– So, hello everybody. And thank you for welcoming me to your wonderful state. When PBS and the Expo approached me about a topic, I was so excited, as I typically am about many subjects. And I really just, at the time, couldn’t narrow it down. Most of my presentations are typically very specific. But I decided that it would be genius to go with everything there ever was to know about indoor gardening. Prepare to ride the fast train. I do speak pretty quickly, naturally. And we have a lot to cover. But feel free to flag me if I’m just really going too fast.

It won’t be the first time I’ve heard it. My dad says when my girlfriends and I get together, we sound like a fax machine, so I’m used to it. So let’s get started and we’ll get right in there. There’s a lot of reasons to grow indoors. One is that it is extremely fun. We’re all plant people, or we wouldn’t be here. So we know the joys that that can bring. It’s convenient, as opposed to outdoor gardening. You don’t even have to walk out the front door to do it. It’s really rewarding to see something flower, or you’ve grown a food crop for the first time indoors.

And there’s a lot of just really great, rewarding aspects of growing plants, through the learning process. It can be very inexpensive, unless you are a plant collector of rare plants. Most plants can be purchased pretty cheaply, and kept for a very long time. And it’s also good for your health. We do a lot of teaching about growing food in homes, which obviously is better for your health, because you have fresh produce right there and available to you, almost always organic. But that’s true for house plants and other types of plants too. It provides oxygen in the air. It has been proven that plants around lift our moods. So it is a health booster. And besides that, it gives us something to do besides binge-watch Netflix.

So I’m gonna go through the basics first. What every plant, regardless of what you’re trying to grow, whether that’s an orchid, or lettuce plants, or whatever it is, these are some basic requirements for plants. And if you grow plants, you know these basics. But I think there’s some tips and tricks that I can offer to help you you improve these categories. And if you’re really trying to dial in, growing a plant to its most thriving ability, it’s important to pay attention to all four of these aspects. A lot of people are very good at maybe one or two of these things, but could use brushing up. Those four things I’m gonna address first are temperature, water, and I also put humidity in that category, nutrients or fertilizer, and light. And I did put a special footnote on light because for a very long time, and until just recently, we all know light’s important for plants. But we were using, even on a commercial scale, what was available to us, and that wasn’t always ideal for plants. They’re not always emitting the types of lights and wavelengths that plants use to photosynthesize.

For example, we’ve used fluorescents for seed starting for a very long time. It’s what we had. There’s a lot better technology out there. And that technology is moving very quickly, and it is a tough world to keep up on. But same in the greenhouse, we use high-pressure sodiums or metal-halide. High-pressure sodiums we used because that was what was available. They are originally designed to be street lamp lights. So it wasn’t ideal for plants. So just now, finally, we’re getting into a world where we can really dial in light and wavelengths for plants. So when it comes to growing indoors, this we can breeze, for most of us, breeze right over.

Because most plants like, have an ideal temperature of between 65 and 75 degrees. And for the majority of us, our houses are usually in that range. If it’s a teeny bit lower or a teeny bit higher, it doesn’t affect most plants that much. So most of us are already delivering a pretty good temperature. There are such things as cool crops, like lettuce, you know, the things you plant first in your outdoor gardens. And there’s plants that don’t mind if it’s a little bit cooler. And those, you can go down to 60 and still have a very healthy plant. There are plants that like it much hotter, tropical plants. Sometimes temperature is also used to trigger flowering. So sometimes the plant doesn’t always need maybe this high or low temperature.

But maybe to trigger flowering, it does. But most of us are already in this range. So there’s not a lot we have to do. Having said that though, sometimes a plant can look not its best for something very small. And sometimes those things are temperature. You know, maybe your house is a perfect 70, but you have your plants next to the heat vent, or maybe a really drafty window, or right by an outdoor door that you open and shut all the time. So it’s constantly getting drafts. Or maybe there’s big temperature fluctuations. So maybe it’s warm in the day when sun’s getting in, and very cold in that room at night. Whatever the case may be, drastic swings in temperature are not good.

