How to Grow Your Indoor Plants Big Over the Winter

You know, you can actually keep your indoor plants or some of them growing throughout the winter. I know because it's happening all around me and there are a lot of plants that actually just don't want to stop growing, like philodendron, pothos, syngonium, lipstick plants, all sorts of vines, vines that have soft, like stems. Hoyas, like there's a lot of plants that grow throughout the winter and there's a way that you can encourage them to continue to grow by just doing a few basic things. It's really, really easy. I'm just gonna tell you what they are. Most of the plants that you're gonna see in this video, you can find on plantaruna.com, but here's the thing. You really should sign up for the email list because you're gonna get crazy discounts, okay? You're going to get emails with crazy discounts, so please do that. It'll benefit you, okay? It really will. You will definitely see new growth happening during the winter and you're thinking maybe it's a miracle, what's going on here? But you probably have placed your plants in the right spot to begin with and that's a really good sign. So like a plant, like a Monstera deliciosa, if it's placed in bright, indirect light and it gets warm air and the humidity is decent, probably going to grow. Anyway, so let's just talk about the light. So in the winter, it's usually darker. In the northeast, at least, the days are usually gray. Today's actually a beautiful day. It's sunny, but most of the time it's pretty gray and dismal where I live, so I'm gonna have to deal with the light situation. I tend to put my plants, especially my larger plants, closer to the window so they can maintain their size and their shape and also to help encourage them to grow throughout the winter. If you do not have a lot of light in your home, wherever you live, you might think about adding grow lights. Grow lights really do help during the winter because they just need light. Plants need light to live. All plants pretty much need light to live, so you might want to supplement them with LED lights. You could get bulbs. You could get panels. There's so many different types. I like LED because it's cost-effective and they don't get really hot. Putting your plants closer to the window is a very, very good idea because they're going to get a lot more light. It's not as intense as it is during the summer when you're concerned that direct light will burn the leaves of your plants. Winter light tends to not do that, and I know that because I put syngonium, I put calathea right up in the window, and they're completely fine, the ones that are doing well, at least. So you'll see on this syngonium, there's some beautiful new growth here that is just gonna keep happening because of the light it's receiving. I have quite a few plants that are not getting a lot of good light, but those plants are low-light tolerant, like my sansevieria, my snake plants, and my zee-zee plants, and even some other plants like pothos can handle it, but the more light they get, the better. They're gonna grow in the winter. Trust me. I hate when people say trust me, but believe me. Believe me, you. How much light do they need? This is the thing. As much as you can give them, I like to give them over six hours, and if you can't provide four hours of natural sunlight, definitely get a grow light if you're concerned about your plants, and if you want them to grow during the winter because it will help them. You'll be surprised. Grow lights do not supplement natural light in general. I mean, you have to get some serious lights and keep them on all the time, so they're just, for me, a supplemental light source when there's not enough. When there's not enough light. Oh, shoot, where's my earring? I flipped my earring out of my ear. The backing is still in. Okay, from the 80s, just letting you know, I have wore some big earrings, my heavy earrings, and that's why I have a slit ear, but it doesn't matter. Let me just have, oh, it doesn't matter. It's like a war wound for me, a battle wound. Okay, humidity. Humidity gets like zero. No, it just dries up in the winter unless you have a radiator system. Radiator systems are great because it uses water and it doesn't dry the air out as much as forced hot air, which is bad on your skin. It's bad for your plants. Not really bad. It just dries them out. You can tell my throat's dry because the heat was on. That's what happens. My skin is dry because the heat is on, and that same thing happens to your plants. Increasing the humidity really does help your plants, and you can do it in a few ways. The best way is to get a humidifier. Just crank that baby up, put it around your plants. Don't put the humidity, like the mist directly on your plants because they could develop bacteria and fungus and stuff like that, so don't do that. I'm cleaning up my plant while I'm talking, but put it in an area that it will kind of find the plants, the plant's foliage, and if you don't want