watered and fertilized on a regular basis. In addition, plants that flower on the interior when you've got them potted in a really tiny little pot and very limited soil mass, they actually need a lot of fertilizer. But they need a fertilizer that is formulated for a flowering plant. They need a little bit of extra magnesium. They need a little extra some of the minor elements. So get a complete fertilizer that's formulated for a flowering plant, and use that. 

One of the things that you can do just to try, if you've got one of these plants that has not been blooming, and you're using just a regular houseplant fertilizer: supplement that houseplant fertilizer with about a half a teaspoon of magnesium sulfate per half gallon of water. So a teaspoon per gallon of water, and use that with your fertilizer when you're fertilizing your houseplants that flower. And you'll find that that little bit of magnesium goes a long way to help these plants regain their health and their ability to set flowers. So make sure that you've got a really nice, rich soil mixture. You're using a complete fertilizer, and you're watering them on a regular basis. You really don't want these plants to wilt. Hibiscus is another common plant that I see people using as houseplants. Of course, in the South, this is an exterior plant and you want to, you know, you have them all over the place. But the tropical hibiscus, the hibiscus rosa-sinensis, is a great interior plant. And if you have those outside on your patio or your deck right now, it is one of the plants that you can bring in successfully and you can have flowers all the way through Christmas if you take care of it properly. 

But you need to remember that this is also a needy plant. It is, it's gonna be putting out new growth over the winter because it's going to replace those sun leaves with shade leaves, so you're gonna get a whole new crop of leaves. And you're supporting flowers and bud development, so it needs fertilizer and it needs to be watered on a regular basis. This plant doesn't like to wilt, and even though it's in your house in a lower light situation, those first six to eight weeks after you bring it inside, it's going to still think it's outside and it needs to be watered and fertilized on a regular basis in order to maintain that growth. It's a plant that will do much better if you can put it in a really bright window. It can handle full sun, it can handle and southern or a western exposure, but if the only light you have is coming in through an east window, it probably is gonna be okay there too, as long as you don't expect it to look the same as it did when it was outside. Once it warms up again in the spring, you can take it back outside and it'll make all new leaves again and set new flower buds. But right now, if you're bringing those plants inside, you may notice that they are covered in flower buds. So this is a really good time to support that growth and have those flowers in your house.

Citrus is another fun plant to grow, and I've talked about growing citrus a lot with a number of different groups and I have people calling me from all over the state to ask me about growing citrus in their houses. 

So, it's become quite popular, and you'll find that in most of your local greenhouse nurseries, you know, they're going to be selling different kinds of citrus. It might be a kumquat, it might be a little mandarin orange or a Meyer's lemon. This one happens to be a eureka lemon. You might have all different types of things that you can grow in your house. And yes, it's possible to get lemons. This lemon tree is in my house, and it doesn't look like that right now 'cause it's outside, but I had at one point 52 lemons.

I didn't know what to do with so many lemons. It was amazing. I was giving them away to my neighbors and friends and they all said, where are you getting? They're off of my tree, you know, it was amazing to have so many lemons and so they can be grown in Wisconsin. 

You do need a higher light level to grow things like citrus in the house, but it is possible and you can grow fruit in your house. And impress all of your friends and neighbors and family because you'll have these great things. So the fun thing about the citrus is that citrus are very weird in their flowering and fruiting habit. So, throughout the entire year, you can have flower and fruit development. So that means throughout the entire year, you could potentially have fruit ripen, ripening on the tree, and flowers at the same time. And so, and that's very common. It's very typical. The flowers on the lemon are very fragrant. So much so that if you have a problem with that, this might not be the plant for you. Because when they're flowering, it's almost like having a gardenia in the house. 

You know, it has that really heavy, sweet fragrance. And so, I like it. The leaves themselves have a fragrance also, though. So, it's, you know, it's all the way around a really fun plant. It can be a little bit messy, and they do get quite large. Because this plant is always growing and producing new leaves and flowers and fruit, it's another one that needs regular water and fertilizer to keep that growth going. So, yellow leaves, very common. That could be an indication that it went dry, it could be an indication that you overwatered it, or it could be a low light level. So you have to play with it and make sure that you've got it in the right place, and then give it as much light as possible and then keep an eye out for scale, mealybug, and spider mite. This is the messy problem with the citrus. 

