How I Clean My Houseplants & Deal With Plant Pests

hi everyone my name is nick and the last week or so i have been going around and painstakingly cleaning every single one of my house plants which is the most time consuming part of caring for all of my plant collection people always assume that it's watering my plants that takes the most time but that is a breeze in comparison to the maintenance of taking care of all of my health plans so i'm gonna go through today and i'm gonna show you guys how i have been cleaning my plants which the most important goal of cleaning my plants is not only to make my plants look clean and beautiful but to make sure that they are pest free which is something that i deal with in my home and i'm sure many of you deal with is pests hiding throughout your plants and while many pests aren't going to completely annihilate your plants you might find that there are a couple hiding here and there which just could be hindering your plants from growing to their fullest potential and i can tell you confidently that i feel like we're going to find at least one pest hiding on all of these plants here so i have this lovely agliana chocolate this beautiful uh hoya carnosa and then the ever so stunning stromanthy sanguinia trio star right here i might do a couple more than this but these are the three that i am going to begin with today as my focal points so let's go ahead and get started as much as you might love to see my beautiful face throughout this project i think i'm going to bring you guys in a little bit closer because that might make it a little bit easier to see what's going on so first and foremost i want to say that when i do my plant maintenance i like to make sure that my soil is dry and it's time to water my plants because it just makes it a lot easier for me because after i'm done this i'm either going to throw this plant in the shower or in the sink depending on the size and it would just be kind of uh irresponsible of me let's say to go ahead and give this plant a good watering in the sink or the shower if the plant is already well watered and that's just going to cause more problems than not as many of us are familiar with the issues that over watering uh can give to our plants specifically this agliana that would be like practically a death sentence so the soil is dry it's ready to go ahead and get watered and first and foremost you are going to want to make sure your plants are dusted my plants are i think at least decently dusted which is surprising for me because i always sit down to film my youtube videos and my plants are completely riddled in dust but what i'm seeing uh with my plant here is that there is a little bit of um like sticky substances on some of the leaves so i'm assuming that we might find like a like some scale or some mealybug just a little bit i don't know if you guys can see very well let me get like a little bit closer you can see on this leaf right here oops sorry now we're not even remotely in frame you can see on this leaf right here or maybe you can't there's like a little bit of residue on the leaf and you can kind of see it but it looks like dried water splotches so yeah there could have been some mealybug in the vicinity of this or some scale or it could be something else completely different but what i'm going to go ahead and do is just go ahead and start cleaning these leaves up looks like we got a mealybug right there okay so we found at least one mealybug um it's just a little fuzzy one it's nothing too big it looks like it was just maybe even some leftovers from an old mealybug or another one on this plant or something like that but yeah we are going to go ahead and start off by making our little mixture that we are going to clean off our plants with which is fortunately made with stuff that you probably already have in your home so this mixture is really simple we're going to make it right here at the sink and use a glass you can use whatever bowl measuring cup whatever you want and i'm just going to put in a little bit of rubbing alcohol it's like a centimeter maybe a little bit more i'm using 70 today it does not matter if you're using the 90 something percent i forget exactly the number save a little bit of rubbing alcohol in here i'm gonna add just like a drop of so maybe two i am using uh mrs meyer's lavender scented soap however i always hear you should be using unscented soap but it's lavender like it's already but um i think if you are being the best plant parent you can be you should be using an unscented soap i think people like to use castile soap a lot but i use this lavender soap all the time and i've never had any issues and then we're just gonna fill it up a little bit of water from our sink we're gonna do roughly a ratio of one part rubbing alcohol to six parts water but um it doesn't have to be exact you don't have to be measuring it out so i'm just gonna add a little bit of water maybe just a little bit more and the soap is not only going to help clean off our leaves of course but it's going to help suffocate any bugs that are issues on our plants and the alcohol is of course not only going to clean but also kill the bugs because they just can't deal with the alcohol so i'm gonna add just a little bit more water and i'm gonna be using a couple paper towels today i can already hear you guys in the comments telling me that that's a waste um my issue with using rags when i'm cleaning off pests is that the pests are just going to pile up on the rags and i'm going to constantly be having to clean them or switch between rags so i'm just going to be very mindful and use as little amount of paper towels as i can today but if you're using a