What's up everyone? Welcome
back to the channel.
Today we're talking about these two plants
and they're actually the same plant.
They're just a different variety. Now,
if you've ever had problems
with your houseplants,
which I have and almost everyone I've
talked to has had problems with their
house plants,
these two or any variety of these
plants might be your saving grace.
Now what am I talking about? These
look very different, right? Well,
I purposely went to the garden center
and picked out maybe a more classic
variety of this plant and a rarer or
more unique variety of this plant.
So this is the snake plant.
It's a Sansevieria trifasciata.
This is a more classic one. This
is called the Golden Hahnii.
This one is Sansevieria trifasciata
cylindrica. As you can see,
we've got these nice cylindrical tendrils,
kind of like aliens reaching up out
of the ground, although I don't know,
this looks a little alien as well.
Now in this video we're talking about
how do we care for this plant and,
spoiler alert, it's
actually pretty darn easy.
So we're going to talk about the light,
the water, the nutrition, repotting,
how to deal with any sort
of plant problems as well
as how to even propagate so
you can get even more of this beautiful
plant. Alright, so stay tuned.
When it comes to light
for the snake plant,
it's pretty tolerant to most conditions,
but it's going to do best if you
give it bright, indirect light.
So here you can see, here is my window.
About three to six feet away I've
got my little plant bookshelf.
It thinks it's supposed to be an
actual bookshelf, but let's be honest,
I'm going to be using it for plants.
And so you can see it's about 4:00pm
right now and we're still getting a good
amount of light coming in
and hitting my snake plants.
So they're going to do
just fine like this. The,
you probably want to avoid putting them
directly on a window sill over here.
You want to avoid putting them in the
dark, like maybe a closet or something.
Not sure why you would ever do that, but
definitely avoid something like that.
This is the sweet spot and
honestly for many houseplants,
something along the lines of about
five, six feet away from a window,
that's going to be your golden zone. All
right, it's time to talk watering. Now,
watering is a sensitive
issue in houseplants because
honestly watering is where
people either overkill
or underkill their plant.
You're either watering your plants too
much or you're watering them too little
if you're a houseplant
owner, almost guaranteed.
At least the people that write in to
the Epic Gardening channel and send me
emails and stuff. That is the biggest
problem that I see with houseplants.
So again, snake plants,
they are succulents, right?
That means they hold a lot
of moisture in their leaves.
They don't need a whole lot of water.
Good way to test is to take your finger
and put it down about two inches into
the soil. If it's dry two
inches down, that means, yeah,
it's time to water your snake plant.
And so one thing you can do is just
maybe put it in the bath or put it in a
shower or put it under the sink
and just give it a good drench.
But then let it sit there because as
long as you've got drainage holes like
these, you can, you're going to
want that water to drain out,
let that soil soak, but then
let that water come out.
Cause what I'll see a lot of people do
is they'll, they'll water water, water.
They have a saucer on the bottom,
that saucer collects water,
and now there's standing
water at the bottom.
That's the same as having
no drainage holes, right?
Because then you're still rotting
out those roots at the bottom,
plant's going to be starved for
oxygen and you're in a bad spot.
Now another thing to think
about is the smaller your pot,
the more often you're probably
going to have to water.
And that's because the deeper your soil,
the longer it takes for water to
evaporate out of the soil, right?
And so the smaller your pot, the more
often you're going to have to water.
That's a really simple tip that I
think a lot of people mess up. Alright,
now we're talking soil. So most
houseplants are gonna want that rich,
well draining soil. It's kind of
standard and it's across the board,
what most houseplants want. Snake
plant is slightly different.
If you go to a garden center
and you get African violet mix,
that's actually going to be one of the
better soil mixes you can get for your
snake plant. Another thing you can
do if you want to make your own,
what you want to do is just for
that aeration element of your soil.
So typically you'll do something, let's
say you're making a potting mix, right?
You're going to do like
one third peat moss,
one third well blended compost
and one third perlite. Well,
in the case of something like a snake
plant, which again it's a succulent,
it wants to drain even more.
You're going to want to say maybe 50%
of your mix will be something like a
perlite or something to add aeration and
the rest you can add that peat moss and
that compost.
And so all you're really doing is just
bumping your perlite count up a little
bit to give more larger
chunks in that soil.
More ability for water to drain right
through and more ability for oxygen and
water and air to circulate
well. And that's,
I mean that's sort of a
general rule of succulents.
That's why when you do succulents,
you get a cactus mix, right?
Lot better drainage, more
aeration in the soil.
And that's just what those plants
really like. So it's pretty simple.
Either go with that African violet mix
or just make your own and increase the
amount of perlite that
you add into the mix.
You might've noticed that these actually
are still in the pots that I bought
them in at the nursery.
And you might be saying,
why aren't they in a more beautiful
pot? Why haven't you repotted them?
Well snake plants in general, they
want to be slightly root bound.
They're okay living like that.
And so what I'll do is I will
definitely repot these, uh,
but I'm not going to really increase
the pot size. At least right now.
I might bump it up half
an inch or something like
that. That's not a big deal.
But in the beginning of
your snake plant's life,
when you grab it from a nursery,
there's not a really big need to repot.
