Garden Help Desk: Identifying tiny flowers on your spider plant
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- Spider plants develop fleshy storage roots that help them tolerate short spells of dry soil. Frequent watering isn’t a healthy practice for these plants.
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- Spider plant plantlets, also called pups, will grow on the ends of flowering stems. The pups can be cut free from the stem and rooted in water or moist soil.
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- Mature spider plants can produce many flowering stems and plantlets. The stems can be left on the plant or removed, depending on your preference.
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- Stump grinding is an effective way of dealing with a tree stump, but the excess fresh wood chips in the soil can make it difficult for plants to grow at the site of the old stump. The excess chips near the surface of the soil can be raked up and used to mulch a shrub or flower bed, to reducing this problem.
Courtesy photo
Spider plants develop fleshy storage roots that help them tolerate short spells of dry soil. Frequent watering isn't a healthy practice for these plants.
What are these stringy things with the flowers coming out of the top of my spider plant? What should I do with them? And how should I best care for the plant?
The long stems are flowering structures — very normal for a Spider plant. Young plantlets can grow on the ends of the stems after they’ve flowered. You can remove these stems. Or, if you’d like to see the plantlets develop, and get additional plants, leave the stems while the plantlets grow. Once they’re large enough to look like “mini-plants,” you can cut them free and root them in a small dish of water or tucked into moist potting soil. Today’s photo shows a mature spider plant with many plantlets.
Spider plants like medium to bright indirect light and should be watered thoroughly/deeply whenever the upper inch or so of the soil is dry. Let the soil dry between these deep waterings. Don’t let the pot sit in a saucer or tray with drainage water. Frequent watering (watering when the upper soil is still moist) isn’t good for the plant.
If you ever need to repot your plant, don’t be alarmed if you find white structures in the soil like those you’ll see in our second photo today. They are storage roots, normal for this plant and shouldn’t be removed.
Our neighbor just cut some of his trees down last month and drilled down into one stump and put stump killer in it. The trees were on the other side of our fence. Our own garden is right next to the fence. There are a lot of tree roots in our garden from his trees and we are concerned about planting vegetables if the poison will get into the soil and into the vegetables. We already have raspberries and strawberries growing there. Will they be affected? We are probably being over cautious but don’t want anyone to get sick.
Courtesy photo
Spider plant plantlets, also called pups, will grow on the ends of flowering stems. The pups can be cut free from the stem and rooted in water or moist soil.
Some tree species are more likely than others to send up shoots from their stump once they’re cut down and there are some species that will almost certainly sprout or sucker. Without taking extra steps after cutting down those trees, there will be ongoing problems in that part of the landscape. Your neighbor may have had some of those problem-prone trees.
You’ve checked on the product your neighbor used. There are some products used as “stump killers” that can cause serious problems in a landscape and shouldn’t be used in residential areas, but this isn’t what your neighbor used. The active ingredient in his stump killer is potassium nitrate. Potassium and nitrogen are two of the basic ingredients in garden fertilizers. The product will speed up decomposition of the stump but won’t harm your plants.
When trees need to be removed there are a few ways to reduce the chances of having new sprouts or suckers from the stumps.
For smaller trees, you can dig out the stump and removed as many of the larger roots as possible.
Digging out the stump and roots isn’t practical for large trees, so having the stump mechanically ground down can be a quick and effective way to prevent sprouting. The stump grinder will leave a large area of chunky shredded wood mixed with some soil. Rake out as much of the shredded wood as possible. You can use the shredded wood as a mulch somewhere in your landscape. If you leave a large amount of fresh wood chips mixed into the soil it will temporarily reduce the amount of nitrogen available for new plants that are added to that location in your landscape.
Courtesy photo
Mature spider plants can produce many flowering stems and plantlets. The stems can be left on the plant or removed, depending on your preference.
A chemical treatment is a third option for dealing with trees that need to be removed. The trick to successfully preventing killing a stump sprouts and suckers is to apply a chemical to the cut surface of the stump within a several minutes of cutting the tree. The longer you wait to apply the chemical, the less effective your efforts will be.
Spray the entire surface of the stump, from edge to edge with a product that contains the active ingredient triclopyr (Ortho Brush-B-Gone or Poison-ivy Killer for example) or glyphosate (KillzAll, Ultra-kill, Roundup, etc.). If sprouts do show up later cut them off and treat their cut surfaces in the same way. Depending on the kind of tree, you may need to repeat the treatment several time before everything is dead.
Stump grinding is an effective way of dealing with a tree stump, but the excess fresh wood chips in the soil can make it difficult for plants to grow at the site of the old stump. The excess chips near the surface of the soil can be raked up and used to mulch a shrub or flower bed, to reducing this problem.