larger project you could use a sponge that's my dish sponge so i'm not going to use that that would probably be a little bit easier to keep cleaner than a rag when it comes to like mealybug or scale piling up on your rags depending on how bad your infestation is but yeah i'm just gonna use a couple paper towels today and also i should be using gloves because this alcohol is going to dry out my skin like the dickens but um i don't have it so we're just going to make do with what we have so let's go back over to our plants i found some honey grown napkins so i'm going to start off with these before i move on to my paper towel stash but you're going to see i'm just going to take it and i'm going to thoroughly clean off the top side of the leaf because that's where you are likely going to have your leaves be more dirty and wear any of those dusts and residues could be hiding up but also make sure that you get the bottom side of the leaves because that's where pests are more likely going to be hiding out and you might be thinking can i just avoid doing this one leaf at a time and spray them with a spray bottle and my answer to that is no you can't because you're not going to be able to clean off these leaves nearly as thoroughly by just spraying them with the solution as you can by going through and individually cleaning off every single leaf which like this leaf right here you can see how much of that little sticky residue it has on it so this is going to clean it off completely and i'm going to have to worry a lot less in the end and putting a lot more eff a lot less effort i mean in the future putting in more effort now absolutely but you know one plant just takes a couple of minutes and it's definitely worth it in the end so this was that leaf that had that little mealy bug on it only seeing one mealybug so far in this plant but i'm sure there's probably a couple more hiding in the creases here so we will also make sure that we get in there and just kind of just like squeeze it over some of these and just let some of the fluid like kind of rest in the crevices you don't want to overdo it like i'm not trying to water my plant with this alcohol and soapy water but it's totally okay if some of this water gets into my soil because i'm going to just be watering this plant anyway so i'm sure that some of this uh soap and alcohol is just going to get rinsed and flushed out the bottom so nothing to worry about there i did find one more mealybug on this plant so it's a good thing that we're going through and cleaning it off one by one but as you can see now i have all of the leaves cleaned off individually front and back there's still some soap in the leaves and now we are just going to let this plant sit and marinate if you will i'm just gonna let this chill for like five or ten minutes with this cleaning solution on it and then we're going to take it over and we're going to throw in the shower and we're going to rinse it off but since we have a couple of minutes before that's going to be ready let's go ahead and tackle this next one so this plant this stramanthi oh we're going to have to adjust the camera this stromanthy has been living directly next to my ugly name of chocolate so if i found a couple of mealybugs on there i'm assuming i'm gonna find some mealybugs on here and probably a couple more than just the one or two not seeing any yet but we're going to take a look um first and foremost i have this leaf right here plain green with some brown tipping it's really not looking great and i feel like once i remove this leaf the rest of the plant is going to be looking so much better so let's go ahead and cut this down at the base so now this paint looks ten times better i literally should have cut off that leaf weeks ago because now this looks like a literal work of art which also like a little bit of kudos for me for being able to take care of uh this stromanthy which if you guys have been watching my channel you might know that i'm like literally in love with this houseplant but i've never successfully been able to grow it but my friend gave me some offshoots of her plan or a division of her plan that she's had for a couple years and it's been absolutely thriving so yay for that but let's go ahead and once again clean i can see there's a little bit of white right here on the leaves i don't know exactly myself if that might be like from a water situation or if that might be some mealy bug but we'll keep an eye out i know of some of my prayer plants like my calathea orbifolia that i have in my bedroom that the mealybugs really like to hide inside the new leaves before they unfurl and then they'll hide on the back of the leaves after that so we'll flip the plant around oh okay so right here do you see there's some mealybug on there so let's get this a little close up so you guys can see there is i'm sorry i'm gonna be shaking while i'm holding this up but there is a little not juicy one but a really fuzzy one right there and you can see all those little white specks are baby mealy bugs that are still developing so let's quickly go ahead and clean that off as well as we possibly can and now you might be understanding more why i'm like i don't really like to reuse rags on my plants because i'm just going to be spreading around these mealybugs if there's too many which some of my plants specifically the ones that have brown scale issues let me tell you they are pretty gnarly i'll see if i can find one for this video for you guys enjoyment but it looks like that was the only leaf that was really kind of harboring some mealybugs the rest of this plant's looking pretty clean which is good but like i said there's always going to be one