And you can’t have a plant look, much like how a 15-degree day is much colder if it’s windy for us humans, right? That’s because the wind is whisking away our little microclimate of body heat. So it feels colder; same with plants. If there’s constantly a heat vent blowing on it, you’re kind of whisking away its little microclimate. So a very simple fix can be the problem for problem plants. Watering is, I was an a educator at a college in the horticulture department for several years with primarily student waterers. And of course, many years of students. Watering is absolutely the hardest thing to teach someone else. It’s intuitive. It absolutely depends on what plant you’re growing. It depends on the conditions in which you’re growing those plants.

You know, any two of us growing the very same plant that we bought at the same garden center on the same day is not gonna take it home to an identical growing environment at home. And our habits are different, both watering and where we’re gonna put it. It’s very hard to give somebody a recipe and say. . . I’m a grower at a greenhouse. And I get people all the time come in. “How much should I water this?” They wanna, “Well, I water every Sunday. I give it a half a cup every Sunday. ” I’m not a big fan of calendar watering because there are, even in your homes.

Outside, there’s a lot of variables. But inside your homes, there’s still variables. Maybe you’re trying to grow in a window. Well, the day length changes throughout the year. We can go from a little over nine hours of sunlight on the shortest day of the year to 14, 15 hours. That plant is not getting the same light from season to season. So their needs are gonna change. The less they’re respiring and photosynthesizing, the less water they’re gonna need. So being able to move with that is important. Using drainage holes is extremely important when growing indoor plants.

They have to be able to drain. If they don’t, it’s causing root rot problems. It wears the soil out of nutrients and breaks it down much quicker. The roots don’t have a healthy place to grow. And I’ll show you a chart that will show you an ideal soil, what a soil should really be made of, its profile. But drainage holes are huge, and very important. I get a lot of people bring in sick plants, and a lot of them have no drainage holes. So there is definite correlation there. And the best tip I can give you, and I’ll try and give you little tips and tricks along the way, is really know your plants. The problem with watering all your house plants on Sunday, while convenient, is you might have some in a little three-inch pot.

You might have a big hibiscus or a ficus in a 10-inch pot. Those things are gonna dry out at different rates. So knowing your plants is the best thing. When we’re packed in the spring with plants in the greenhouse, we’ll have upwards of 450 varieties. If I watered all of those the same way every day, most of them would be dead. So knowing the actual plant you’re growing is very important. So here’s the chart, as promised. So the composition of your media that you’re using should look roughly like this. So if you are overwatering. And by the way, far more people kill their plants overwatering than they do underwatering.

I’ve seen it time and time again. They love them too much. And drying out can be a problem, but most plants will perk back. If you consistently overwater, you’re gonna see some problems. So at any given moment, your soil should really only be containing 25% moisture. So if you’re a heavy-handed waterer, and you’re just dousing that pot so you don’t have to water for a while, you’re really waterlogging the soil. And the plant’s not using all of it, so it stays wet, it sits wet. You’re really striving for about 25% moisture in your soil. And very much related to that is airspace. Your roots have to have oxygen to grow.

The best plants have the best roots, right? And if you’re soaking it with water, you’re filling all those pores that should have been air space. So now you have too much water and you have no oxygen. That’s a recipe for disaster every time. So minerals, that’d be things like perlite, vermiculite, and organic matter, things like shredded bark or compost. So that’s what a soil profile should look like for most indoor plants. Not only should they have drainage holes, but at Happy Leaf, we’re really big fans of the self-watering containers. I love them because, especially if you’re unsure of your ability to be a fantastic waterer, it kind of takes some of the guesswork out of it for you. You noticed, if you can see them, each one of these has a little hole in the bottom. So if you’ve never used one before, it’s just a reservoir in the bottom. And you fill the bottom reservoir with water.

That way, the plant is uptaking water as it needs it. And when the water goes down, that’s air space in itself. And it also reduces disease, because you’re not watering the foliage. You’re not watering the top of the soil at all. You’re letting all the water draw up through capillary action from the bottom. This helps a lot, and it takes a lot of the guesswork. And it also helps you to water less frequently, ’cause especially some of these have pretty big reservoirs. So you can fill them up much less frequently than if you are watering over the top. So a bit about humidity. It’s surprising what havoc humidity can really cause.

