Check out all our blog posts on Indoor gardening.
Yes, you can keep lemongrass alive and growing inside your home through the coldest US winter. To grow lemongrass indoors, give it a large pot with drainage, at least 6 hours of direct sun or an LED grow light, temperatures above 60°F, and soil that stays lightly moist. With that setup, you can cut fresh … Read more >>
Hanging baskets make a porch feel finished. But if every evening out there turns into a swatting session, your plants might be part of the problem, though probably not in the way you think. The good news is that you can keep mosquitoes away from hanging plants without giving up your ferns, petunias, or trailing … Read more >>
When a ZZ plant starts falling over, the most common culprit is wet soil that has started to rot the rhizomes and stalk bases. A ZZ plant falls over most often because overwatering has softened its rhizomes, followed by too little light, a top-heavy clump in a small or light pot, and less often thirst, … Read more >>
ZZ plants are naturally slow, but low light, winter, crowded rhizomes and watering problems can stall them completely. Here is how to get new shoots.
You hang a gorgeous basket by the front door, and two weeks later a house finch is sitting on a tidy little nest right in the middle of your petunias. It’s sweet, but it’s also a problem when you need to water. If you want to keep birds out of hanging plants, the trick is … Read more >>
Houseplants don’t clean the air in a typical American home in any way you’d notice. Air purifying plants absorb tiny amounts of chemicals in sealed lab chambers, but in a real house, normal air leaking in and out does far more cleaning than any number of pots you’d want on your shelves. I still think … Read more >>
The main ZZ plant varieties are the classic green form, near-black ‘Raven’, compact ‘Zenzi’, dwarf ‘Zamicro’, round-leaved ‘Lucky Classic’, yellow-flushing ‘Chameleon’, and rare variegated forms. For most homes, I’d pick classic green or ‘Raven’ for a floor plant, and ‘Zenzi’ or ‘Zamicro’ for a desk or shelf, because all of them share the same tough, … Read more >>
Brown tips on areca palm leaves almost always mean the narrow leaflets are losing water faster than the roots can replace it, or that salts and fluoride are piling up at the very ends of the leaves. The fix is to find the specific cause (dry air, uneven watering, tap water minerals, too much fertilizer, … Read more >>
Areca palm leaves turning yellow almost always point to a watering problem, most often soggy soil, followed by light that’s too strong or too weak, a magnesium or potassium shortage, cold drafts, pests, or salty tap water. One old frond yellowing at the base of a cane is normal aging. Several fronds fading at once … Read more >>
Yellow ZZ leaves almost always mean too much water. Here is how to tell the cause, fix rotting rhizomes and decide whether to cut yellow leaves off.