hiding somewhere they always seem to work their way through the cracks and this is why i really prefer going through and wiping my plants besides just throwing them in the shower and expecting the water to take care of them which that's a good start throwing them in the shower if you have no other uh sources of kind of you know insecticidal soap or this little solution that i made here a good start would definitely be just throwing your plant in the shower and giving a really really good rinse off maybe taking a rag or a paper towel and going ahead and just kind of doing what i'm doing here cleaning off the front in the back of the leaves it's not going to eradicate the problem by any means but it's definitely going to keep it a little bit more at bay but this one is definitely a quicker job than that aguilar name on this one has probably half the amount of leaves that ugly nema has and once again let's just let this plant sit and marinate and then i will be back in a couple minutes and we're going to take both of these plants into the shower to start off all right we are here in my shower can you tell from my little pile of perlite and leaves but i've been doing a lot of plant maintenance lately so i am literally just going to water these one by one whenever i water my plants in here i'll usually fill up the whole thing to the brim and use my watering can to kind of save on water a little bit but i am going to just turn the shower on and let nature do its work and i probably just ran that for like 15 to 20 seconds to just give it a good watering clean off the leaves nicely i don't want to damage the leaves but my shower isn't that strong so it's not going to do that and then we'll go ahead and put stromati under give it a really quick rinse and watering and there we go just 10 15 seconds is all we need plant cleaned off it's well watered much more well watered with that quick shower than it would be if i was going around spot watering my plants so let's go clean a few more let me see if i can find a couple that might be a little more riddled with the pests all right so i have this hoya right here and i was sitting at my desk earlier and i noticed that there was some mealybug hiding on this stem right here if you can see that there are a few babies those little white little fuzzy thingies that are working their way up the stem that i'm holding here and there's probably a few more hiding you can see in this crevice right here that little fuzzy white thing is a mealybug hoyas are notorious for getting nealy bug in fact a hoya bella my first hoyabella is what brought to mealybug into my home and they have never left and i had gone years before that without dealing with mealybugs so now it's just part of my everyday plant routine dealing with the mealybugs so buyer beware but um i still love hoya i'm not going to knock them for their mealybug issues but we are just going to simply take got a paper towel here and i'm just going to pull around the stem and i'm just going to lightly go up and i want to be gentle because there's some new leaves on here sorry doing this completely off camera there are some new leaves on here so i do want to be gentle not to break them off but if they are healthy enough they should be staying in place which it looks like they are but i do want to be mindful there because i'm sure that with these new leaves there are probably some mealy bugs hiding there so if you probably see i'm just like squeezing some of the soap studs in solution just kind of on there to make sure that they are suffocating those damn mealybugs and let's do the same with this one right here so i'm going to pull up lightly slightly over those leaves same with these ones here actually i might want to be a little bit more gentle with these ones right here because they're a little bit more developed and probably more likely to pop off i'm just going to give them some light cleaning getting within the interior of the taco shaped area of these leaves where those mealy bugs are definitely going to be hiding out and then let's just finish our way up here and of course let's go and get in these crevices here i'm just kind of squeezing over them lightly broke a little leaf off but that was a sad little leaf anyway so it didn't even matter but do you want to be gentle i see i have some new growth right in here so i definitely want to be kind of mindful there and of course i'm going to clean off these leaves in the same way that i was cleaning off the other leaves um with the hoyas they are definitely going to be hiding less than past specifically melee bug because that's what i'm mostly dealing with my hoyas they're not usually going to be hanging out on the leaves or on the back of the leaves they're always in my experience going to be on the stems in the crevices or cracks of the leaves that kind of just form as these get kind of tight with all these different leaves that appear in the stems and then the most issues i have is on the new leaves like these little ones that i have right here that are forming so this is where i'm going to find most of the issue but they are definitely going to be all over the hoya as they really just have this really passionate love affair when it comes to my hoya we can see right in here it's another mealybug so let's just soak that one as much as we can with our solution and then if we can't get it out hopefully the water from the shower will go ahead and knock that guy free but regardless our solution should be taking care to not only suffocate him with that soap but just straight up annihilate him with that alcohol so i think that's a good enough cleaning for this hoya here so hoyas are definitely much more