Sunday, March 7, 2010

How to Propagate Spider Plants (Chlorophytum comosum)

Spider plants (Chlorophytum comosum) are possibly the easiest plants to propagate. There are two really easy ways to do it, but both require a full grown plant that is putting out babies/nodes. Baby spider plants look like the large ones only they are coming off the main plant on a stalk and hanging down. What they are trying to do is reach the ground, at which point they would shoot off roots and become a separate plant.

The easiest way of all is to just take a small pot full of dirt and put a node on top of it, still attached to the main plant. After a few days it will start to put out roots and eventually be it's own plant. I'll cover that in more depth when the plant I'm growing now puts out nodes.

My sister in law has a large spider plant and my brother gave me one of it's nodes. You can root them in water with ease, so that's what I did. This is what a node looks like. Pretty Cthulhuian, huh? You just submerge that in some water, changing it every week or so, and after a couple weeks it puts out roots. You can let them get several inches long if you like, it helps the plant get started. But part of spider plants popularity is their cockroach-like survivability and I've found that an inch or two of root is plenty. Then you just take a small pot half full of dirt and put the rooted node gently on top. Cover it with more dirt, water it thoroughly and put it in a sunny, but not too direct, spot.That's it, pretty soon this one will be putting out babies of it's own.

4 comments:

  1. I just recently got into gardening & horticulture again, seeing that spring is back. I like the tips you have posted, will definitely look around.

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  2. jjrodriguez: Thanks for stopping by.

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  3. On a pedantic note, the word you were looking for is Cthonian, which comes from the Greek word transliterated as "khthonios" meaning "under the ground" or "of the Earth". Many of Lovecraft's scariest things are described this way. Quite frankly, that spider plant is a good target for this descriptor -- despite all sorts of trauma it is extraordinarily vigorous. Makes you wonder...

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