And I think it’s overlooked a lot. Most of our homes are 40% to 50% relative humidity, and that’s okay for most plants. Some plants, some super tropical plants do require more than that. And if you think of their native habitat, where we extracted those plants initially, they’re in tropical rainforests, so it’s very humid. We take them out of that environment and we put them in our dry homes, and they can suffer. And I see it a lot. There are some cool tips and tricks you can use. You can water using a saucer, like this top picture shows, filled with pebbles. What that does, I know we talked about microclimate a little. If you keep that pebble tray watered, it creates this little dome of humidity around on your plant.

And that can be extremely beneficial if you’re struggling with humidity. Again, this is really very plant specific, unless you have a very dry house. Some are just more sensitive than others. So the humidity trays, you can buy these humidity trays online. And you basically, it’s a tray you set your plants on, and that tray is filled with water. Now, the roots and the plant aren’t in direct contact with it. But as that water evaporates, it’s creating a good amount of humidity for your plants. If you really have a humidity problem, like commercially, we have to very much pay attention to this. You can use a humidifier, mist bottles. I’m not a big fan of misting your plants, because I’m not a big fan of wetting the foliage.

It promotes a lot of disease, and you have to be very careful if you’re gonna be using a spray bottle. So some common signs that, especially in the winter, that you have too much or too little humidity, most of the time, it’s too little. And a lot of times in the winter, we’ll see a plant that has these brown tips, like the top picture here. That, very often, can be a sign of low humidity. You can get these yellow margins, although that can be caused by several things, nutrients more likely. That can happen. The leaves can fall off completely, which isn’t always. . . It’s a very good sign that there’s a humidity problem, but that’s not always the case, because a lot of plants, remember, have a natural dormant phase.

So they wanna go dormant. I have a plumeria that I bring in every winter. And it looks great for about three weeks, and then one by one, all the leaves fall off. And then the next spring I put it outside, and it comes back out. So you shouldn’t panic for some plants. And sometimes, that’s just a natural dormancy period. If you have a flowering plant and they develop buds, but they just never quite open, that could be a humidity problem. When you have too much humidity, it’s always, almost always a disease issue at that point. You’re gonna get powdery mildew. You’re gonna get botrytis, which is what strawberries, older strawberries get.

Which is gray mold. And it can look something like this. Whether it’s powdery mildew, sometimes downy mildew. Too much humidity is usually a disease issue. And I have a few slides like this. I’m not throwing it at you to memorize, or make this complicated on you. I just want a snapshot to illustrate. These are all of the nutrients that plants need to thrive. They have an atmospheric component, what they need from the environment. And then they have the primary nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.

And that’s what we always talk about. But I really wanted you to understand that there are a lot more elements at play, even though they don’t get front page news. That’s why they call magnesium, sulfur, and calcium secondary nutrients. And they’re very, very important. You might see in your garden centers, they sell what’s called cal-mag fertilizer. That’s calcium and magnesium. Because they are needed in higher quantities, just not as essential as the NPK. But they are very important. And even the micronutrients are very important. Some of these are found just in our drinking water.

So when you’re watering your indoor plants, they can get some of this. But what’s important to know about the micronutrients, is while they need very little of it, and often we’re providing those things without even knowing it. Some of those micronutrients can compete with others. For instance, iron competes with manganese very readily. So if you have too much iron in the water, you could now suffer a magnesium deficiency. They compete with each other in the soil. So those are just nuances to know that there’s more involved than just the nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. So again, this chart isn’t meant to confuse you. I don’t even expect you to read it. I just want you to know that these are out there.

They’re fantastic tools. If a plant is suffering, you don’t know why. It’s got yellow margins. It has purple tips, it has curling tips. It’s losing all its lower leaves. Those are very good signs you have a nutrient deficiency. And there are some great resources online, my favorite being, you can get these pictures where it shows like kind of what a manganese deficiency might look like. Or iron is a very easy one to spot, because the whole leaf turns yellow except for the veins. They’re yellow. If you grow petunias outside, and they turn yellow, that’s an iron deficiency.

