Queen of the night plant

DATE WRTTEN: OCTOBER 11,2008
My mother-in-law is really obsessed with plants so, here i am left with the Queen of the night plant in me and my husbads house. The big problem about this is that I dont have a clue how to take care of it other than trying to water it every week. Last month my plant had a lot of bugs, which i didnt know it was bugs cause it was white until my mother in law told me that it was. She then put the plant outside. A few days after it started to look brown so i went to walmart to get some kind of plant bug spray to kill the bugs off from the plant. The next few days the plant looked even more brown or i guess i should say burnt looking. Now, it's been almost a month and it still looks burnt. Is it permenantly dead now? What can i do to fix this? How can i kill those bugs? I feel really bad because my mother in law counted on me to take care of it and now it's all ruined. Please if anyone can help me fix this i would greatly appreciate this. Thanks!



This message was edited Oct 11, 2008 12:41 PM

This message was edited Oct 11, 2008 12:42 PM

It looks like it still has plenty of green on it, I suspect it'll recover. For the bugs, it would help if you could show a picture of them so we know what they are--my first guess would be mealy bugs, what I usually do for those is take a q-tip dipped in rubbing alcohol and use that to swab them off the plant. You'll have to keep your eye out for them though since they can come back. Or else look for a spray that lists mealy bugs on it. But there are other possibilities besides mealies, so if you can get a pic of them that would be helpful.

Your plant, Epiphyllum Oxypetalum: http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/2443/ will be fine. I would cut off all the crispy brown parts. If the white bugs you are referring to look like little cotton blobs it is probably mealy bugs as ecrane3 stated above and I rid my plants of them the same way she described, dip a q-tip cotton swab into isopropyl alcohol and wipe the white blobs off. I'm not sure what has caused the browning of the foliage on your plant. It could be from a fungus disease or lack of humidity. What type of soil do you have it potted in? I would recommend a well draining soil, you don't want the soil to stay too wet. I use Garden Safe products, they have one that is a fungicide: http://www.gardensafe.com/ProductCategories/indoorinsecticide/Fungicide3/ as well as an all around houseplant insecticidal soap spray: http://www.gardensafe.com/ProductCategories/indoorinsecticide/InsecticidalSoap/


You can raise the humidity for your plant by getting a spray bottle of water and misting the plant every day. The Epi likes bright light but no intense direct sunlight.

The brown could also be from sun damage--since the plant had been indoors and then MIL put it outside, if the area outside got any direct sun the plant wouldn't have been used to that and could have burned as a result.