Air Plant Care: Must Know Spanish Moss Care and Culture Tips for Tillandsia usneoides

good morning guys welcome back to my channel in today's video we are going to be talking about air plants again so I had a special request to do a video on Spanish moss so I decided that's exactly what I'm going to do I'm going to go over the care and culture that I use for my Spanish moss here in the greenhouse and hopefully some of these tips and tricks will allow your Spanish moss to grow well as well as mine does so anyways sorry I have one last sip of coffee there before we get going what I'll start with here is just some caring culture of Spanish moss and then we will I'll show you how I water it and I will show you how to make these nifty little Clips here so you can clip your Spanish moss everywhere just like I am I love these little Clips it is see I can just clip it to the pot there and move it around wherever I want it to be just kind of like a little hair clip I could probably even um clip it to my ear so anyway it's Spanish moss umm Spanish moss it does seem to do well in the shady side of my greenhouse it also does well in the sunny side of my greenhouse with any air plant this thicker is the leaf like this guy here the less frequently it needs to be watered so that one doesn't need to be watered very often at all but a thinner Leafs guy like this one is actually going to need to be watered a little bit more often because of the thinner leaves so as you can see from Spanish moss very thin leaves to it or whatever you call them I guess their leaves very thin it needs frequent watering it will desiccate out very fast especially in a house so um if you're a home grower there's a strike against it for Spanish moss is going to be hard to keep it humid enough in the area you wouldn't want to just put it on a sunny window because that window is going to get dry when the Sun comes out but so it likes high humidity rate now it's 92% humidity in here it doesn't matter too much about temperature it seems it tolerates a wide range of temperature the greenhouse I've seen it actually I had some outside for a while I eventually did freeze solid it which is a little piece tiny little piece like an eighth of the size but it got down to frost before it actually died so these things can get really cold and I've had it here in the greenhouse up to 95 degrees in the summertime and it does just fine as well again takes lots of water you want to make sure especially when it's warm you're watering it often I do do a dunk method you could do a spray method like this putting his spraying but it's very slow and ineffective you're going to be spraying the the outside of the moss but you're not going to get the inside of the moss very well excuse me on another note there and as I say I will show you how to how I do the dunk method later if you notice when SMED Moss is thirsty it's kind of a gray silver color and when it gets wet it is green so it changes color they're kind of right before your eyes a lot of air plants will do this so I know when it's this gray color that it's thirsty and if it's still green it is um fine and doesn't need to be sprayed with water or anything like that what else can I tell you about the stuff it multiplies quite quickly when you have a little batch of it it doesn't multiply as fast as when you have a lot of it of course it's like grass clippings if you have a little tiny patch of lawn you're not going to get many grass clippings but when you have a whole lawn it seems to grow like crazy and you get tons of it so I can make these little um things like this every month or so I can make another one and they just keep multiplying and multiplying and well actually I can just with I'll do with this guy here because it's got a little bit tum bigger of a clip on it so what I do is I take a SAP strap and I just lightly zap strap the top of it there and then I just put an orchid clip on it this little orchid clip has a black ladybug things to remember with Spanish moss and this is key to its survival here's another one here I did Spanish moss hates metal it hates wire so use as little as you possibly can I have zaps trapped as you can see I have used metal with the plastic like a twist tie with the plastic on there I can barely see in all the Spanish moss at this point and yeah that is what I've done and this is just a piece of bamboo I have been told that if you were to use metal the zinc and the coatings on the metal will kill the entire thing of Spanish moss and it will it'll seem like you did everything right and it was actually the metal that killed the moss so make sure the moss never comes in contact with any metal or wire or anything so when you do this you always want to use plastic or wire that is coated in plastic or wood I've got a little piece of wire up here I am still taking a little bit of a risk but it's such a little piece that these should be really fine another good idea I thought of after if you wanted to do this would be like a plastic coat hanger and zap strapped to a plastic coat hanger but so other than humidity other than water we've talked about sunlight we've covered the temperatures so why don't I bring the camera down I'll show you sort of the dunk method I use for watering the moss and I will I'll give you a little quick um step-by-step instructions on how you make these little Clips here so let's go down and have a look at the bench okay so now that we are moved down we are going to start by making one of the little bunches there so I'm going to take some off this plant here hopefully a bill to see that plant now what we want to do is just take a sharp pair of scissors and we're going to just cut a little bit of it off here so let me raise the camera up a little bit again can you see me there I don't want to take tons and it's amazing a tiny clip will remove so much so I'm just can do a little clip I just clipped about a centimeter it seemed of the moss and I'm going to remove that just like so now it's important with moss that it likes to always