Citrus are very attractive to a number of different insects. And because it's a fruiting plant, there are a lot of insecticides that you really don't want to use on your lemon if you're planning on eating those lemons. So you need to be very careful about keeping it clean and making sure that you're watching for those insects. Herb pots. This time of year, there are some herbs that I will bring into the house. There are other herbs that I will either purchase at a local garden center or start from seeds so that I can have fresh herbs in my house. Herbs do require high light. If you don't have an incredibly sunny window to grow herbs, you might want to think about getting a bank of fluorescent lights or some sort of plant light system so that you can provide them with the the amount of light that they need to really grow in a healthy manner. So they like bright, you know, they can grow in full sun and you're not gonna have full sun in your house, so try to supplement if possible. They do like an organic and very moist root system, so you need a really nice soil mix that you're using. 

They tend to be messy, so if you're bringing in rosemary, marjoram, thyme, oregano, any of those kinds of plants, mint, they, yes, you can keep them growing throughout the winter and you can harvest them and use them in your cooking or in beverages, but just understand that they are going to be dropping leaves. And the smaller the leaf and the more there are, the messier it is. So if you're bringing in thyme, for example, it actually will grow very nicely if you've got a bright window. But when those little thyme leaves drop all over the place, it's very messy. So sweep 'em up and keep it nice and clean. Dish gardens. Dish gardens are fun. I've done a lot of different types of dish gardens with my kids. This is my son's little gnome garden. And it counts as a dish garden because it has grass growing in it, it's not just the little gnomes. 

But these are a fun way to make winter go a little bit faster, and it's super easy to do if you've got kids or grandkids and you want to do this in your house. Those grasses, whether it's wheatgrass or annual rye, they grow so quickly, and they don't need a huge amount of light, and it's just a temporary growth kind of thing. But they are really fun to do with kids and you get real plants growing nicely. Sometimes we have these types of gift baskets or dish gardens that may have been given to you as a gift, and those are wonderful. I actually enjoy getting those, and I've had people get them as gifts and then they give them to me because they don't know how to take care of them. And that can be part of a problem in taking care of this sort of thing because everyone of these plants has a different requirement for living. So sometimes it's better if you take these gift baskets apart and look at the individual plants and make sure that you know what you have, how they're planted, and try to do a good job of taking care of each one of them separately, because they're not all going to need to be watered at the same time. And sometimes, they don't all need the same amount of light. This polka dot plant is not going to need as much light, I mean, is going to need a lot more light than this cyclamen. And the ivy, eh, maybe, maybe not. 

I mean, there are, and the orchid, definitely a different thing, different thing altogether. So try to look at what you have individually, and hopefully they're not all potted together into one dish. Most of the time, if you start digging around, you'll find out that they're actually in separate little pots. And that makes it a little bit easier. But know what you're dealing with, and look at each one individually so that you take the best care of those and keep them going for a long time.

So, steps in bringing plants home. So you've made your selections, you've gone to your grocery store and you're bringing home something. The first thing is to make sure that the plant you've selected fits your space. It's the right size, it's the look that you want, and that you have the right location for it. You can remember those little rules of thumb: the darker the foliage, the less light it requires; the more variegation, or if it's a true flowering plant, it may need more light, a little bit higher light level. 

So make sure that you've got a good place for it. Check carefully for insects or other problems, and I can't emphasize this enough. Do not bring home plants with mealybug or scale or spider mites. Just don't do it. I've had people call me and say, well, I know this plant had mealybug, but the greenhouse grower assured me that they've treated it and it's clean. No. Don't, just don't. Because their eggs are gonna be down in the whorls of the leaves, you're gonna have things in the soil. Mealybug is very, very persistent and once you have it, it is very difficult to get rid of. So make sure you're inspecting those plants very carefully before you bring them home. 

If you're buying plants now, not a big deal, but if you're buying plants anytime over the winter, including those holiday kind of plants like poinsettias, they need to be wrapped. And sometimes the plastic wrap, those sleeves that they put them in, doesn't help because the plastic transmits the cold very quickly. So if they're in a plastic sleeve, put them in a paper sack so that they are not directly exposed to the outside air. When we get down into those temperatures where it's, you know, below twenty degrees, plants can get chilled very, very quickly. So make that the last purchase of the day, do not leave those plants in your car. Don't accept delivery of a poinsettia that they dropped off at your front porch at nine o'clock in the morning and you haven't come home till six o'clock at night. That plant is not gonna make it. They just need to protected from that cold weather. You need to make sure that you unwrap them immediately. So if you're purchasing gift plants, for example, for someone else, you want to make sure that they're wrapped, if you're not gonna give it to them right away, go ahead and unwrap it until you're ready to give it to them. 

