Calathea White Star Care: Seven Tips

[Music] here is my calafia white star care video it's been requested it took me a minute but here we are these are seven things that i'm going to talk about but not maybe in this order in the video and of course just a quick disclaimer before we get started i'm not an expert i'm more of an enthusiastic hobbyist so what works for me might not work for you and this is all based on my own experience but we'll start with watering when do you water well you water when your plant is dry so check the soil poke your finger down an inch or two and if the soil feels dry it's probably time to water you might also pick the plant up and if it feels lighter you might realize it's also time to water now calatheas do need distilled water and so i do this by i actually invested in a water distiller because i have a lot of calatheas the white star is really sensitive to elements that are in the water minerals so distilled water is important i store it in these old distilled water jugs that i have these gallon jugs and this makes a gallon at a time so my water distiller so it's perfect so i just go ahead and pour it into my watering can i take it around the house and get everybody watered but i definitely again check each plant before i water to make sure that i'm not over watering and i would say one of the things about watering calathea is that they they need to have an even kind of moist soil but they also like there to be moisture in the air so i use a whole room humidifier in my plant room and that keeps the humidity at between 50 and 65 but in other areas of my house i use these little oil diffusers without any oil in them though i know some of you use um like pest repelling oil which i'm really curious about but i've never tried and what this does is it raises the humidity in this tiny little area and i have measured it just to make sure um it can raise it like anywhere from five to seven percent which is great when i'm running the heater in the winter for example and i'm drying the air out with something i'm doing in the house but it's not going these little oil diffusers are not going to raise the overall humidity in the room they just won't so it might be worth investing in a meter for you to tell you know what what is the humidity level at because low humidity will lead to brown tips on your white star and so well using tap water over time so just keep that in mind there's a little relationship there with the brown tips and what causes them you can also get brown tips from over fertilizing and i get a lot of fertilizer questions so let's talk about it this is what i'm using right now i dilute what's recommended here on the back but down to 25 strength and i make it up in a gallon jug and store it and then in the growing season so for me that's usually march to november so that's when i see a lot of growth on my plants my calafias i go ahead and i fertilize them once a month every other month and that's all i water them before i add in this fertilizer mix that you see here that have these really cute calathea illustrated stickers on them um and just watering before i can make sure that i'm not going to be burning the roots and if you over fertilize you can definitely burn the roots and then you can get these brown tips on the edge of the leaves just along the margin it's really frustrating when you get a new white star check do you see these pellets do you see something like this in the soil because if you do definitely has some slow release fertilizer so i'm not going to be fertilizing this for a few months because one i'm outside of the growing season it's currently january and two i want to make sure i'm not adding in too much fertilizer when it's already got some i also do replace nutrients in my soil by just adding a top dressing of worm castings so i add an even layer across the soil and then i water through this is just going to help replace some of the nutrients that get lost over time and i also amend my soil with it so let's talk about soil now this soil is a amended pre-mix potting soil that i bought i haven't been able to make my own soil since everything's been going on so it's been about a year but you can see here this is a chunky soil it's sun grows black gold and that's what i'm looking for i'm looking for a soil that's got some really big elements in it that's got what looks like some nutrition i add in the worm castings for a little bit extra and i add in a little bit of something else as well so i am end with perlite and i do this because well pearl it's a little controversial some people don't like how it tends to rise and the pot tends to float to the surface over time and then do you see what it's supposed to do here it's supposed to improve join a generation and when that happens you kind of lose the benefit so we'll talk about that um i tend to repot often enough that it doesn't usually it's not too much of a problem but you might want to try pumice or something else right what works for me might not work for you so keep that in mind but the important thing about the soil for me is that when i water it number one it's fast draining so my pot needs to have a drainage hole so that i can make sure it's doing it and two i've got to see that water come out really quickly after i water the plant depending on the size of the pot will tell me a little bit about how quickly right the bigger the