Ultimate SNAKE PLANT CARE Guide — Ep 202

if you don't already have a great respect for the snake plant no doubt one of our most resilient house plants around then hopefully after this video you will not only have newfound appreciation for them but also some solid information on how to care troubleshoot and propagate them [Music] in this video i'm going to drop some cool snake plant knowledge that you probably didn't know then i'll go over a range of snake plant species and cultivars then i'll take you through some of their morphological characteristics that's like more of their shape or their form and structure and then general care tips and pitfalls and finally a quick tutorial on propagation now if you haven't already heard snake plants which were known scientifically as sansevieria have been relatively recently reclassified into the genus dracena much too many people's dismay now i chatted with some of my snake plants and they said that they're pretty used to this stuff because though humans have a short-term memory over the last 250 years or so these guys have been placed into the genus of cordoline ascenta sansa virenia and sansa verena prior to them being established into san severia in 1905. so the fact that they are now in dracaena is kind of like old hat for them now i won't go too much more into that topic because i have a whole video discussing how that reclassification was determined which i'll link to above and also below in the description if you are at all curious otherwise its varied common names still hold which include snake plant of course mother-in-law's tongue i don't know why people hate their mother-in-law so much and of course one of my viewers calls it i poker which i think is such a suitable description for it and you know if i look one way or another i'm probably gonna get my eyes poked out so i do think that that's an appropriate term and then also bowstring hemp the latter which is interesting because snake plants were and are in fact used for fiber including to make bow strings and like hemp or flax both of which are bast fibers which essentially means it's a stem fiber so you actually have to rhett the stems it's ret you read the stems in order to get the fiber which essentially means you have to let the stems decay and then you wash and dry the fiber which you will be pleasantly surprised i actually did and this is what i got so i ended up taking one of my dracaena trifasciatas my sansevieria trifasciatas and i read the stem and i'm getting these little minute fibers out now i don't think it's dracina trifaciata that they use in order to make both strings it might actually be like a thicker species which gives a thicker fiber but you'll also be happy to know that i have a number of fibers here so i could show you this is flax fiber and this is also a stem fiber and it does look quite similar and feel quite similar to flax so you could see that this is probably what it would look like and i'm actually even wearing some of linen in my shirt today so this is produced very similarly to hemp and linen and you can see it doesn't look as it looks a little less softer than like say a silk which this is obviously silk and then i have tencel here which is actually made out of wood but it's a wood pulp and then it's extruded with a lot of chemicals unfortunately but this is actually a more natural fiber so i thought that was pretty cool in order to be able to get those results so what's cool about this is that the fibers are so strong and absorptive they're even considering it now for crude oil cleanups according to a 2020 article in journal of natural fibers that i read now additionally through their native range which is principally throughout africa but they actually can be found throughout the arabian peninsula and throughout some parts of asia like i think india sri lanka and burma now snake plants have been used in those areas medicinally for a range of ailments like everything from bronchitis to snake bites i mean if you look into the ethno-botanical literature you'd think snake plants are like a panacea because people use them for just about everything and there has been a resurgence of interest in compounds from both dracena and the genus formerly known as sansevieria in pharmacological circles now there's a lot of information in the literature about snake plants antibacterial properties and its leaves and also the rhizomes which are the underground stems and as a matter of fact one peer-reviewed paper and i have this here it's called flavonoids and stillbinoids of the genera dracaena and sansevieria structures and bioactivities in the journal molecules so that even went on to say that the structural similarities of flavonoids isolated from sansevieria and dracaena plants seem to justify on a chemotaxonomic basis the recent inclusion of sansevieria species inside the genus dracaena so essentially what that says is that the two once separate groups of dracaena and sansevieria look a hell of a lot alike from a chemistry standpoint as well as a genetic standpoint as we found out in my earlier video on the sansevieria reclassification now as i film this video there are botanists right now who are doing genetic studies on snake plants to better understand how they are related to one another and which ones are actually true species versus like hybrids or cultivars or even subspecies so i'm sure that even within one to two years we'll have a better assessment as to how many species are actually out there but there are probably now over 90 species in the snake plant grouping and they can all be readily cross pollinated and hybridized and they readily show variations in their leaves so there are a lot of different cultivars and variants out there which is why when you go see dracaena trifociata or sansevieria trifasciata there's so many different types of cultivars including this one which is dracaena trifasciata lorenti which has this gold markings along the edge now if you take a closer look at the