fragile as you saw with the sleep that popped up um so you definitely want to be a little bit more careful than i was being with my um aglinema and maestromanthy but uh still one that you're definitely going to want to be very very mindful to get into all of those cracks and crevices so once again i'm just going to leave this to marinate i feel like there's probably a better word than marinate but i'm going to put it aside do one more plant i have a hunch that i have this fern that's probably completely riddled with scale because i cleaned off a different fern a couple weeks ago that was also very middle of the scale so so i have been purposely waiting to water this plant because i knew it needs a cleaning so it's definitely going to look a little wilty today in comparison that's going to look tomorrow after i go ahead and clean this and give it a watering but this is my kangaroo paw pawfurn or my microsorum diversifolium and i feel very correct that this plant is totally riddled with brown scale do you guys see that all over the backside leaves which is funny because i was talking about that in a recent video and someone was like those are definitely spores on the back of your fern honey those ain't no spores these are brown scale and they are here to slay so um you can see this large one right here that i'm kind of breaking with my fingers so i can just scratch them off if i want but there are a lot of them they're all hiding out along the like a vein or like rib of my leaves so this is going to be a little bit more of an intense cleaning job so let's go ahead and get right in there with this solution i'm just gonna scrub scrub scrub scrub scrub i'm going to be much less gentle than i was being with my hoya this fern is a much more heartier fern i would probably be second guessing whether i would be wanting to use this alcohol situation on a much finer fern per se like a maiden hair fern as this alcohol could dry out those very thin leaves and kind of cause some issues maybe appearance wise i am not speaking on experience i am literally just guessing but i'm not worried about this whatsoever with this heartier firm so really just getting in there front and back there are scale hiding all over this plant but this alcohol should kill most of them but my goal is really to clean off this plant because i really just don't want the scale still living there dead or alive we have this fern frond right here that you can see all the little baby scales hiding in there all those little tiny brown bumps just once again go in there and there are other products that i use on my home i often use and i've talked about these in plenty of my other videos um captain jack's which is a spin acid spray which that's an important kind of spray to use if you're dealing with spider mites because spin acid is going to be a miticide which is very helpful because a lot of pesticides are for or insecticides i'm sorry are for insects and it just so happens that spider mites are not insects so that's not going to work and i often like to use house plant systemics which is a powder which is basically a chemical and it'll just kind of you put it right in the soil and it will get absorbed up through the plants veins and then any bugs that stuck on the plants will die which is a very helpful thing but i'm also aware that that is not available in a lot of different countries so i figured that rubbing alcohol and soap and of course water are going to be available much more readily and this is straight up something that i use all the time i'd say i honestly probably use this solution more often than i'm using my captain jacks or my systemics mainly because i don't have to buy this separately like i have to order a thing of captain jacks and i have to order systemics but i can just run downstairs to the cvs or the rite aid or what have it and get some rubbing alcohol and some dish soap and i am ready to clean off my plants so these leaves i'm sure you can tell i have definitely been neglecting this i did not realize that this was bad like i assumed that there was a couple scale on here because the other fern but this is all the way across the room for my other farm and i feel like i just featured this in one of my videos recently and it was not this bad but goes to show kids how bad these infestations can get pretty quickly i think that this brown scale actually came from my natal mahogany which is across the room like i said but um it really seems to find the plants that it loves and i experienced that with some of my other plants like for example i deal with thrips in my home which are an absolute nightmare in comparison to uh mealybug and scale so i'm fortunate that i'm just dealing with this here but i will find like thrips really love like the new leaves on my philo dungeon so there could be one philo dungeon in my bedroom with new leaves that has strips and another one out in my living room all the way across the room but the thrips just seem to know where to go this leaf right here you can see once again these are hiding in here all over the place this is a really like waxy type of scale that like i said you can really go at it with your finger but i would guess that many of you might find that to be kind of gross so you can just go ahead with your paper towel your sponge your rag whatever you feel most comfortable with cleaning off your plants this leaf right here as you can see it's very very infested you can see there's like literally a hundred scale deciding here and it's just a tiny little leaf so i'm not even gonna bother with this one i am just going to clip it right off at the base you also need to be mindful with these stems here the scale are