Snake Plant Care: How to Grow The "Mother In Law's Tongue"!

What's up everyone. Welcome back to the channel. Today we're talking about these two plants and they're actually the same plant, they're just a different variety. Now if you've ever had problems with your houseplants, which I have and almost everyone I talk to has had problems with their houseplants, these two or any variety of these plants might be your saving grace. Now what am I talking about? These look very different, right? Well, I purposefully went to the garden center and picked out maybe a more classic variety of this plant and a rarer or more unique variety of this plant. So this is the snake plant. It's a Sansevieria trifasciata. This is a more classic one. This is called the golden honey. This one is Sansevieria trifasciata cylindrica. As you can see, we've got these nice cylindrical tendrils, kind of like aliens reaching up out of the ground. Although I don't know, this looks a little alien as well. Now in this video, we're talking about how do we care for this plant? And spoiler alert, it's actually pretty darn easy. So we're going to talk about the light, the water, the nutrition, repotting, how to deal with any sort of plant problems as well as how to even propagate so you can get even more of this beautiful plant. All right, so stay tuned. When it comes to light for the snake plant, it's pretty tolerant to most conditions, but it's going to do best if you give it bright indirect light. So here you can see, here is my window. About three to six feet away I've got my little plant bookshelf. I think this is supposed to be an actual bookshelf, but let's be honest, I'm going to be using it for plants. And so you can see, it's about 4pm right now and we're still getting a good amount of light coming in and hitting my snake plant. So they're going to do just fine like this. You probably want to avoid putting them directly on a windowsill over here. You want to avoid putting them in the dark, like maybe a closet or something. Not sure why you would ever do that, but definitely avoid something like that. This is the sweet spot. And honestly, for many houseplants, something along the lines of about five, six feet away from a window, that's going to be your golden zone. All right, it's time to talk watering. Now watering is a sensitive issue in houseplants because honestly watering is where people either overkill or underkill their plant. You're either watering your plants too much or you're watering them too little if you're a houseplant owner. Almost guaranteed. At least the people that write in to the Epic Gardening channel and send me emails and stuff, that is the biggest problem that I see with houseplants. So again, snake plants, they are succulents, right? That means they hold a lot of moisture in their leaves. They don't need a whole lot of water. Good way to test is to take your finger and put it down about two inches into the soil. If it's dry two inches down, that means, yeah, it's time to water your snake plant. And so one thing you can do is just maybe put it in the bath or put it in a shower or put it under the sink and just give it a good drench, but then let it sit there. Because as long as you've got drainage holes like these, you can, you're going to want that water to drain out, let that soil soak, but then let that water come out. Because what I'll see a lot of people do is they'll water, water, water. They have a saucer on the bottom. That saucer collects water and now there's standing water at the bottom. That's the same as having no drainage holes, right? Because then you're still rotting out those roots at the bottom. The plant's going to be starved for oxygen and you're in a bad spot. Now, another thing to think about is the smaller your pot, the more often you're probably going to have to water. And that's because the deeper your soil, the longer it takes for water to evaporate out of the soil, right? And so the smaller your pot, the more often you're going to have to water. That's a really simple tip that I think a lot of people mess up. All right, now we're talking soil. So most houseplants are going to want that rich, well-draining soil. It's kind of standard and it's across the board what most houseplants want. Snake plant is slightly different. If you go to a garden center and you get African violet mix, that's actually going to be one of the better soil mixes you can get for your snake plant. Another thing you can do if you want to make your own, what you want to do is just for that aeration element of your soil. So typically you'll do something, let's say you're making a potting mix, right? You're going to do like one third peat moss, one third well-blended compost and one third perlite. Well in the case of something like a snake plant, which again, it's a succulent and wants to drain even more, you're going to want to say maybe 50% of your mix will be something like a perlite or something to add aeration and the rest you can add that peat moss and that compost. And so all you're really doing is just bumping your perlite count up a little bit to give more larger chunks in that soil, more ability for water to drain right through and more ability for oxygen and water and air to circulate well. And that's, I mean, that's sort of a general rule of succulents. That's why when you do succulents you get a cactus mix, right? A lot better drainage, more aeration in the soil. And that's just what those plants really like. So it's pretty simple. Either go with that African violet mix or just make your own and increase the amount of perlite that you add into the mix. You might've noticed that these actually are still in the pots that I bought them in at the nursery. And you might be saying, why aren't they in a more beautiful pot? Why haven't you repotted them? Well, snake plants in general, they want to be slightly root bound. They're okay living like that. And so what I'll do is I will definitely repot these. But I'm not going to really increase the pot size at least right now. I might bump it up half an inch or something like that. That's not a big deal. But in the beginning of