But what I like more, even more is these deficiency keys. Because you can really fine tune what you have versus basing it on somebody’s illustration. Is it happening to the older leaves or the younger leaves? Is it happening all over the plant? You can start there. And then, okay, is it on the edge of the leaf? Is it just in the veins? So you can really narrow down what deficiency you have. So know that these keys are out there. They’re very effective tools if you feel like your fertilizer regime is off. So NPK, since they’re the stars of the show, we’ll give them a little extra special attention. So nitrogen is really for vegetative growth. You often hear NPK referred to as shoots, fruits, and roots. Because that’s what primarily those things are helping the plant to do.

And I love, we often recommend this fertilizer for growing at home hydroponically, this MaxiGrow and MaxiBloom. And if you’ll notice, those numbers correlate with NPK. So 10, 5, 14 would be nitrogen and phosphorous and potassium. When the plant is in a vegetative state, you’re putting on green growth, then we would recommend that you use MaxiGrow. It’s got that high nitrogen, and nitrogen grows good shoots. As soon as that, whatever it is, starts to flower, we recommend you move to the MaxiBloom. Now notice the numbers change. Now, I want to take down my concentration of nitrogen, and I really wanna boost my phosphorus. Because I don’t want the plant putting a whole bunch of energy, and putting out even more green growth. I want it to concentrate and use its energy on flowering, fruiting or flowering.

So that just illustrates. And the 14 stays the same. Why? Because good roots are important whether the plant is green or whether it’s flowering, or no matter what. The health of the roots is often a very serious reflection of the health of the upper part of the plant. So roots are very, very important at all times. So, when you’re fertilizing your plants, I get this question a lot. And I really tried to put this presentation together in the eyes of the customers that come see me with their problem plants. And every time somebody’d come in with a new problem and I hadn’t put it in here yet, I tried to, so. And fertilizing is, seems to be like the great dark hole for a lot of people. How much is too much? The best advice I can give you when it comes to fertilizer is always, always follow the label.

More is not better. More is not gonna make it grow faster. What it’s gonna do, it may make it grow faster. But growing faster also makes it grow weaker. So more is not better; do follow those. They’ve done hundreds of trials to find that rate, which ideal, it’s not too much, it’s not too little. What is that ideal rate? Follow that and definitely don’t use more. I get the question, “How often should I fertilize?” That very much depends on the stage the plant is in. If you’re shooting for flowers, you got buds, you’re really excited, you’re gonna get flowers. Maybe you wanna give it a higher rate.

The flowering rate, not higher than the recommended. Or it’s in the winter, a lot of plants, whether they’re, I mean, maybe not like my plumeria, where it loses all its leaves. A lot of plants have a dormant phase, or at least a resting phase. So they still have green foliage, but they want a period of rest. And that usually, for us, naturally occurs in the winter. And fertilizing becomes a lot less necessary then. I very rarely fertilize, if at all, in the three months, in the hardest three months of winter, especially that first three months. I want to get them going and rejuvenated a little bit before spring. But I very rarely fertilize in the winter. And if I do, it’s a very weak fertilizer.

So fertilizing every time is really unnecessary for most crops that are grown indoors, even if it’s a high-feeding plant. You do wanna water it once in a while with clear water to flush out. Those fertilizers are salts, and it builds up in the soil. So you do want to flush your soil with clear water periodically to get rid of excess fertilizer. If you’re not good at this, or you don’t want put a lot of thought into it, then I would consider a slow-release fertilizer. Osmocote is a popular brand, and it’s basically pelletized fertilizer, that every time you water, just a very little bit dissolves off. So you get a little fertilizer, then you water it next time, and a little bit dissolves off it. So it’s actually putting a little bit of fertilizer every time you water. And you can get formulations that are up to three months. You can get some that are six and nine months, commercially anyway.

