Winter houseplant checklist

Welcome back to your Good Day Garden. Cooler months can take a toll on your houseplants. Now is the time to get them ready for winter. Garden guy Dale Kaye, enter. Slide on in. Has his checklist. Hello there. Good morning. This is a lot. I mean, I get it. We have to tend to them, but this is a lot. Well, there's some critical pieces to taking care of your houseplants over the winter months because, of course, there is no true, you know, indigenous houseplant. It's all plants that regularly live outside and we just try to put them inside and make them look good, right? So we have to start to replicate nature outside when it's not so conducive in Minnesota during the winter months so let's take a look at the things that you need to get your plants rolling and most importantly I guess keep them happy and the first and the most obvious one you see it when you go out walking the dog at night it's getting darker earlier and also in the morning so supplemental light becomes really key particularly if you have a dark spot so you can buy these little lights you know if you've got something at your desk or you know in a small space or I found this one at a you know home improvement store and it actually has three of these adjustable things so you can group your houseplants around and kind of give them supplemental light but will that help us too yeah it probably it probably will that that and popping vitamin d like it's going out of fashion. So light is important. So anything that you can do to supplemental light. Ease off on the fertilizing because just conditions aren't conducive for growth. So if you are going to fertilize maybe once a month, just do it at a really half rate or quarter rate application. The next one is humidity. And our furnaces might be making our plants dry too. So we'll talk about watering. But of course, it gets really dry inside our homes. You know, your skin feels it. Everybody feels it. Plants actually feel that as well. So there's a ways that you can mitigate dryness inside the first one the most obvious one and actually the best one is a humidifier just like this one two three in your living room does you the world of good and also does your plants the world of good and if plants are doing the world of good then we're a lot healthier as well so it's a kind of a symbiotic little circle of life inside our homes during the winter months you can also try misting this one can invite some fungal problems it's probably the least and but it works and then last but not least a little humidity tray just some stones in a little dish just put some water in there don't have your plants swimming and then your plants just sit on top there and they'll just get that that humidity so that's your humidity mitigation as far as that goes the next obvious one of course is watering and it really is you know you could i could spend we could have a half an hour no an hour and a half day okay special on watering but in a nutshell every plant is a little bit different so you've got to kind of learn your plants just like you're learning your kids or your babies or anything else you got to learn your plants but once you get to know how much they need but one thing for sure is they'll need less water during the winter months than they will when it's warmer and you've got the windows open or maybe you've even got them outside for the summer months so they'll need less so just keep that in mind there's all sorts of tools that you can deploy that will help you water but just a watering can I recommend maybe once a week once every two weeks just depending on the plant but you know sticking your finger into the soil I mean it's you hear it all the time it's you know it's not an old wives tale that you know it actually works you can get little moisture meters there's a couple right by the plant by you that you can use as well that will help you determine or help you learn your plant the next one is pests just just the nature of being indoors plants will get pests indoors so some quick little things that you can do actually I want to show this one because fungus gnats are often a problem for indoor plants, but this diatomaceous earth, this one that I'm holding, just look for that at your favorite local garden shop. This one came from Lost in the Forest in St. Louis Park, but that's sprinkled on the top of soil. Really, it breaks the cycle of fungus gnat eggs, so that's a really good one. Also wiping the leaves, you want to clean your leaves regularly because they do get dusty just, you know, we're running our furnaces. just wiping the leaves with a very light dilution of something like dish soap on a cloth wiping those leaves does really really well just make sure it's a very weak dilution and then there's also these neem cleaning wipes it's just like a baby wipe just you know just like a towelette but this one has neem oil in it which really protects the plant against pests as well so you can pop this one in your diaper bag and Bob's your uncle you can kind of run around and take care of your plants and then last but not least something that is a little bit more of a chemical control but does very very well it's called systemic houseplant it's a granular so you're not spraying indoors that's the advantage of it but you just sprinkle that on top of the soil it is a systemic insecticide so make sure you read the label yeah and you know don't put on your herbs or anything inside like anything like that but just doing those simple tips watering when you when you water your plant you can that one's in like a decorative pot take it out of the pot right let it drain yeah otherwise you know the phone rings you get busy you forget you can take it let things drop just make sure you take it out of the pot because water actually collects in the bottom there and before we go behind me is a fan big kind of circular fan any type of air movement around plants just like this outside and a little gentle summer breeze if you can replicate that indoors just a gentle breeze okay that really does plants the water good cool I thought you were gonna they don't have a fan near it. I thought so too, because it was going to dry them out. No, just a gentle breeze, not like a hair dryer breeze. All right, Dale, appreciate it.