Prayer Plant (Marantaceae) Care — Ep 031

[Music] hey guys this is summer rain from homestead Brooklyn and today's question revolves around the Marne teh CA or the prayer plant family we've actually had a significant number of questions around prayer plants which is so good to see because these plants three or four years ago if you walked into a garden center or a plant shop these are really hard to find but now if you walk in you see so many different varieties which is so cool because house plant enthusiast market really started to ask for new and interesting cultivars and varieties so I have 12 different varieties or cultivars or species here across four different general now Jenna is just a scientific way to group like plants together it's the plural for a genus so I have four different general here this is stro monthi this one in the that began up here closer to you are moranto so then I have kallithea here and then this is a tune on the-- now the first thing you'll notice about these plants is the striking foliage now you walk into a plant shop and you're just like oh these are so beautiful because they have so many different types of colors and patterns on their leaves so it's not unusual for somebody to just walk in and say oh my gosh I want this plant without knowing very much else about it but the striking foliage foliage you'll see that a lot of these plants and I have one right here have like this almost aubergine or maroon bottom some of them have a white bottom and then you'll see all these different kind of colors along the the primary veins of these plants now this is for good reason these plants love a moist and humid environment so they they have a lot of water saving and also light light saving qualities these are plants that would typically be found on the forest fluor in the understory so they don't get a tremendous amount of light so these bottoms these maroon or purple bottoms this is on the the abaxial surface which means underside and on the abba ad axial surface on the upper side you'll see all these different colors but this maroon or sometimes though the whitish bottoms will actually prevent the light from going through the leaf and pump it back up through the the green part of the leaf again so that it maximizes the light that it gets what's good about that how it translates into our homes is that these are truly medium to even you could push it into the low light plant arena which is great because let's face it like a lot of us don't have a tremendous amount of light in our homes the downside though is that and I mentioned this before is that these plants love moisture which means they love high humidity which is something that we don't often have in our plants and as we start to approach the the colder climate the colder seasons that heater that heating that we have in her house often dries out the air a lot more these plants are particularly sensitive to too much heat or too dry within the air so you'll notice and I'll pull this calathea zabrina out you'll notice it starts to curl its leaf along the edge here so even before a plant will turn flaccid or you know start to look a little sad this will curl its leaf so I've noticed in my 10 anthe right here as well in this calathea which might have been a little bit too close to the window it started to curl and really it's the leaf like is basically taking its leaves and saying I'm gonna shade myself from the hot Sun or this hot temperature so I could hold on to that moisture within my leaf the other thing you'll see is that and how the prayer plants actually get their name is that the plant really love to move and if you have a prayer plant in your house you'll totally know what I mean by this but in the daytime it'll actually put its leaves down similar to this and then the evening if you've ever watched a time-lapse it'll start to fold its leaves up as if it's in prayer and again another great water saving technology that these leaves have developed themselves now these plants are typically found in Central or South America and I'd mentioned this before but on the forest floor and they love this kind of high humidity medium light their soil likes to stay pretty moist and I have a whole section that I've done another plant went on me on watering hacks in the home so if you haven't seen that one definitely tune in because I talked about hydro spikes and humidity mats and ways to kind of beef up the humidity within your area and these are plants that definitely thrive in that kind of environment the soil you'll want it to be able to hold on to some water but also still drain because these plants will even though they like to be moist they will have root rot if you have it sitting in too much water and also these plants are quite sensitive not just to a lack of humidity but the type of water that you give it and I found this out kind of the hard way because I'm in New York City supposedly we have like some of the best water ever but I was using just regular tap water on the marathas here and I started to notice a lot of leaf browning now I had really good humidity so I was like well that's not it so what could it be and I tried using distilled and filtered water and that was so much better the brown edgings which you'll see sometimes this on this Tremonti it gets a little bit of crisper Brown edgings so again might be the heat might be lack of humidity but it could also be the type of water that you're using so if you have too much dissolved salts if you have too much fertilizer on these plants they're definitely going to be sensitive to that now the other thing you'll probably notice and this may have happened if you have had these plants long enough is that they will start to die back so you might have really beautiful leaves one minute and then all of a sudden it's what looks like a dead stock now I pulled out three of my plants here I have this calathea zabrina this calathea veggie ahna and this calathea loose nari all of these had dried back to this kind of brownish stock here and what I would like to say is if you've been treating your plants fairly well they may just actually be going into dormancy because what you don't see below the soil is that it actually has a pretty tuberous rhizomatous system down here so if what I'd like to do is a little test so if you're if you're able to like pull on the stem and the root and if it's still kind of hanging on there then chances are that it's actually fully alive it's just taking a little break it's like you know what guys I've been blooming I've been putting out these beautiful leaves but it's time for me to go a little dormant and oftentimes plants especially if they're subtropical or tropical varieties which is a lot of our houseplants they like to have some kind of dormancy in their dry season which is sometimes our cool season so all three of these plants had what I would say died back but you know you might not want to look at you know a brown stem within a within a pot so I would just say you know go out and get another plant but also keep this one and keep on caring for it in the same way that you would if it if it had some leaves I mean I continue to keep mine moist and boom you start to see these beautiful new leaves start to develop so these are I would say some of the best tips that you could do when thinking about moranto again truly you know low to medium light plants I would say it's perfect and more of a north facing window or a little bit further back in an east and west window or you can even put it maybe like eight feet back from a south facing window but remember you want to keep the humidity high you want to take care of the type of water that you're using and if you do those things and you're going to be a really good plant to the morontia family here so hopefully that was very helpful for you of course if you liked all of these videos that you've been seeing week over a week on plant one on me then of course subscribe it helps out a tremendous amount and I would thank you and I'd be so grateful and then of course you could follow my plant journey on instagram at homestead brooklyn and if you want more information I have a lot of blog posts up probably 60 or 70 different posts already that I launched back in February of this year and you could go on homestead brooklyn calm thanks guys tune in next week bye

Channel: Summer Rayne Oakes

Views: 682,501

Rating: 4.9415426 out of 5

Keywords: Summer Rayne Oakes, conversations, sustainability, environment, maranta, marantas, marantaceaea, calathea, prayer plant care, how to care for prayer plants, ctenanthe care, ctenanthe, stromanthe, prayer plants in the home, houseplants, houseplant care, homestead brooklyn, Summer Rayne plants, summer rayne apartment, garden answer, houseplant love, indoor gardening, garden tips

Id: g_4aEFYj3QA

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2017