Benefits of Hydrogen Peroxide on Houseplants! | Hydrogen Peroxide for Root Rot & Pest Management!

Hey guys! Today we're going to be talking about ways that you can utilize hydrogen peroxide in your houseplants to keep them extra happy, healthy, and growing as they should. I have a little disclaimer, so hydrogen peroxide should be treated more as a medicine for your plants, medicine for plants, and not necessarily as a regular part of your routine. I don't use hydrogen peroxide every single time I water, it's more of if I notice symptoms of something potentially going wrong with my plant, that's when I'll go ahead and introduce hydrogen peroxide. So if you're doing this excessively, it can harm your plants, just be sure that you're doing it with caution. For the most part, your plants will be okay, but excessive use, especially repeated over a period of time, can harm your plant overall. So yeah, we wouldn't take like cold medicine to help try to stop us from getting a cold before it even starts, before we even have symptoms. So kind of treat hydrogen peroxide as the cold medicine for your plants. Once you start noticing symptoms, that's when you'll go ahead and whip it on out. The very first way I will use hydrogen peroxide in my plants is when I am potting up plants in fresh soil. You can disinfect soil or your growing medium with hydrogen peroxide and it is really straightforward. So to disinfect the soil, what I'll do is I'll mix a one-to-one ratio of hydrogen peroxide and water. Okay, so for disinfecting the soil, you're going to need a pot that has drainage holes. Make sure it has drainage holes, whatever container you're using. Otherwise, you're just going to have a big muddy mess when you add the hydrogen peroxide water mixture. I'm not actually going to be using this soil today. I don't have anything to repot in the near future, so I'm just going to show you an example on a small amount of soil just so you can see the process. But basically, I'm just going to fill up this pot with the soil mixture that I like. I currently am using black gold all-purpose potting soil, perlite, a little bit of pumice. I have some like moss in there, just tiny little pieces, and then orchid bark. So it's really, really airy, but to disinfect this, all I'm going to do is just... I have my one cup of filtered water here. I'm going to add my one cup of hydrogen peroxide to that. Thoroughly saturate this. I do this outside on my deck so I can just let it drain through the cracks on my deck, but you could do it wherever. Just make sure you have something for it to drain into. So I'm just going to really coat it. Then basically, I would just let this dry until it was completely dry. You can kind of toss it around a little bit to help with it drying evenly. Then you can go ahead and use it, and it is disinfected, which is really nice. You don't have to worry about any pests getting into your houseplants. Keep in mind, this is something you'll probably have to do like the day or two before you're actually planning to use the soil because you do have to let it dry out. So just keep that in mind. Plan ahead if you plan to repot a plant. It is going to fizz a little bit and sound a little bubbly, but don't be alarmed by that. It's just ridding the soil of bacteria. Keep in mind, this does rid it of both good and bad bacteria. The good bacteria will come back over time, but that's why we don't want to do this too frequently or too often because if our plants don't have that good bacteria too much of the time, then it's not going to be good for our plants. Especially, I love doing this because a lot of different soil types tend to have like fungus gnat eggs or larvae or something in the soil. I'm pretty sure of this because how else do they get into our house? But it does kill the fungus gnats, so that's just a preventative measure while you're disinfecting the soil to ensure that you're not going to have like a fungus gnat infestation walking around going like this swatting all the place. You know what I mean? The next great way to use hydrogen peroxide in your plants is get rid of mold or fungus growing at the top of the soil. I know this has happened to a few of you. I get some messages on Instagram sometimes about this, but it's happened to me a few times where I don't know what it is, especially in ceramic containers. Like mold or this fuzzy stuff will kind of form on the top of the soil out of nowhere and it's only on certain plants, so I don't really know what's going on there, but using the hydrogen peroxide to kill that is really going to help. I do also use the one-to-one ratio for this. If you haven't watered your plant with hydrogen peroxide in a while then you can go ahead and just water like you would a normal plant with the hydrogen peroxide and just make sure that the soil is completely saturated. But if it hasn't been too long since you already used hydrogen peroxide, you can go ahead and put the mixture into a spray bottle and just spray the top layer of that soil and it'll help kill the bacteria that's growing there. Kind of on that same line is if you get like powdery mildew growing on the actual foliage of your plants, you can also use this to kill that bacteria and fungus and get rid of that problem. When I use this to get rid of like powdery mildew on the plants or what I think is powdery mildew, I'm not even sure if it like completely is or not, I put it into a spray bottle and I really dilute it. For our spray mixture to take care of the foliage issues, we'll of course need a spray bottle. I'm just repurposing one from Little Barn Apothecary that was from like a face mist. First go ahead and add, oh gosh I'm gonna make a mess with this. I don't have a funnel. I'm going to go ahead and add one cup of water, roughly, very very roughly. My dog is growling at the Oh this one's going to be even harder to add. Dang it. Should have thought this through. Oh that was excellent. Wow I'm talented. Screw the cap on and use it as necessary. It won't happen in all cases but if you're using a bit more hydrogen peroxide potent of a mixture then you could risk burning the foliage of your plants so just play it safe and dilute it. If you also