absolutely going to hide there too oh i can see this one back here i don't want to remove that leaf because it's a really beautiful leaf but there is this one stem right here this just practically looks like it's blistering with the scale and i apologize i'm sure that i'm not able to get this as well as i would like to but it literally looks like the stem has blisters on it because it's so covered in very very mature scale so that's one i'm gonna have to make sure that i go in and yeah so really gonna have to pay some close mind to this plant here this is obviously going to be a much more intense cleaning job than the last few plants so i'm going to go ahead and finish this plant remove some of these dead and dying leaves and then i'll be back with you guys in a moment obviously this is a pretty intense attack of these um brown scale here on my fern and i'm sure many of you or at least some of you might find your fern looking you know kind of sad and wilted and covered in these scale and just be like i'm throwing it out which you know you know i would admit that i would do in some situations but i really like the way that this looks it's got a lot of character and i know it looks really bad right now but i feel so confident it's going to look fantastic after i go ahead and throw this in the shower and water it that i'm going to include a little snippet of what it looks like tomorrow which has to be tomorrow because the day after is when this video is going to be posted in the morning so just saying but um what is my limit what is my threshold when it comes to dealing with pests and i would just get rid of something um scale and mealybug like i was saying i think are a little more um controllable you're never going to be able to really eradicate pests in my experience it just kind of seems to be something that kind of you got to deal with as a planned parent but if i was to find a plant that was totally riddled with maybe spider mites and the leaves were all you know pale and gross and splotchy and just covered in spare my damage i might go ahead and toss that or if i have a plant that's really dealing with the thrips very poorly once again i'm going to go ahead and just toss that and not even bother with it or maybe try taking a cutting of the plant and salvaging a cutting and really cleaning it off very well but this fern i see a lot of potential with this just because it's got some gross brown scale on it i think um it's going to be very easily treatable is all the scale going to be off of it and this is plant going to be back to normal after the situation no it's going to need at least another clean before i can say that this plant is nearly pest free and it might take even more than that but i still think it's well worth it for this beautiful fern it's just something that i feel like i have to deal with with a lot of my ferns but i'm going to go over this plant one more time to see because i see like a couple more just like larger scales that are hiding here and there's some ones that i can just go out with my fingers before i go ahead and get this in the shower but as you can see i really should have worn some gloves because my fingers are pruning up from that alcohol just really drying them out so i think it's time for me to about call it a day but i'm just gonna let this sit a little bit longer we're gonna go ahead and rinse it off in the shower and then um hope for the best i just finished giving these guys a nice rinse and a good watering so now that i have all of my plants leaves cleaned off of the cleaning solution and now that they're all well watered i'm just going to let them sit here in my shower for the rest of the day or perhaps until tomorrow morning until they are dry and their planters are dry and their leaves are dry and all of that stuff and then put them back in their regular spaces in my home and you know of course ones like the aglemon the stromanthy that had minimal pest issues uh they are totally fine and i'm not going to have to give them another cleaning anytime soon other than my typical like weekly plant maintenance of just like dusting the leaves and whatnot and watering when it's time to water but you know the fern definitely going to need another cleaning in a week or so time because that was disgusting it was riddled with brown scale it was very very uh it was a situation to say the least and the hoya as i do with all my other hoyas do have to keep a close eye on those crevices between the leaves and the stems because that's where those mealybugs really love to hide and also those new leaves as i'm sure you guys saw so that is how i've been cleaning my plants and taking care of them and i really just wanted to share this method with you guys because i know that i have done videos in the past on plant or pest care pest care pest management and as i said some of the products are not available in every country but this is something that i feel confident you can literally go to your local grocery store or drugstore and they're going to have everything available if you don't already have everything available in your home already so that's going to do it for today's video cleaning my plants plant maintenance dealing with plant pests and whatnot so thank you guys so much for joining me if you don't already follow me on instagram at philly foliage subscribe to my channel and i will see you guys in my next video have a great day

Channel: Nick Pileggi

Views: 63,628

Keywords: how i, how to, clean, houseplants, plant, plants, nick pileggi, phillyfoliage, alcohol, soap, aglaonema, hoya, stromanthe, fern

Id: HpVvEVOifWA

Length: 26min 34sec (1594 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021