lay the same way so you always want it to be laying down words if you start turning it upside down and messing it up and hang it upside down to grow it's actually going to die so I'm going to lay that down there bring you back down so there is our chunk of moss and as I say I've done a very good job at making sure I keep the shape I know that this is the top I know how it likes to hang the worst thing you can do is have your moss and a tangled mess because it really really hates that so I'm going to use a recycled zap strap and I'm going to you just spread it out a little bit at the top here you don't want to paint it tight remember this is a living plant so if you crush the the tissue of the plant up there the crush dying tissue could actually M come down the the whole plant and you'll lose more than just a little bit so I'm just going to lightly zap strap in there so I've got some of the moss hanging on the outside of the zaps trap and some of it on the inside it's not tight at all right it's just sort of temporarily there and I'll leave it like that and then we'll give it a cut and remove that you'll end up with all these little pieces everywhere I we just throw them in the orchids and they seem to continue to grow so there we go and then I use an orchid clip and I like to go through the one side has two and one side has three prongs if I can I try to go through the one that has the three prongs because it kind of fits it tight into there just like so refocus the camera a little so it's in there quite tight and then I can just clamp this where I want it to be now Spanish moss it um once it gets used to an environment it really hates change so I don't take it outside the greenhouse I do move it around in the greenhouse but it's essentially all the same environment in here but if you were to move it from one window to the next window to the bathroom to the living room to the greenhouse outside it's going to hate you for that so pick a spot stick with it remember not to use any kind of metal because that is going to be a downfall they're just going to clip it a little bit tighter and yeah we're good to go on that one so now we just got to give that a watering all my Spanish moss right now is looking kind of dry let's slide that over slide the water over here so this is just regular tap water and this is how I do all my Spanish moss and I'm just going to let that sit in there for a minute you can see it instantly turn color just grabbing another one here so here's a little bit bigger one and you can do more than one at once keeping in mind of how it lays out you want to keep that shape you don't want it to get all tangled here's that one that we have sprayed with water so I'll lay that one in there as well here's the one with the ladybug on I'm going to lay that one in there as well and we'll just do that with it so another reason I like these little clips compared to the sort of coat hanger ones that I've made that have four on is they're so much easier to water because you're not you don't have such a huge one and the ones that are folded with the vanda's like this they're even tougher to water because you've got to worry about the Vanda roots and everything like that so that one is just going crazy on the Vanda but it's not nearly as easy to water but anyway there we go so everything has turned color here we can gently pull them back out remember to keep them the way they were hanging so there's the first one we'll hang back up I think that might have been the next one in there so there's the next one and we just allow them to drip dry but yeah they're so easy to place when doing it in this way and they look good too you know you can even no I place them when they're dry on like the extension cords that are in here to run the lights and that sort of thing they don't have to hang on a totally horizontal surface or anything like that they clip the wires they clip the wood they clip to basically anything they clip through the plant pots this way so really versatile an easy way to do it and that's our new little one that we made so or can we put this guy hmm think for now we're just going to clip him right here just like so so there's anyone there alright so anyways guys that is how I work with my Spanish moss I hope this gives you a few tips to grow your own Spanish moss the stuff is really expensive in a garden center around here anyways one little strand like this is about 15 bucks so it's crazy the original Spanish moss that I got I would flipped out and I went into Home Depot and it was a top dressing on a daffodil pot and the whole pot was like ten dollars so you got a pot it had maybe 20 daffodils in and it had live moss as a top dressing for it so I picked up the whole thing and yeah it was a cheap way to get some Spanish moss when I didn't have any but anyways guys that's going to be it for this time I think the next video I have to start worrying about bringing the plumerias upstairs dormancy is almost over for them we now in my area have 11 hours of light which is more than enough to get everything breaking dormancy unfortunately it's too cold outside to put them outside but I'm going to bring them up and maybe put them in a sunny window with you so stay tuned for that I'll show you the the area where I kept them dormant all winter and I'll show you the area where they're going to go till next time bye guys

Channel: Brads Greenhouse & Gardening

Views: 259,344

Rating: 4.8749075 out of 5

Keywords: venus flytrap, how to water Orchids, growing Orchids, how, to, care, for, orchids, how to grow orchids, orchid care, tricks, tips, greenhouse, nepenthes, sundew, flytrap, Cephalotus, heliamphora, Orchids, Culture, Dracula Orchid set up, Sharry Baby, Orchid, Oncidium, Wildcat, Phalaenopsis, Cymbidium, Cattleya, Vanda, Brassia, Dendrobiums, Draculas, Masdevallia, Oncidiums, Miltoniopsis, phalaenopsis, orchid, Flower, Garden, Green, Environment, Flowers, Nature, Gardens, Friendly, yt:cc=on

Id: mb8LFWfTezI

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 01 2014