Herself's Houseplants

Scale until recently was only a problem on my orchids. Lately down here in Houston it has become an outdoor problem as well. I wish it was as easy to fix on trees as it is on houseplants.

Scale is a group of insects that feed on plants. You’ll notice them on your houseplants as hard bumps about an 1/8″ to 1/16″ across and usually dark brown. They don’t move or look like bugs. Usually plants will have sticky areas along the leaves as well.

Scale can also be white and long, thin bumps. However, I’ve only seen these scales outside.

Scale insects suck the sap out of your plant.

Because of their protective shell the only time spray on insecticides help is when they are first born and crawling to the location where they will build a shell over themselves.

Luckily houseplants are small and I’ve found that placing the infected plant in the sink, washing the leaves with soapy water ( ~ 1 tablespoon dish soap to a gallon of water ) will remove all the scale.

I then follow up with an insecticidial oil spray.

More information:
Scale Insects
Keys to scale insects ( photos of various kinds of scale for identification )

I picked this plant up at a store this week. I brought it home and found it so pot bound it was sitting like a loose rock in its pot! It had pulled all the dirt in the pot into a tiny ball it was so pot bound.

The first thing to do with a pot bound plant like this is get it out of that pot and soak it. This one soaked for an hour and still the dirt/root ball was too stiff to loosen.

If after soaking your plant you can very gently and slowly loosen up the root ball do so.

If you can not loosen the root ball take a very sharp, very clean knife and make 4 cuts, one on each side, from the top of the root ball, to the bottom about 1/4″ deep. This will allow the new roots to grow out instead of continuing to circle which would in time strangle the plant.

Once the roots are loosened or cut you can repot this plant in a larger container with some fresh potting soil.

I think the houseplant most commonly affected by soft rot is the jade plant. In the winter, stems become weak, then mushy then rot. This occurs because your plant has caught a bacterial infection. Any plant can be a victim.

Although over watering is blamed as the cause; the problem is really a lack of light. The rest of the year the water you put in the soil gets used and evaporated. During the winter the plant slows its grow and there isn’t much sun to speed up water evaporation. So by watering less in the winter, or giving the plant more light or both you can avoid the problem.

Two things need to be done once soft rot occurs. First you need to unpot the plant and put it in a new pot with fresh soil. If you must reuse the pot, run it through the dishwasher or scrub it down with bleach first and rinse thoroughly. You need to get rid of all the bacteria.

Next you must perform an amputation on the plant.  Wipe the outside of the plant down with alcohol. Take a very sharp razor and sterilize it. Slice off the part of the plant effected plus some of the unaffected area below the rot. The bacteria spreads out before symptoms show. You must remove all the bacteria with out spreading it to the section that doesn’t have any bacteria.

What do you do when you have over watered your favorite plant?

The first thing to do is to get it out of the pot and re-pot it in fresh soil. It is not the damp soil that kills the plant but the bacteria that grows in the damp soil. So un-pot the plant, rinse off the roots in the sink and scrub out the pot if you are using the same pot. Dish soap and hot water work just fine.

There are several products you can buy in the nursery or online to treat bacterial problems with plants. If you have a plant you can not easily re-pot you might try one of those remedies first.

If you have a plant that gets over watered or is just prone to root rot try this:
Unpot the plant.  Take a small clay pot, about 1/3 the size of the main pot, and place it upside down in the larger pot.  This takes away the part of the soil that remains wet the longest.  Cover with a little dirt.  Place your plant over the upside down pot and guide the roots to the section between the two pots.  Finish filling with soil.  Just remember to keep a closer eye on the soil moisture now.

And remember when in doubt -> wait don’t water.