to use a humidifier, you can fill up a tray with pebbles and water, and the evaporation from the water will get on the plants. It's a little less effective than a humidifier, and then group your plants together, and that is yet another tip about growing plants in the winter. Try to create a microclimate, a microenvironment for your plants, and you can do this in a number of ways. You can get a little greenhouse, a portable greenhouse, and put all your tropical plants that really like high humidity together in it, and if you have too many plants to do that with, you can take a portion of a room, a portion of a space, and kind of section it off so the plants are in tight, so they're getting the humidity from each other, and you can also control the temperature a little bit easier when you have your plants centralized. When they're together, they're not scattered all over the place because the temperature is a really, really important thing as well for getting your plants to grow during the winter months. I do want to say when you do group your plants together, there's a good chance that you could spread bugs. You can spread diseases, so keep that in check by maybe preventatively spraying neem oil solution, a diluted solution, onto the plants like every couple of weeks just to keep any critters away. That would be great, or to stop it from spreading because it can happen, and when you are grouping your plants together or you're putting them in their own special room, I would suggest adding a fan so you have air circulation because that also helps deter pests like spider mites and aphids. I don't really get aphids here. I get mealybugs. Mealybugs are my nemesis. I get them, but air circulation does help in controlling pest populations from increasing, okay? Temperature, the temperature is big, big, a big deal. Did I mention that in the beginning? I said light and humidity. Well, temperature is also a big deal. If it's cold, your plants are not gonna grow. Your plants aren't just gonna, they're gonna like, why did I just spit? But I didn't spit. I just made this. They're not gonna grow because they're thinking, I need to actually go dormant because it's freaking cold out and I don't know what to do, so I'm not gonna do anything. When your temperatures are higher, and I'm gonna say, I'm gonna reach out there and say 70 degrees plus, I notice, I notice more growth. Some parts of my house are warm. I don't know why whoever put this heating system in didn't do the best job because there are cold rooms and there's warm rooms, unless it's just because the insulation. I don't know. The point is every house has cooler areas and warmer areas. Stick your plants in an area that's warmer, like this whale fin sansevieria. I just noticed it's in the kitchen, and the kitchen gets warm because we're using it all the time, and there's a couple of heat vents there, and there's always something cooking. This pretty thing here, this pretty thing here has three leaves coming out of it. This little joy, bundle of joy is now gonna have a family because it's, look at it, and it's winter. This happens. I'm saying it happens. Every little clip I was showing you in the beginning of this video, and maybe during the video, this is all now. This is happening now, so it's pretty impressive that these plants are growing, and I'm gonna tell you why. I'm gonna tell you why they're growing because they don't know. We literally plucked them, plucked them. We bought them and put them in our houses, and we are controlling the environment in our house. We don't change the environment in our house very drastically during the year, all throughout the year because we like to be comfortable. We like to sleep at a certain temperature. I like to sleep at 66. I like it. I like it cool. So that's the thing. That's what we do, and then we put the air conditioner on in the summer if we do, or we open the windows. They don't know the difference, okay? So it's really light temperature and humidity that are the main factors, but you're gonna get growth if you follow these steps. Now I'm going all over the place and not really following the steps in the video. I'm gonna go back to the steps. 70 degrees plus. If you don't wanna heat your entire house or apartment or room at 70 because it might be too hot for you, put them in that little microclimate. Make a microclimate, and you can put heat mats under the plants, and that'll warm the soil, and warm soil is a good thing to promote growth. It'll promote root growth and foliage growth, and they'll think that summer is never gonna end, and that's what you want your plants to think, like fool them that it's always gonna be summertime. So that's it. So keep the temperatures high. Some plants, like some cactus and some senecios, they do like a little coolness in their life during the winter. They like a little bit cooler temperatures, so maybe do a little research before you stick all your plants in a constant temperature. How many days a year? 365 days