How To Properly Care For Your House Plants

The pot you are using as a transfer pot, needs to be filled about one third of the way up with potting soil. If there are any roots sticking to crockery pieces, you need to remove them and loosen the soil clinging to the root ball.

You will then put the ball into the middle of the new pot and sift soil around the root system. The potting stick is useful in making sure that there are no pockets in the soil and that it is firmly packed.

Take care to allow ample space at the top of the pot for watering purposes. Once the plant is firmly in place, give it a good watering. It is also a good idea to give the plant some food as well. Follow the same rules for each plant you are transferring.

Transferring plants to larger pots, is imperative and necessary for the overall health of the plant. It is something that should not be overdone however. If the pot is to large for the plant, this can be just as bad as leaving it in a pot that is to small. An oversize pot will store water for to long and cause root rot, because a smaller plant cannot use all that water properly.

With extra large house plants and extremely sensitive ones which will not take repotting you can employ a substitute remedy known as top dressing. Here you scratch off the surface soil down as far as you can go with-out exposing the roots. Then refill with an enriched potting soil. The enriched soil will pass food down to the roots and if the plant has been suffering from lack of nutriment it will revive.

With larger plants and very sensitive ones, you may not be able to repot them as well. You may need to employ something known as top dressing. This entails scratching off the top of the surface dirt as far as possible, but avoiding root exposure. Then you add new nutrient rich soil, this will pass the food down to the plant roots and if the plant has been suffering from malnutrition, this will solve the problem.