The soil of your houseplant is an amazing thing. It provides nutrients to your plant, holds water for the plants roots to take up, and supports the overall health of your houseplant. But what happens when your soil isn’t helping your plant but hindering it? That’s where I step in to give you the best tips to maintain it.
If you want to hear about these tips in more detail, listen to our podcast, Plant School, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or most any other podcast listening platform.
#1: Buy the Correct Soil
The first step to managing your houseplants soil is to get the right kind. When you first bring your plant home from the nursery or greenhouse, there is no need to change it’s soil for 1-3 years. If you have had your plant around this long, then it might be time to repot or topdress it and give it some new soil. Before you can do any of that, you need to buy the right soil.
For cactus and succulents, you can buy a special type of soil from your local hardware store or online that is labeled specifically for houseplants and cacti. It’s a little bit more pricey but it’s a more sandy mix that will favor good drainage to help these desert plants not get too much water and better their chances of survival.
For your other houseplants that are tropical, they can use soil labeled for houseplants or a more generic bag of soil labeled for potting. I tend to use the generic potting soil because it tends to be less expensive and I have found no harmful effects from it.
#2: Aerate the Soil
If you notice that your soil has become clumped together so that there is a gap between the soil and the pot, then your soil needs aerating. This is something to be done about once a month at the most and it is done by simply poking the soil with a chopstick, knitting needle, or some other pencil-like object. This not only breaks up the soil and allows more air to your roots, but it will allow water to flow more easily to the entirety of your pot.
Be careful of tuberous roots (large bulb-like or potato-like roots) to not break or injure them because this could allow bacteria or fungus to enter in and could be detrimental to the health of your plant. Tuberous roots can be found on plants such cyclamens, ZZ plants, etc. Most houseplants do not have tuberous roots and if you break a few roots while aerating, the plant will recover and be just fine.
#3: Refresh Your Plant’s Soil
In order to refresh the soil of your plant, you can repot it every 1-3 years or topdress it. Repotting involves completely removing the plant and teasing out it’s roots at the bottom with your chopstick and then placing it into it’s new pot that has an inch or two of new soil placed in it. Once the plant is placed, start filling in around it with the new soil until it’s filled and sits about 1-2 inches below the lip of your pot.
Topdressing, on the other hand, involves removing 1-2 inches of old soil from the top of your potted plant and replacing it with new soil while doing your best to try to mix it in.
When you repot your plant or topdress it, it benefits from the fresh nutrients that are now available in the soil you gave it.