a year. I actually had to think about that. You should water your plants regularly throughout the year. Sometimes you wanna back off a little bit during the winter because if it's colder, if you're keeping your plants colder and you're not really pushing them to grow, you'll wanna back off on the watering. I like to water my plants when they're pretty dry. As you can probably tell, there's a bunch of plants back there that are pretty dry that I have to fix. I have to fix them. So just treat them normally. So if you notice, like you would all year round, water when the soil is dry. Drain the excess soil, water from the pots. If you're using a cover pot, dump out the extra water and keep doing that. Here's a little trick. You can use lukewarm water because that might think, make them think it's somewhere in the tropics and it never gets that cold and you won't shock them. So that might be helpful. You don't have to, but just don't use really, really cold water. Don't use ice cubes. Don't use things like that. Just let the water be air temperature, which should be 70 degrees if you're trying to get your plants to push out some beautiful new growth. You gotta clean. You've got to clean the leaves of your plants, which I've been doing lately, because that's gonna help them get that extra light that you're providing. It's gonna keep the dust mites away, dust mites. It's gonna keep the bugs away and it's gonna allow them to be able to open up their pores and do transpiration, respiration, perspiration, whatever the heck they do. It's gonna help them. So just clean your leaves, especially of your bigger plants, like this Bird of Paradise. I've been dusting it and it's been helping it. And some are really growing, which is pretty amazing. I have one there that's growing. It's almost touching the ceiling. So I'm excited about that. Clean, a clean plant is a happy plant. This is something I mention often is you should not really be fertilizing most of your plants during the winter time. But since this is a little bit different and we're trying to encourage some of our plants to grow during the winter, you might want to fertilize them. Plants that are actively growing like Pothos and Philodendron and my freaking Monstera. I don't know why I said freaking Monstera because it's so pretty and that new growth is so pretty. I'm gonna give it a little bit of fertilizer because I'm feeling like it might need it. Don't, not too much, just like a totally diluted solution, a quarter of the recommended strength that is on the label of your fertilizers. Organic fertilizers are the best I find because they're just a little less intrusive. They're a little less shocking, especially during the winter. So yeah, totally fertilize your plants if you see active growth, maybe like once a month, just to give them a little bit of help because I feel like it's a long winter sometimes and they're hungry and they need a little tiny bit of nutrition. Then you can hit them a little bit harder in the spring. But yes, fertilize your actively growing plants in the winter to help them grow a little bit. That's really it. It's, like I said, it was super simple. You can just do what you normally do, but you kind of do it in a little bit of a micro environment. You take what you've got that you want to grow and you put them together, you provide more light, you provide higher temperatures, you provide higher humidity, and then you give them a little bit of food, give them enough water to grow. I think you're gonna see them grow beautifully and maybe a little bit faster and a little bit healthier if you provide them with those care needs, requirements, whatever you want to call them. It's gonna make them grow faster and they're gonna be really happy and you're gonna be very, very thrilled in the spring when you've got these buff looking plants and other people don't. And you're gonna say, hmm, I listened. I mean, plants just kind of do it themselves and we just help them along a little bit or a lot, depending on what kind of plant it is. Here I go, I'm gonna ramble about plants again, but they do all the hard work and we do the busy work, just cleaning them and taking care of them and rotating them. Please rotate them because I've been doing that more and more and I find it's very, very helpful. I say a lot of things that I don't do. I'm trying to do what I say at this stage in my life because it sounds like a hypocrite if you don't, or I do. Okay, that is it, thank you so much. Thank you, I really do appreciate you watching these videos. I appreciate you subscribing to this channel and if I have anything interesting to say, I'll probably make a video. Sometimes I feel like I've made every single video about plants under the sun. I think I have. I don't know, that's not true because there's landscape plants, there's xeriscape plants, there's a gazillion plants out there that are not just indoor plants that exist. That happens, goodbye, it happens, I don't know why, but I have to get back.