After about a year or so,
yeah, you're to want to repot.
It might be a little bit too rootbound
and then you want to grab a pot that's
about an inch bigger in diameter,
so a little bit bigger. And just,
that mix I talked about,
add some of that in,
make sure that you refresh the soil.
Because again, this is a growing plant.
There's, it's taking nutrients from
the soil. It's taking, you know,
it's getting energy from the sun and
yeah, that soil is going to get depleted.
So you do need to refresh that soil.
And you can of course use a general
houseplant fertilizer diluted maybe once a
month when you, when you do
water this. But in general,
snake plant's a slow grower,
you can actually just
refresh the soil once a year.
You're probably gonna be fine, especially
if you're growing it as a houseplant.
When it comes to pruning
your snake plants,
you're going to find that
it's not too necessary to do.
But if you have a damaged leaf, so
let's say, or a damaged structure.
Let's say this got bent and
cracked or something like that.
The best way to deal with that
is not to cut it off here,
but actually to cut it right at the soil
surface and that's going to clean up
the appearance. And also
really, once you chop this off,
this section of the plant is really
not doing a whole lot of work.
So you're gonna want to take that off.
And so like for example, right here,
you can see there's a little cut right
here. This is really not that big,
so I'm not going to prune this
all the way down to the bottom.
That would sort of be a waste of plant
tissue and there's just no need to do
that. But let's say this is really ripped.
What I would want to do is kind of get
in there and cut it off as close as I
could to the soil surface so that way
it organizes the plant a little bit.
It looks a little more aesthetic and
you're getting rid of that damaged tissue
so the plant doesn't have to support
it anymore. Okay, let's talk division,
propagation. If you want more
of these bad boys, honestly,
they're pretty cheap and you can
buy them. They're very, very cheap.
But if you want to have some fun, if
you want to experiment a little bit,
probably the best way, you
can do it by leaf cutting too,
but the best way is to let your snake
plants grow naturally and then propagate
them by division. And division
is as simple as it sounds.
Simply take this out of its pot,
break up the individual plants in here,
and then plant those into new pots.
It's dead simple. Uh,
that is by far the easiest way
to propagate your snake plant.
That's pretty much it as far as snake
plants go. Again, dead simple houseplant.
So if you have a brown thumb, a black
thumb, any other color, thumb but green,
first of all, there's no such
thing as a brown or black thumb.
Everyone can learn how to grow
plants. That's what I'm here for.
It's not that hard. Let's do it.
Right? But if you think that you do,
these are great plants to go with.
But let's talk about just
a couple more things.
These are some commonly asked
questions that come in on the channel,
on the website, on the podcast,
et cetera. So number one,
probably not a good idea to snack
on these, right? Don't do that.
Not that you were planning to
have a little snake plant snack,
but also your pets. They're slightly
toxic, so keep them out of reach of pets.
Specifically cats. Cats
basically love to destroy plants.
I have a family friend who bought
a bunch of new houseplants,
cat promptly destroyed the lower
levels of all of them. Fortunately,
none were toxic, but I mean,
come on. That's a little rude.
So keep them out of the way of your
plants, or your pets, excuse me.
A second thing, if the leaves are
drooping, you have a watering issue.
Very classic. We always, um,
we always see some sort of droopiness
when it comes to a watering issue in a
plant like this. All right, next question.
What pests can I experience? Well,
first of all, not a whole lot. They're
pretty resistant to most pests.
You might find that you get some mealy
bugs or aphids or something like that.
The best thing to do is kind of make a
scan of your houseplant collection once,
twice a week.
See if you're seeing any little bugs
come in and then take cotton swabs with
rubbing alcohol, especially for
mealy bugs, and just rub them off.
Make sure you get as many
as you can because again,
with pests it's all about
disrupting that life cycle.
And so if you leave a couple and
they're able to create progeny,
well now you still have a problem and in
some cases you have actually have even
a bigger problem. So that is another tip.
Another thing you should probably think
about doing, mix and match these things.
You can go to a garden center and just
ask them where their Sansevierias are and
they'll bring you to the promised land.
They'll bring you to all the Sansevierias
and they will show you all the
different varieties they have.
And so what I'll probably end up doing
is I'll grab a couple more varieties and
put these all together in a
big planter, right? And these,
these can go outdoors as well. These
are super popular office plants as well.
But you know,
you can grab some smaller ones that are
a little cheaper and mix and match them,
put them in a bigger houseplant pot,
and now you have like a really
beautiful array. I mean these,
it's the same plant that
looks drastically different.
Imagine if you got maybe a white-leaved
or black-leaved Sansevieria,
which both of those do exist. That's a
pretty good combo. Like the aesthetics,
it's all about the
aesthetics, right? So anyways,
those are some simple tips on
how to care for snake plant.
Sansevieria trifasciata. We talked about
light, we talked about watering, soil,
propagation, pests, diseases. By the way,
diseases almost entirely are
going to be of your own making.
It's going to be a root rot issue. Leaf
rot is extremely rare with this plant.
So, diseases, just don't overwater
it. All right. Until next time,
definitely leave me a comment down below.
Tell me what plants you want me to
profile next and I'll see you in the next
episode. Good luck in the
garden and keep growing.