plants i have here you will see some of those color and modeling differences all throughout here but you'll also notice that they have different leaf structures now some plants have these broader flexible leaves others have broad leaves that aren't so flexible so for instance right here these are not flexible at all and then you have some that have narrow flattened leaves like this others have more guttered type of leaves and then still some are actually cylindrical or elliptical like here i mean even this one is a little it's cylindrical but it's a little bit more grassy so why would we pay attention to what their leaves look like well as a general rule of thumb the plants that have these thicker leaves are going to be much more equipped at dealing with dry conditions and will likely need to be watered far less frequently than some of these thinner leaf varieties that i have here now what's interesting is that the early phylogenetic studies reveal that just because one snake plant has a similar leaf to another snake plant say something that's like cylindrical in nature it doesn't mean that they're actually more closely related to one another in fact the cylindrical nature of leaves have evolved multiple times throughout the evolutionary history of snake plants okay so let's talk a little bit about light because when we talk plants we need to talk about light since that's their food source so in general snake plants are found in their natural habitat in shade all the way to full sun which really works well for house plant owners because that means they can tolerate and thrive in a range of conditions now this of course is all relative and if you're growing your snake plant in the interior of your space with very very little light then it'll likely hang out there for quite some time i would say like maybe two or even three years but it's really not going to thrive in those conditions so you'll want to give them preferably anything from like indirect light to high bright light to even full sun now the reason i recommend this is because growers typically acclimatize their snake plants in shade houses and greenhouses before they sell them on the market and that's at around 200 to 1200 ppfd or that's 1000 to 6000 foot candles and as some folks know from my houseplant masterclass course this is more equivalent to the mid-range of indirect light all the way to highlight and bright light which means if the grower is growing their plants in those conditions then you'll more likely succeed growing your plants in those conditions in your own home consequently i'm growing snake plants in all sorts of lighting conditions in my home and pretty much all are doing well but some grow way more quickly than others given the light that i'm providing them now there's a word of caution in this if you're growing your plant in less than adequate light areas then you want to be mindful when you water your plant because since those snake plants are probably not growing as quickly because you're giving them a little bit more marginal light in the interior of your space you have a chance that you could actually rot your plants and i actually did that and it's they didn't have as much of a well-draining mixture and i rotted out some of the rosettes by over watering it too much with those ones in the interior so just be careful with that you will want to air on the side of dry when it comes to these plants rather than something that is a little bit too moist and i think one of the ways that you can ensure you're not over watering your snake plant is really by choosing a well-draining potting medium using planters with drainage holes using a porous planter so something like a terracotta for instance because that clay of the terracotta will essentially wick away the moisture now another thing that we may actually overlook is when to water your snake plant i'll advise you that it's actually best to water in the beginning of the day so that the water actually has time to evaporate throughout the day instead of just sitting there at night like the plant is in a wet diaper now that could invite rot and that is something that snake plants are susceptible to which i'll cover in a few now let's talk about potting medium because if you're heavy-handed on the watering can then you can make your potting medium more porous by adding some grit so there's something like you know perlite or maybe some horticultural sand or the like now there is some research out there that if you amend the peat mixtures that you might use with a bit more sand then you'll have far more productive plants so whatever you have on hand to make your potting medium a little grittier or a little airier that's great you could see even if you just take a quick scan of some of the potting mediums that i'm using here some of them have a lot more grit like some small stones lava stones a lot more coarser perlite black lava stones red lava stones and also peat with a lot of gritty mixtures like perlite less so on the vermiculite because vermiculite will actually hold on to water now let's talk about temperature because some snake plants are more tolerant to a light but not long lasting frost i actually found a snake plant outside in the snow and even though it actually broke off by the rhizome i was able to propagate both leaves meaning it actually survived that frost but in general you'll want to ensure the temperature is between like 45 degrees fahrenheit or approximately 7 degrees celsius preferably however you're keeping a mature plant above that 50 degree fahrenheit mark which is more or less 10 degrees celsius and if you're trying to actually root these plants up then you should be maintaining a potting medium temperature of about 70 to 75 degrees fahrenheit or 21 to 24 degrees celsius so if you do that and you keep a reasonable level of humidity and air flow for these plants then you'll probably start seeing roots and i would say you know maybe like four to six weeks as long as it's during the