Like Ma from Little House on the Prarie, I have specific days for doing certain tasks. Saturday is the day I water all my indoor and outdoor plants. Also, because spring is here and that’s a season of increased growth, it’s also the perfect time to fertilize any plants if they need it.
This week as I was watering my plants, I couldn’t get a fertilizer spike into one of my spider plants. It seemed that the roots were bound together, so I decided to divide the plant and repot it. If you’d like to see exactly how I did it, keep reading because I’m going to give you all the details!
If you don’t know much about spider plants, let me tell you some things that I’ve come to love about them.
They are very easy to grow. They multiply quickly. They love light, but they can tolerate some shade too. They grow quickly. They get very long, and I love how they cascade down over pots. And they make a great plant for a hanging pot.
My mom gave me some “babies” from her spider plant a couple of years ago, and now they’ve grown and grown and grown. So much so that I’ve got them in 3-4 containers around my house. The container in the photo above is the smallest one.
As I was watering my plants today, I decided that since spring was here and all the plants would be getting more light, it was a good time to fertilize them. I love using Jobe fertilizer spikes, but for some reason, I could not get the spike to go in. I knew the plants had outgrown the pot and were probably pot-bound, so they needed to be divided.
Sure enough, when I pulled the plant from the pot, the roots were a tangled mess!
To get the roots untangled, I spent 5 minutes or so gently mashing and pulling at the chunk of roots to loosen the soil. Finally, I got as much dirt out as I could and was able to separate all four spider plants.
I decided to take a sharp pair of scissors that were cleaned with rubbing alcohol and trim the roots so they would fit into the new pots. I’m not sure if that is an okay thing to do or not. I mean, there were plenty of little rootlets, so I figured it would be okay. Only time will tell, though.
From there, I put them in new pots with healthy potting soil and added half of a Jobe’s fertilizer spikes to each pot and placed the pots in a new plant container in a sunny window seal.
And that’s it. After dividing my spider plants, I’m excited to see how big they get now that they have more room to grown. Once they grow out of this container, I’m either going to have to gift them to some friends or find some bigger containers to put them in.
If you have any questions about dividing spider plants (or any house plant for that matter), feel free to leave me a comment below. I’m no plant expert, but if I do have an answer for you, I’ll definitely share it!
Love and light,
Meagan