Because plants will build up ethylene gas when they are in an enclosed space, especially with that plastic sleeve. And ethylene, do we know what ethylene does? It's the ripening hormone. It's also the abcision hormone, and it will cause the leaves to drop. And there's nothing better than getting a gift plant, and "Oh, this is so beautiful," and taking it out of the wrapper and having all the leaves fall off of it. So, make sure that you're taking care of those gift plants, too. The first thing I do is clean my plants. Sometimes I prune them if they're too overgrown or too big. And then water carefully and thoroughly. So when plants come in from Florida, and most of our tropical plants, that's where they're coming from even in the middle of winter, they're coming from Florida. 

They've been on a truck for a good three days, they've been wrapped tightly and boxed and bagged and they are, you know, gonna be really tight in there. They have to be unwrapped right away so that they can start that whole acclimation process and get rid of any ethylene gas that might have been built up in there. Washing the plants is really important, and I do this on a regular basis with some of my plants, not just when I bring a new plant home. And it's as easy as putting it in a sink, sometimes it's as easy as putting it in the sink, and using lukewarm water, you don't want too cold, you don't want too hot. And the goal for this is if there are any little critters trying to make a home on that plant, water is a big discourager. Water is the cure for spider mites, it's not the cure for mealybug and scale, but it, but this does help to deter any insects from making a home on your new plant. If you have really big plants, and you can put 'em in a bathtub or a shower stall, you can do that, it helps to decrease any pests that might be making a home but it also can help increase light interception. So, here, and trying to wipe off all of the individual leaves of a ficus plant is probably not gonna happen. That's, unless you're really, you know, very obsessive about cleaning, you know, trying to clean every leaf. But this has enough dust on it that I could write "dust me" on the leaf. 

And so, if you're not cleaning your plants, it's a great place for insects to make a home, but it also can reduce your light interception by as much as 25 percent. So if you're bringing a plant from Florida into your home, in the winter, and you know that your light levels in your house are way low, nothing compared to even Florida in the shade, and you're also letting dust accumulate on your plants, you're not helping the situation, you know. You need to give them as much advantage as possible, so try to keep them clean. I've found that sometimes with dusters, you can get a lot of dust off these little leaves just using some of those electrostatic kind of dusters. But if you can put it into the bathtub or a shower stall and give it a bath, even once a year, it makes a huge difference in the growth of the plant. If it's a big-leafed plant, you might just use a soft cotton cloth and make sure that you're wiping the plant gently, you don't need any cleaning solution. You do not need any oils, silicone, no spray, no nothing. Plants make their own wax, they don't need anything else to help them shine. They just need you to get rid of the dirt, and they will shine. So, a little bit of a cotton cloth wiping will make them nice and shiny. 

When it comes time to water your plants, every plant is different. And you may think that every Saturday morning, you have to go around your house and water all of your plants. That may work for some of them, but for some of them it's not going to work. For hibiscus, that plant may already be wilted by Thursday morning. For other plants, watering once a week, every week, forever, is going to be the death of them. So you need to look at each plant individually. The best way to do it is to stick your finger down in the soil and see if it's wet. That's a great way to do it because your finger is pretty sensitive. There are moisture meters, and I have tried probably six or seven different ones, and none of them really work very well. So, I've spent a lot of money trying to find things that will give a better indication of what the moisture level is, but it doesn't work. 

Once you get into a routine with a certain plant, you should be able to figure out when it's dry and when it needs to be watered. Hopefully you're doing that before it wilts. So some things you can put on a regular schedule. With smaller pots, you might actually be able to even just lift the pot and kinda get an estimate about whether or not it needs to be watered. So, watering will change depending on the humidity level in your house, the light level that the plant is receiving, the leaves on the plant, how many leaves it has, and what kind of soil mix you're in. In addition to the type of pot it's in. If it's in a glazed, ceramic pot, it's going to hold moisture better than if it's in a terra cotta pot. If it's in a plastic pot, same thing. It's gonna hold moisture a lot better than it would in a terra cotta. But some things do better in terra cotta pots. 

