Tips on moving house plants

If you find yourself getting ready to move and have house plants, here is a tip I discovered several years ago that may be helpful. I recently shared it with a friend that suggested I post on here.

This applies primarily to 'viney' plants, but the principle applies to all potted house plants.

A couple of weeks before you move, cut back on the water to your plants and skip the last two waterings altogether. Allow your plants to become wilted with the leaves droopy and dull. Vines, like Philodendron, Creeping Charlie and Wandering Jew will benefit from this in particular. The vines will become rubbery and much less apt to breakage. You can wrap the vines around a piece of cardboard for transport. The center of a fabric bolt from your neighborhood fabric store works perfectly for this.

Once you've moved, place your plants where you want them in your new home, put the vines where you want them, on hooks or whatever, then water them.

A plump, shiny leafed, freshly watered plant is much more apt to breakage than a rubbery, wilted one.

Is that not really hard on the plant itself? What about leaf loss and/or yellowing due to lack of moisture? With my luck, they would not recover from it.

Even a Peace Lily which many people have seen wilt from lack of moisture, will still pop right back up when its watered.. My understanding is that even though it seems so resilient, the plant still suffers greatly each time this happens. JMHO...

This message was edited Nov 18, 2009 3:48 PM

hmm ... I will have to think on this awhile.

Ugh, I can't imagine having to move all the plants I have ... and I'm thankful that won't ever be happening! We've been in our house almost 35 years and when my husband retires in another five years or so we will be downsizing and traveling a bit so I plan on donating my plants to the local botanical gardens and giving away others ... they will have to bring a hand truck/dolly and move them, not me! ^_^

Re: cutting back on watering ... I think that would be okay up to a point but I don't think it would be good to let a plant stay completely dry for very long. My thinking is that a well watered plant would be plump and "rubbery" and apt to have branches bend without breaking whereas plants that are too dry would have more brittle branches that would break easily but maybe I'm not understanding correctly.

I love the idea of using cardboard tubes for vining type plants! That sure would make it easy to transport them to a new home. I remember someone on one of the forums a year or so ago talking about moving a long distance. The lady had many plants and she rigged up some type of poles across the inside back of the van/truck for hanging baskets, which sounded like a great idea. You could hang baskets real close to each other so they didn't slide back and forth on the poles during the time on the road.

A plump, well-watered vine, like a philodendron is much more apt to break that one that's a little late on being watered. I'm not suggesting starving it to DEATH for water, and guaranteed, they'll suffer much less missing a couple of waterings than from having their vines break.

I've used this method of moving plants in all of my many moves from Mississippi to Montana to Arizona to California and all my plants have survived intact and come right back with the first watering. This works on Creeping Charlies, Wandering Jew even my big split leafed Philodendron survived 4000 miles of moving without losing even one leaf as a result of the moves.

Everyone has their own way of doing things. This just happened to work for me. It may work for others.

and, I realize after reading through again ... you aren't saying to let the plants get so bone dry to where there is no moisture left in the potting medium. As long as the root area has sufficient moisture to sustain them for a few days I'm sure they would be fine. I am just so glad I'm not contemplating a move to where I'd even have to think of transporting plants, LOL.

ok, Now I understand!

Lin has a way of making things make sense!

Thanks