pot the longer it might take to filter down but i don't want my plant sitting in water and aeration is important so let's talk about that um when the soil gets really compact right um and this is a wooden dowel that you see me using here and i'm just gonna poke this down into the soil and kind of artificially create an air pocket now some people do this it's a little controversial about whether or not it works but for me the composition of the soil is important with all those chunky elements because if there's not enough aeration you're not going to have fast draining soil so the water is going to sit there and you're also not going to have enough oxygen in the soil and when the soil by the way is too wet the roots of the plant can't take in oxygen and they need to do that you create an anaerobic environment when the soil is too compacted so keep that in mind you also want to clean off your leaves so i use this old little makeup brush that came with something to clean my leaves and i do this pretty often um and i'll tell you why right cleaning your leaves is great there's a number of reasons why you would do it for me it's a really good time for me to just look at my plant and see if i'm having any pest issues or any other issues for that matter i might even take a little bottle of distilled water and spray the leaves down if they're particularly dusty but i don't let moisture set on the leaf surface when i do this i do dab it away and i recommend that you do that just because leaving moisture sitting on the the surface of the leaf can lead to bacterial and fungal issues so that's been my experience but it's a good time to check for webbing for white debris on the back of the leaves because spider mites love a white star they really love a white star and will go to town and feast on your plant and so cleaning serves a variety of purposes checking on your plant looking for pests and there's also another thing that's important is you you just look at these things like here for instance this is my lapardina has a brown tip now the white star doesn't quite have brown tips and this is a really small one to be honest it's a tiny little speck of brown it's going to grow over time and it's going to get crispy and that's just how it is and the white star is very prone to this problem and i get a ton of questions about how do i prevent how do i stop my white star from from crisping up well check the humidity have you been watering enough too little too much uh have you over fertilized keep all of those things in mind those are usually the culprits or like this leaf here is it just an old leaf that's part of its natural life cycle that as new growth comes in the older leaves dry up and fade away don't panic don't panic about the leaves not being perfect if you see and i stress this one just go and do a google image search for like calatheas in the rainforest and you're going to see calatheas whose leaves are absolutely not perfect that even in its most um kind of the environment where it's getting everything it needs it's still going to not be perfect it's gonna have crispy tips so don't stress out now cleaning the leaves also helps with photosynthesis it gets the dust off the surface and allows them to take in more light but what kind of light how much light now i tend to give my calatheas a little bit more light than i think is usually recommended they're either right up against a north facing window in an east window getting morning sun pulled back from a west facing window a few feet and then maybe even a little further back from a southern window so really bright indirect light or i can give mine kind of a weak morning light um direct light rather and keep in mind though that you can burn the plant and what will happen is a little brown spot will show up on the leaf over time the leaf there will thin and thin and then until it's just a hole so it's possible and if you notice that pull your plant back as soon as you can and other than that that's pretty much for me i say the last thing is maybe temperature i keep mine between 65 and 85 degrees uh fahrenheit but they're pretty resilient plants so just keep that in mind but they are from the rainforest they're from tropical america so keep in mind what they might be used to or what might be most beneficial but also notice you see the patterns on the leaf here are slightly different we have thicker and thinner leaves we have different colors the white star tends to produce pinkish lines that fade to cream over time and they're polymorphic for patterns so sometimes you're going to have these thinner lines and sometimes thicker lines and this can have to do with the environment with the maturity of the plant with even things like temperature with light exposure so don't worry if you see different colors in the lines over time that is perfectly natural so if you have a question or if there's something i haven't mentioned that you're wondering about go ahead and leave me a comment and i'll try to answer as soon as i can i hope you enjoyed the video and until next time be well and take care [Music]

Channel: Addy Beez

Views: 4,937

Rating: 4.9240508 out of 5

Keywords: calathea care, white star, calathea white star care, calathea, care, calathea star, how to take care of a calathea white star, house plant, houseplant, indoor, plant

Id: m1Gpuua4NXs

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021