Some things you don't want to hold moisture. So you consider what kind of pot you're putting things in, too, and that will help you with deciding when and how much to water. So, please water before this happens. This is one of the biggest problems with spathiphyllum, or the peace lily, is that people tell me, I love this plant because it tells me when it needs to be watered. Well, but the time it has told you that it needs to be watered, it really needed to be watered about five or six days ago. So, uniform moisture for a lot of these tropical plants is what we shoot for. We don't shoot for complete, dry, wilting, and then overwatering, and then dry, that is what causes those lovely little brown tips and irregular growth and lack of flowering. Watering is very important, so try to get a handle on it for each one of the plants that you have. So make sure that you're watering before the plant shows signs that it is wilting.

So, same thing as washing the plant, and this works really well for small plants. 

The best way is to take it out of whatever, if it's in a decorative container or sleeve or a tray, take it out of that, put it in the sink. Water thoroughly until the water drains through the bottom. When it's through draining, pick it up, take it back to where it lives and make it happy again. Absolute best way to water. Is that practical for all plants? No. So do the best you can, but basically what you want to accomplish with all of your plants is when it is time to water that plant, no matter where it is, what size pot it's in, you need to water until the water drains through the bottom of the pot. Because the majority of the roots are in the bottom of the pot. So you want it to drain freely, you do not want your plants sitting in water. But you do want water to get to the bottom, so it's a little tricky sometimes to figure out when that magical amount of water has been reached. 

When you have plants sitting in water, for some thing that are, for example, African violets that you might water from the bottom, generally, those, that water will be taken up fairly quickly. And within 20 or 30 minutes all that water should be gone. If you have water sitting in your pot, in the bottom of your pot for more than about two hours, you can have rot organisms start working on your root systems. That quickly. So, yes, water all the way to the bottom. Do not let them sit in water.

So, another thing that affects how much we water is how much light the plants are getting. So you want to make sure that you have placed your plants correctly in your houses and that they're really happy, and so I'm gonna give you a couple of tips on how you can figure that out in your plant based on your windows and some other indicators. So, in general, if you have east-facing windows, you're talking about pretty cool, medium levels of light. East-facing windows are great for for a lot of different plants, even flowering plants like spathiphyllum do fabulously in east-facing windows. 

West. West is hot. West windows tend to be super hot and very bright light. You can get burn, scorch, and excessive drying with some plants in a west window. So choose the plants that can tolerate that really high light to put near those windows. South, same. Especially in the winter. One of the reason that I think my lemons, my citrus, my hibiscus do so well is that I have them on the south side of my house on a window that goes from floor to ceiling. And so I've got a huge expanse of window and it's a southern exposure and so they get, they get probably as much light as they possibly could get in a house over the winter in Wisconsin. North window is going to be your lowest level of light for most of the year. 

It's a very cool light, it's considered very low levels. However, African violets will grow beautifully on a north windowsill. That is like the perfect quality and quantity of light for African violets. So, there are a lot of factors that can affect how much light you're getting to your plants. One is the kind of window you have. They have these fabulous new windows that have all these great filters in them that filter out all of the light that your plants would love to have, and we choose those kinds of windows because they reduce fading of our furniture and our floors and all of that, but it's not really the best thing for your plants. Plants, of course, would prefer a lot more light than that. If you've got screens on your windows, window treatments, those will definitely affect how much light is coming through. The size of your window, and you might not take that into consideration if you think I've got north window, it's gonna be really low light and I've got all these other things going on. But if it's a super big window, you have a lot more quantity of light coming in. 

It may be a lower quality of light, a cooler light, but you have more expanse of open window. So sometimes the size of the window can affect it a lot. If you've got an overhang on your house, a porch, something along those lines, trees, and then, of course, the length of day is definitely going to affect how much light you have coming in to your house. So, when we get into these, you know, happy fall, but we're going into the short, short days of the year, that will definitely affect, you know, how well your plants will do. The best way, if you have access to it, is a light meter to really determine how much light you have. And light meters are great because we as people, we have our eyes that see even in the dimmest of situations, and we go into a room and we think oh, this is really bright, I can see, I can read, it's great. Your plant sees things very, very differently. So, if you go outside on a fall day, so this is morning, fall, no leaves on the trees, full sun is 2,000. The reading on this would be 2,000. And this is a photosynthetic unit. 

