Spider Plant - Exposed!

A few weeks ago I was trying to do some cleaning without disturbing my plant arrangements, and instead I ended up bumping my armoire hardcore sending one of my baby spider plants rocketing at the floor.  The pot spewed wet soil everywhere and the spider plant was left semi exposed on my rug. (Pretty glad I chose a black and brown rug for the room - no visible stains!).  I probably caused some damage to the plant with this rather violent act, but on the plus side I got the opportunity to examine the root growth.  I had no idea these spider plants had a tubular like root system.  Check it out!

Spider Plant Rescue!

I received the below spider plant from a coworker, who was worried he had killed the plant.  Looking at it, I imagine he received the plant many months ago, and just kept it in its plastic cup filled with water.  Perhaps this is a fine long term arrangement for some of the spider plants, but you can tell by looking at this one, it just needs some soil!

Oops, I just realized I didn't take any "before" photos!

Ok, well I ended up plunking it down into my little column cap planter.  I ripped a piece of it off and stuck that in my former baby orchid pot.

Below you can kind of get a sense of some of the decay that had been caused by such long submersion in water.  I think that some of the leaves were completely submerged, in addition to the roots, which caused the leaves to decay and contaminate the water and make the whole plant a garbly gook of a mess.

I will keep tracking the progress of these little ones, but I expect a full recovery!

Spider Plant "babies"

A couple weeks ago a coworker offered me the opportunity to pluck as many spider "babies" as I wanted from his office-dwelling mama spider.  Not wanting to be too greedy, I snatched up five!  After about 2 weeks semi-submerged in water, most of the babies started to show some distinct root growth.  I decided to just go ahead and pot them all in some fresh soil.

It's kind of hard to see on this surface but the image below is a close-up of some of this "significant" root growth I observed.

The baby below doesn't really have any noticeable root growth, but I'm sure it will root eventually and perhaps the moist soil will be a more appropriate environment to foster that kind of growth anyway.

Using the new standard procedure, I rinsed some river rock, laid some down in the cleaned out baby food jars and loaded up with a custom blend of soil.  I think I used some new and some "old" cactus blend soil (which contains sand) and some perlite, in a ratio of about 6 or 7 to 1.

And here they are all lined up in their new abodes!  Since there wasn't much of a root or base for these little rascals, they are kind of just sitting on top of the soil.  Hopefully that's good enough and they can nestle themselves in.  I figure "in nature" the little babies dangle off of the mama until they root down presumably in place.

I should note that these have been kept in the office, I brought them home only to pot them.  They are back at the office, which doesn't have any direct sunlight, and is actually quite dark other than the subtle desk lighting I have in place as well as some bleak overhead lighting.  I have been assured that these suckers are resilient even in the most doubtful interior environments... we'll see!

Flea Market Babes

At the Dublin Flea Market today, I stopped by the plant lady's stand to scope out her latest clippings.  I snatched up two varieties of snake plants (much more substantial than the one I got in April!) and a spider plant (finally!).

From the minimal research I have done, I believe the spider plant can thrive in one of my indirect or bright light locations (a few feet away from and east or west window).  I'm going to just water it a small amount every few days, like I do with most of my other plants.

This snake plant did not have much of a root system when I pulled it out of the styrofoam cup.  I wonder if she just broke it off of its prior stem a few days or weeks before bringing it to the flea market?  If so, that could explain why it took the other one so long to start showing signs of growth (it was spending all of its energy re-growing lost roots!).