If you wanna take the guesswork out of it, maybe not in the winter, but slow-release fertilizers can be really magical that way. Like I said before, it’s a misunderstood thing. Most of our plants indoors really prefer, unless they are truly low light loving plants, prefer 12 to 16 hours of sun a day, and of high quality light a day. Even if you have the best south-facing, sunniest window, or a greenhouse. Unless you have have, remember what we talked about before. We can have nine-hour days; that’s not enough, even if all the sun’s coming in. But even those situations are not ideal, unless it’s sunny every day where you live, there’s absolutely no tree shadow or anything throughout the day. You’re not getting optimal light in a windowsill. Greenhouses, you get the full arc of the sun. But even if it’s south-facing, you still only get sun for a certain part of the day.

And then it has to be sunny to even get those rays, right? So that can be a problem. That means that often, for indoor plants, we have to use supplemental lighting. The three things to think about when you’re lighting are really duration, and that is just, how long am I gonna leave that light on? How much does my plant need? Quality, and that’s wavelength or color. And that’s where a lot of the technology with LED lights has come into play recently, because we can really finally dial in to this. And then quantity, which is the amount of light. If I, for example, have a grow light hanging this close to my plant, I’m getting pretty intense light. Versus if I hang that same light with the same wavelengths way up here, I’m getting a little less light down at the bottom. So those are three things to consider. I did a trial recently, and I did several plants. And I didn’t feel like it was appropriate to use a lot of time for this, but I did wanna show you.

Okay, so the plants on the left are grown under a Happy Leaf LED grow light. And the ones on the right are a south-facing, bright, beautiful, sunny window. And in the one month I ran this trial. It originally was going to be an eight-week trial. But I didn’t really need to make it longer than four weeks, because I got results so quickly. And this isn’t one in a dark room. This is one in the sunny window versus under a really good grow light. This top one is an Echeveria called Coral Reef, so it’s supposed to have all those curly, beautiful leaves. And in the windowsill, that relaxed a lot. They started out both curly.

So it really wasn’t what the grow light did for the plant. It’s what the window reversed in the plant in that case. The second picture, I apologize, are a little close. You can’t define each of the plants as well. But the grow light plant was easily four times bigger than the other. So we have a texture difference, we have a size difference. We have a coloration difference on these bottom two. The grow lights really brought out, because they are full spectrum, all the natural pigments that the plants are supposed to have. And again, this is in four weeks. And the results, I did let a few of them, because they were still changing and still differentiating.

I did run that trial a few extra weeks on certain plants. And the results were even more pronounced. So I wanted to show you a flowering plant. So not only is the one on the left under the grow light growing better with more flowers, the one in the window is growing all of its flowers on the sunny side. So that’s why you kind of have to rotate your plants to be optimal. And then on the bottom is just a common succulent. Look how much more growth it put on, just in four weeks. And it was a much stronger, sturdier plant. These types of succulents often have, the leaves fall readily. You just look at it funny and a leaf will fall off.

But the one under the grow light was a much stronger plant, and that was less likely to happen. So I won’t read all of this verbatim to you, but there is a very big difference when it comes to wavelengths between fluorescents and LED grow lights. One of the most important being the spectrum. Fluorescents give off a little bit of blue light, and then that’s about it. There’s very much different quality in LED grow lights. Not all are treated the same by any means. But if you really get a good company that’s dialed in to that, it will have all of the ideal spectrum that plants use to photosynthesize. And I like to tell people, your job as a grower, and it doesn’t matter to me whether that’s marigolds outside or a peace lily inside, or a tomato plant anywhere. Your primary job is really boiled down to one thing, driving photosynthesis. If you can maximize photosynthesis, you’ve got a great plant.

So you should be thinking in that way, if you really want the best plants you can grow. With LEDs, they’re diodes, they’re not bulbs. So there’s nothing to replace. They do have a higher initial cost. But if you remember, when we went from incandescent to LED light bulbs, everybody complained how much more expensive they were. But now that we’ve all used them for a while, how much longer did they last? You’re not throwing them away. You don’t have the broken glass in your garbage can, much less in the landfill. And that’s the same for grow lights. With the fluorescent, you run a chance of burning your plants by keeping them too close to the plants. LEDs don’t run hot.