So full sun is 2,000. I am outside, no leaves, it is full sun. Fall, though. And the reading is just a little over 1,000. So, in the fall, we've already reduced our maximum light by half. Outside. So, what do you think it's gonna be like inside? I have this great southern exposure, with windows that go all the way to the ceiling and it's a vaulted ceiling so we've got huge amount of light. I've got western sliding doors on this side, huge amount of light, right? Huge. 

I was just outside, it was a little over 1,000. 140. So, no matter how bright you think your house is, it is not even close to the level of shade in your yard. So this is an important thing to think about when you are thinknig about taking plants outside and bringing them back in, we are talking about a huge difference in light levels, huge. But when we're also talking about bringing new plants into our homes and trying to make them happy and grow and thrive and flower for us, we need to keep this in mind. That it's a tough road for some of these plants and so we have to help them along the way. So, indications that you don't have enough light. You're not getting any new growth because plants should be growing. Your leaves are turning yellow, they're dropping. You've lost variegation, your soil is staying too wet. 

Too much light. Sometimes it's kind of the same way. You might see growth, but it might look different. You might get paleness or whiteness with the foliage. Leaf drop, scorched leaves. Very common in the spring when people get really excited and really want to put their plants outside or they've got new bedding plants and they put them out in the full sun and then they turn completey white. It's fabulous when that happens. Or your soil is staying dry all the time. If you're having to water a plant every day, maybe it's getting too much light. Not usually a problem inside. 

If it's perfect light, the plant kind of maintains a steady amount of growth. You've got nice, dark green leaves, or you're maintaining the variegation. Very few leaves are dropping. Some leaf drop is totally normal. And you're watering on kind of a regular basis. And everything is really copacetic. It's all in balance, it's all good. Then you know it's all perfect. And sometimes it takes a while to reach that level of perfection with plants. So when you bring your plants home and you're going to be putting 'em in your house, you've picked the perfect place for them, you know that to water properly, you need to let the water run through the bottom, you don't want that water running all over your floor or your furniture, so make sure that you've got them properly contained. 

They make these really great saucers with wheels on them, which, for my large plants, I love because I can move them around easily and sweep under them and do all of that. It's very easy to tell when I've watered enough, you know, you don't want to overflow the tray, but just water till you see some water coming out of the bottom and you're good to go. The other way is to use what's called a double-potting method, where the grow container is inside here and the grow container is just a regular black nursery pot, and it sits on floral foam. Just the water-based floral foam that soaks up water. And so this part is plastic and completely waterproof. The plant is sitting on the foam, I water it, the water runs into the foam and gets soaked up and no water gets on my carpet and it's fabulous and it's a great way to go. And then you can put your plants in any kind of decorative container you want, as long as it's waterproof. What about insects? Chemicals. How many of you like to use chemicals in your house? 

Most people don't want chemicals in their house, they don't want to use insecticides. Let's go back to the beginning where I said make sure you're not bringing those insects into your house to start with. But even if you're the very most careful person in the world and you've done your due diligence and you've inspected and you've made sure that it's all clean and ready to go, sometimes you may still bring stuff in and so you might have to take a trip to your local garden center to figure out what it is. Here's the lovely mealybug. And it's just a fabulous little sticky, yucky insect that makes white goo to protect itself. Because of that, it's a scale-type insect that covers itself with this white, sticky mess. It's very, very protected from any kind of spray insecticide. When you get to the point where you've got mealybug all down in the whorls of your leaves and you've got an infestation like this, in some cases, it truly is better to get rid of the plant. And start over. If you want to battle it, there are some systemic insecticides that you can use that you can put into the pot that will be taken up and will slowly kill them. 

You can combine it with cleaning, spraying with insecticidal soap or another type of spray insecticide. Whenever you use any kind of product, though, on an interior plant, it is the law that it be labeled "for interior use." So you need to choose your product very carefully, read the label carefully, and make sure that you're applying it to the very letter of the label. Because that is how it will work the best and that's how it will be the safest. So you need to make sure that you're, you know, you're using those products correctly. Sometimes people with mealybug will take a soft, cotton cloth and dip it in rubbing alcohol and try to clean the mealybug. If you've only got a couple of mealybug, you can battle it that way for a while, but if you've got them like this, it's not good. And it's gonna be a battle. Scale is another insect that is, once you get it, it's a little bit more challenging to get rid of because of the same reasons. It's got this nice, protective layer. 