growing season it's going to be pretty hard to do that in the winter even if you're giving it an adequate light and you're giving it adequate humidity and airflow but this actually brings us to propagation which is a topic i've covered in an earlier video i'll show you one of the more common ways to propagate your snake plant and that is through division this is actually one of the best ways to be able to preserve some of your color patternings on your snake plant especially if it happens to have modeling or variegation and i go over why that is the case in the propagation video now let's go over some common problems that could come along with growing snake plants one we already discussed which is chilling damage since these plants aren't you know really incredibly hardy with frost then you can freeze some of the plant tissues and cause damage in your plants over watering is another issue which can invite rot and rot could take in the form of fungus or bacteria and i cover a lot of those issues in the house plant master class some examples of fungal rot may be fusarium or anthracnose for instance and also insects are not uncommon on snake plants however you know you have thrips you have brown scale and mealy bug on my own i've definitely seen mealy bug and some brown scales and now if you start seeing a little bit more stunting in your leaves or if you see some things that leaves that are kind of starting to look a little bit weird you may look at your roots because there could be a nematode that actually infects the roots now there could also be kind of mechanical or cultural damage i mean obviously some of these are quite tall and if you see some of these brown tips or if you see you know broken leaves or anything it's not usually anything like a fertilizer damage that you might see in some more sensitive plants finally let's just figure out the best places to put your snake plants because as you could see and as we've already discussed there's a lot of different structural and morphological differences between the various snake plants now if you look at the ones that kind of stand up like this like this is my dracaena trifociata laurenti it has this beautiful variegation and it's relatively upright now sometimes the leaves do flop over and in my snake plant propagation video you probably saw one of my dracaena trifasciatas that look like you know that it's limp limped over and you know you it happens when it's just trying to reach out it gets too tall it's not getting direct above light and you might be walking into it and you might break it a little bit so you know you just want to be mindful you could probably just cut those off but because this has this like vertical orientation you could put it in different corners of your house that may not have a lot of space so i actually have this in my southwestern window and again it's one of those thicker plants that could handle some of that intense light coming through my southwestern window which is what i get because i'm in the northern hemisphere then you have some of these plants here like this dracaena pinguecola and i have this one that's a little bit shaped more like a bat and then i have this subspecies here which is a type of dracaena angolansis and it has the subspecies it makes it like really tiny so it's like one of those little starfish ones but it's a really tiny one and then this is formerly known as sansevieria fischeri but i i don't know actually what it's turned into in dracina but they have these like rosettes so this is something that i have on my windowsill you know it's not taking up too much space they tend to grow a lot slower i found so those can be more compact then you have others like this this is formerly known as sansevieri gracilis but i'm not quite sure what it is in dracaena and it starts to shoot out these little stolens or rhizomes and you see them going out like this so again very sharp bottoms and and this could actually you know pick you or scrape you if you walk by so i have this on a higher shelf so you know nobody bumps into it and hurts themselves or hurts the plant so this gives you a little bit more of an idea of how you might actually decorate your home with snake plants but there is a lot that i covered in this video so i do hope you enjoyed it if you liked it give it a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe to this channel because it really does help the channel grow and you can also hit the notifications button while you're at it because if you want to get more of these videos directly to you in your inbox then that's how you do it alright guys see you later did you know that you can be a supporter of plant one on me well take a look at our sustaining membership because through your direct support it helps allow us to keep producing high quality videos and some of the easiest ways that you could support are liking the video subscribing to the channel and hitting that notification button to get these videos delivered to your inbox if you're interested in furthering your houseplant education then take a look at our courses and digital offerings like houseplant basics for beginners and the houseplant master class both of which will give you a certificate of completion when you're finished with the courses information on all these offerings can be found on the website at homesteadbrooklyn.com you

Channel: Summer Rayne Oakes

Views: 179,560

Rating: 4.9140673 out of 5

Keywords: Summer Rayne Oakes, Homestead Brooklyn, Plant One On Me, plants, houseplants, indoor plants, house plants, houseplant care, snake plant, snake plant care, snake plant propagation, Sansevieria plant care, Sansevieria propagation, Mother-in-laws tongue care, snake plant light, snake plant soil, snake plant fertilizing, snake plant water, how to grow snake plants, how to grow Sansevieria, snake plant benefits, snake plant root rot, snake plant collection, snake plant in water

Id: _btLlX7UzH8

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020