Potting up a Spider Plant

I have a Spider Plant that has some very young plantlets on it. The plant is getting too large for the pot now though, and I'm wondering if it's okay to pot up now, or should I wait until the plantlets grow more and develop roots so I can re-pot them?

I would re-pot the plant now if I were you. I got my plant in a small 3 inch pot and it was very rootbound. Now it's thriving in a 6 inch pot and has several plantlet stems in various stages of growth.

They should be fine to pot up now. I sometimes wait until mine have roots and sometimes not. They seem to do well either way.

Thank you all for the replies. I will go ahead and pot up my spider plant now. It does look very root bound as far as I can tell.

I love spider plants but have 1 question: Do these things just continue to grow and grow and require larger pots...or do they reach a peak?


This message was edited Jun 2, 2006 4:22 PM

that's a good question - I do know that they do like a tight bed, but I'm not sure if there's a limit..

Anita

Hmmm....need a master gardener here. =) I guess I'll just have to find out over time? Just love these plants.

I'd like to know the answer to your question too! Hope someone comes by and gives us a clue.

I'm no MG, but I can say that from experience, and my mother's, and my grandmother's, that these things seem to grow forever... We have a variegated spider plant that's been in our family for as long as we can remember. The only way to keep it from becoming pot bound (okay, so we DO neglect it and let it get pot bound... I should say that we try to keep it from getting TOO pot bound :-) ) in the largest pot we can manage to move around, which takes 2 strong grown men to lift outdoors for the summer and back indoors in the fall, is to dig out the whole pot and divide the spider plant up into smaller pots. Then in about 3 years, we have to do the whole thing over again!

I don't know that my posting answers any questions, but hopefully it does :-) For all I know, we may just have some kind of mutant Spider Plant of Doom that wants to take over the world and most don't actually do that. I brought some plain green spider babies back from my last trip to England and though they seem happy enough here in Michigan, they are obviously not nearly as voraciously growing as the variegated plant that's been around our family for ages.

Thanks Calypsa,

I have some of the plain green ones too and they just don't grow like the variegated kind. I intermixed some of them in a few containers and they still grow slower...so I guess it is just what they do.

I can't stand to let a plant die that I know will live in the worst of conditions which a spider plant will....but I tell you, I just can't move huge pots around anymore. My biggest one is due for a division....and I am hoping that I can find homes for some of the parts. I have no trouble giving away babies but no body seems to want a grown plant!:^(

Really?? I thought more people would be excited about a grown plant (or a chunk of a grown plant) than getting a little piddly baby of a spider plant. They start so small... I know that I would much prefer a larger plant! Maybe you could cut a chunk off your big plant and just say that it's an extraordinarily large baby? :-)

My little green babies were a gift from a lovely Fellow at Trinity College who I got to know while I was studying in Cambridge in the summer of 2003. She had the most gorgeous spider plant I've ever seen. Mine always seem so wily and non-elegant. But her green one was so well-trained and draped perfectly! The wee ones I brought home are still pretty small. Someday I hope that they will grow into a nice big plant.

THANK-YOU, I had no idea you could divide the spider plant! Tells you how clueless I am about house plants! Sheesh! That is great!

Sometimes you need a very large, sharp knife lol.
http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/404360/

Mmm.... happy hacked up spider plants... :-)