- Category
- Indoor
- Light
- Low light
- Watering
- Every 7-9 days
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Mature size
- 30-45 cm, with trailing plantlets
- Pet safety
- Non-toxic to cats and dogs.
Growing note
Shrugs off Indian tap water hardness better than most houseplants and throws out baby plantlets you can pot up for free. A safe pick if you have cats that like to chew leaves.
Growing Spider Plant in Indian apartments
Brown, crispy tips are a near-universal complaint with spider plants for the same reason as peace lilies, sensitivity to the salts and fluoride in hard municipal tap water, which shows up worse on spider plant than on many other houseplants because it's such a fast, thirsty grower and processes a lot of water through its system. Filtered water or an occasional deep flush of the pot reduces it noticeably. The plantlets that dangle off long runners, sometimes called spiderettes, root fastest and most reliably while still pinned into a neighboring pot of soil with the runner still attached to the mother plant, rather than snipped off first and rooted separately in water; give it two to three weeks connected before cutting the runner. Variegated types, with the white-striped leaves most commonly sold in Indian nurseries, need brighter light than the plain green form to keep those stripes; in low light the new growth comes in greener and the plant gradually loses the look it was bought for.