notice pests on your plants, so this mixture does also work really well for spider mites and mealy bugs. Mealy's hate hydrogen peroxide, I'm telling you. You can go ahead and spray your plant with some of that mixture and wipe the leaves, keep a good watch on it and it'll kill the bugs. The way I think that most people will find themselves using the hydrogen peroxide water mixture is disinfect the soil when your plant is in the soil and you notice signs of pests. So mostly I would say people will end up using this for thrips and then also fungus gnats. If you're having a war with fungus gnats I definitely, number one, recommend trying mosquito bits. Mosquito bits are excellent at getting rid of fungus gnats. They do a really good job. It does take about a week or two for them to completely get rid of an issue. Definitely try doing this before going to the hydrogen peroxide mixture. If it is a fungus gnat infestation you're trying to fight, if it's thrips, then go ahead and do the hydrogen peroxide because thrips are some of the hardest to get rid of in my opinion. Let me know what you think is the hardest pest to get rid of, but for me it's thrips for sure. Oh and I will link this in the description. If you haven't tried these out, definitely recommend them before resorting to the hydrogen peroxide for fungus gnats. But if you have an outbreak and all of a sudden your plants are just crawling in extra, in pests, extra pests that has kind of gotten out of your control, then you can go ahead and water with the one-to-one ratio and it'll kill whatever is in that soil. A way to use hydrogen peroxide as medicine for plants is to prevent root rot in your plants. So if you're noticing signs of over watering slash root rot, you can go ahead and use this hydrogen peroxide mixture to save your plants and bring them back from the brink of death. Some signs you're going to look for before doing this is yellowing of the leaves, drooping or wilting of the plant. If you notice the soil is wet for an extended amount of time, I would say first go ahead and aerate the soil a bit with like an orange wet stick or something like that. If that doesn't solve the problem, then go ahead and go to the hydrogen peroxide mixture and it'll definitely help. So this is my philodendron burl marks. She's a little cutie. We kind of had a disagreement in the amount of water and I over watered her. I'm going to show you how to use the hydrogen peroxide thing to heal this. You can see she is having some yellowing discoloration. That is a sign of over watering. It can also be a sign of underwatering, but in this case I definitely know it's over watering because I remember watering her repeatedly before necessary. I'm going to go ahead and give her a hydrogen peroxide bath and show you how I do it. For the sake of the video, I'm just going to be doing the measuring and all of that in this glass, in this vase, just because it's see-through and you'll be able to see the mixture a little bit better. Normally I would just do this in my regular watering can, especially if I'm treating multiple plants. And then I already added in one cup of just filtered water out of my fridge and now I am going to add in another cup of hydrogen peroxide to my measuring cup. Pour it in. Here is the mixture. One cup water, one cup hydrogen peroxide, like you saw. Yeah, you can see it's kind of bubbly and fizzy in there. That's what we want. I should also note that even before I had this over watering dilemma, this plant has been a little bit stunted in growth. It has grown a little bit, but just very, very slowly and a lot more slowly. And the new growth is smaller than the older growth. So combined with the over-watering factor, I do think that the hydrogen peroxide mixture is going to change the game for this baby. So yeah. And definitely, if you have any care tips for this plant, please leave it down below. We would both thank you. Basically, I'm just going to, I know I just did a video about bottom watering, but now I'm going back on that because when I'm doing this treatment to my plants, I do top water. So if you're a bottom waterer too, go ahead and not bottom water in this case. I just moved my plant into a container that I will be able to wash after this. All I am going to do is just completely saturate the soil. Give it a good douse. Let it drain all the way through to the drainage pot. I wouldn't recommend doing this in the saucer that the plant sits on, but that's just me because we are going to over-water it just to make sure that we thoroughly saturate all of the soil. I don't know if you can hear that, but it's bubbling. That's a good thing. It's doing its job. Now that we've saturated the soil, you can see the soil kind of raises. That's a good sign. It's bubbling. It's moving the soil around. It's getting that extra oxygen to the roots. Now we are going to go ahead and put it back on its original saucer. And definitely, you do not want to reuse this hydrogen peroxide mixture, especially if you're treating the soil because of pests or mold or fungus or something like that. So just go ahead and dispose of this. Wash and disinfect your container, and then you're good to go and use it on more healthy plants again. Kind of another use for it, like a side effect of using it, is if you notice your plants are stunted in growth or just very weak looking, you can use the hydrogen peroxide to help give the roots that boost of energy they need to absorb adequate nutrients. In the long run, it will help your plant grow, but again, be careful. Don't do this too frequently or you will harm your plant. So those are all the ways you can utilize hydrogen peroxide to help keep your plants doing their best and looking their best. If you have any other uses for hydrogen peroxide in keeping houseplants, please let everyone know in the comments down below. That is very helpful to have tips from multiple different sources. Yeah, let me know what you thought of this video overall, and if you plan to try hydrogen peroxide and what you're going to be trying it for. That is it for this video. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in my next one. Bye! You like that? No, she hated it.