If you've got it to this extent, I wouldn't even try to cure that particular one. I would, that one would be gone, totally gone. If you've got it showing up on the undersides of your leaves and on the stems, there are some ways that you can battle it, especially if it's a plant like your citrus tree that you really want to protect. It requires extensive washing and spraying with insecticidal soap. And there are also some organic pyrethrins that can be used on citrus. But that, in the middle of winter, it's not always the easiest thing to do. So you have to balance it all out and see what will work best for you in your situation and to what extreme you want to go to in order to cure the, this particular problem. Spider mite, if you've gotten to this stage with your spider mites, where you have very little chlorophyll left in your leaves and you've got this beautiful, spidery netting all over your palms and your ivies, it is possible to salvage the plant, but again, it would have been better if you would have caught it you know, a couple of months ago. So if you suspect spider mites, the best thing to do for spider mites is to wash the plant on a regular basis. i have cured ivies of all types of spider mites simply by putting them in the sink, washing them with water once a week for about six weeks. 

And then it goes away. So they hate moisture, they hate humidity, they don't like it at all, and you can cure it. But if you've gotten to this point, it may not, it may not happen for you. So, always read the label. There are some wonderful new products out on the market that contain a lot of organic, plant-based oils. They smell good, they are totally safe to use on interior plants. And if you follow the label, they are completely okay to use on your house plants. However, they are sprays. So, just the logistics of spraying a houseplant in your house over the winter is sometimes very challenging. So use them if you have to, but it's really better if you can keep your plants clean and healthy and only go to these kind of products as a last resort. 

And finally, pruning. Don't be afraid to prune your plants, whether you have a new plant that has got way too much growth on it and you know that it's gonna be dropping leaves and branches before you make it through the winter in your house. Go ahead and prune it. Use your good pruning, pruning techniques and thin it out a little bit, make good cuts. When you're bringing plants in from the outside, like a hibiscus, and see, I'm so not afraid of pruning I let my children hack away at my hibiscus. They love to do this, they just, give me some pruners, I'll cut it off for you. I sometimes end up with a very small hibiscus, but that's okay 'cause it fits better in my house. Make sure, just like when you're bringing a plant, a new plant home that you inspect it very carefully for insects. You clean it, you can, outside it's easy to clean plants. Hose 'em down, use a lot of vigor, inspect them really well, make sure that you're flushing water through the bottom of the pot very well. 

Make sure you're not having little insects come out the bottom of the pot. Of course, you'd rather them come out than stay in, 'cause when you bring 'em in your house, and you water it that first time inside, they're gonna be all over your house. So, earwigs, pill bugs, they are fabulous to have crawling across your kitchen floor. So make sure that you're flushing these pots out and looking for these things before you bring them in the house. I had someone tell me they brought a little snake in one time, that would be exciting too. So let's not do that. If you need to, if you see signs of soft-bodied insects like whiteflies or aphids or something like that, you can do kind of a little preventative spray of insecticidal soap or another insecticide that is approved for interior plants. Do it outside before you bring the plant in. And that will take care of a lot of little hitchiking insects that might want to make a home in your house. And then, if necessary, if you've got critters and problems with the plant, you might want to consider repotting it with all new soil and a new container and everything. 

And don't be afraid, as you're growing your plants throughout the year in your house to prune them as they grow. Grooming is a necessary part of plant care, not only removing the brown leaves and the yellow leaves, but in the case of vining plants like this, don't let them get like this like I did. You need to cut them off, because when you cut them off at the base, they regenerate new growth and they will make a much more beautiful, healthy and happy plant. So don't be afraid of your plants. Take care of them well, and they will bring you a lot of joy throughout the winter and the entire year. Thank you very much for your attention tonight, I hope that you have some postiive ideas about how to bring plants into your own homes and how to take care of them better. But with that, if you would like, I'd be happy to answer any of your questions that you might have. Thank you. 
(applause)

- Welcome everybody to the September meeting of the