your snake plant's life when you grab it from a nursery, there's not a really big need to repot. After about a year or so, yeah, you're going to want to repot. It might be a little bit too root bound. And then you want to grab a pot that's about an inch bigger in diameter. So a little bit bigger. And just that mix I talked about, add some of that in. Make sure that you refresh this soil. Because again, this is a growing plant. There's, it's taking nutrients from the soil. It's taking, you know, it's getting energy from the sun. And yeah, that soil is going to get depleted. So you do need to refresh that soil. And you can of course use a general houseplant fertilizer, diluted. Maybe once a month when you, when you do water this. But in general, snake plant's a slow grower. You can actually just refresh the soil once a year. You're probably going to be fine, especially if you're growing it as a houseplant. When it comes to pruning your snake plants, you're going to find that it's not too necessary to do. But if you have a damaged leaf, so let's say, or a damaged structure, let's say this got bent and cracked or something like that. The best way to deal with that is not to cut it off here, but actually to cut it right at the soil surface. And that's going to clean up the appearance. And also really, once you chop this off, this section of the plant is really not doing a whole lot of work. So you're going to want to take that off. And so like, for example, right here, you can see there's a little cut right here. This is really not that big. So I'm not going to prune this all the way down to the bottom. That would sort of be a waste of plant tissue. And there's just no need to do that. But let's say this is really ripped. What I would want to do is kind of get in there and cut it off as close as I could to the soil surface. So that way it organizes the plant a little bit. It looks a little more aesthetic and you're getting rid of that damaged tissue so the plant doesn't have to support it anymore. Okay, let's talk division, propagation. If you want more of these bad boys, honestly, they're pretty cheap and you can buy them. They're very, very cheap. But if you want to have some fun, if you want to experiment a little bit, probably the best way, you can do it by leaf cutting too, but the best way is to let your snake plants grow naturally and then propagate them by division. And division is as simple as it sounds. Simply take this out of its pot, break up the individual plants in here and then plant those into new pots. It's dead simple. Uh, that is by far the easiest way to propagate your snake plant. That's pretty much it as far as snake plants go. Again, dead simple houseplants. So if you have a brown thumb, a black thumb, any other color thumb but green, first of all, there's no such thing as a brown or black thumb. Everyone can learn how to grow plants. That's what I'm here for. It's not that hard. Let's do it, right? But if you think that you do, these are great plants to go with. But let's talk about just a couple more things. These are some commonly asked questions that come in on the channel, on the website, on the podcast, et cetera. So number one, probably not a good idea to snack on these, right? Don't do that. Not that you were planning to have a little snake plant snack, but also your pets. They're slightly toxic. So keep them out of reach of pets, specifically cats. Cats basically love to destroy plants. I have a family friend who bought a bunch of new houseplants. Cat promptly destroyed the lower levels of all of them. Fortunately none were toxic, but I mean, come on, that's a little rude. So keep them out of the way of your plants or your pets. Excuse me. Second thing, if the leaves are drooping, you have a watering issue. Very classic. We always, we always see some sort of droopiness when it comes to a watering issue in a plant like this. All right, next question. What pests can I experience? Well, first of all, not a whole lot. They're pretty resistant to most pests. You might find that you get some mealy bugs or aphids or something like that. The best thing to do is kind of make a scan of your houseplant collection once, twice a week. See if you're seeing any little bugs come in and then take cotton swabs with rubbing alcohol, especially for mealy bugs, and just rub them off. Make sure you get as many as you can because again, with pests it's all about disrupting that life cycle. And so if you leave a couple and they're able to create progeny, well, now you still have a problem. And in some cases you have, actually have even a bigger problem. So that is another tip. Another thing you should probably think about doing, mix and match these things. You can go to a garden center and just ask them where their sensitive areas are and they'll bring you to the promised land. They'll bring you to all the sensitive areas and they will show you all the different varieties they have. And so what I'll probably end up doing is I'll grab a couple more varieties and put these all together in a big planter, right? And these can go outdoors as well. These are super popular office plants as well. But you know, you can grab some smaller ones that are a little cheaper, mix and match them, put them in a bigger houseplant pot and now you have like a really beautiful array. I mean these, it's the same plant, it looks drastically different. Imagine if you got maybe a white-leaved or black-leaved Sansevieria, which both of those do exist. That's a pretty good combo. Like the aesthetics, it's all about the aesthetics, right? So anyways, those are some simple tips on how to care for snake plants. Sansevieria trifasciata, we talked about light, we talked about watering, soil propagation, pests, diseases. By the way, diseases almost entirely are going to be of your own making. It's going to be a root rot issue. Leaf rot is extremely rare with this plant. So diseases, just don't overwater it. All right, until next time, definitely leave me a comment down below. Tell me what plants you want me to profile next and I'll see you on the next episode. Good luck in the garden and keep growing.