And from an environmental standpoint, because there’s no bulbs to throw away, because a good quality light has characteristics that keep it in your home versus the landfill for far, far, far longer. And because they’re so efficient with their energy use. They use a lot less, your energy bill actually goes down. Not only is it better for the environment, but you can feel it in your pocket. So again, I’m not. . . I don’t wanna throw a lot of technical stuff at you, but relating to the comment I just said about photosynthesis. So a good LED light, this is what spectrum they’re gonna use, okay. They used to think it was all about blue and red light.

And then blue for vegetative light was so important. And then red was so important for flowering. We have worked very closely with Purdue University using our lights, and we were lucky to have had this dialed in. But they have actually found plants use more green light than we thought that they did. They appear green to us because they’re not using a lot of it. They’re reflecting that color off, okay? But they do actually absorb some of it. The ratio of blue to green to red light has really been dialed in. And furthermore, been able to prove that it’s kind of a myth, mainly depending on what you’re growing. But for the most part, it’s a myth that they only need blue at one stage and red at another. They use all of those wavelengths all of the time.

When they’re flowering, yes, they use more red light. But they use more red light during most of the stages of growth. So to find a light that you could do both seed starting, all the way to an indoor tomato plant. And there’s simple PAR meters, you can find out what level you’re at. Again, don’t pay attention to. . . I’m not asking you to memorize this, but the difference in intensity and duration and quality of light has to do with this chart. If you’re growing low light house plants when you’re seed– That’s why we’ve gotten away with seed starting with fluorescents for so long. They don’t require all this heavy intensity light.

Microgreens, if any of you have tried growing those, those are all very low light plants. And so they don’t need high PAR values. They may need that whole wavelength. But the PAR value, they don’t need really high, intense levels. If you’re growing plants for vegetative growth. So this is only your tropicals, you’re not looking for them to bloom. They’re just green plants. Those need a little bit higher PAR value, but not quite as high as fruiting and flowering. So you really want a light that’s putting out high PAR values. And when you’re looking for a light, if they don’t state their PAR value, or state their.

. . at least some metrics that reflect how much light or the daily light integral, they’re probably not putting out enough. So if you’re having trouble with flowering a plant, it could be this. You’re not getting high enough light intensity and good enough PAR values. So we’ve already addressed this. Does it have the right, what makes a good grow light? Does it have the right ratio of red to green to blue? We talked a little bit about the PAR values. And to me, energy efficiency is important. So to me, that makes a good grow light even better, if it pays attention to that. And most LED lights fall into that category.

I find it to be important to have an external power source. If you’ve ever seen professional grow lights, you see this big bank of lights. And it’s got a ballast, and they hum. And there’s fans that make noise. For me, having an external power source. A lot of LED companies are building it right into the light. So when that power source goes bad, and it’s going to go bad eventually, the whole light is junk. So if the power source is built externally, when that power source goes bad, now you’re buying a $20 power source, and you still have a great light. So it’s a lot less in the landfill. They have, one of the most recent developments in LED is, if you bought a grow light that was called a grow light.

It appeared like disco pinkish purple, because they’re trying to get the red and the blue, yeah, the red and the blue in there. So it appears this pinkish purpleish, hard on the eyes color. They’ve actually developed a coating that you can put on the diodes, and it makes it appear white light to us. But it still has all that full spectrum for the plants. Because under that pinkish light, your plants don’t even look healthy. They look weird. So with white, when it appears white and easy on our eyes, we can detect insects and diseases and the health of the plant a lot easier. And there’s just a lot of poor quality material out there. So make sure you’re getting it from a reputable person. The biggest tip I can give you in lighting, is just know how much your plants need.

Because if you give it too much light, you’re gonna see some browning or shriveling, and sadness. And if you’re not giving it enough, you’re gonna get legginess and weak plants. If you do use supplemental lighting, I absolutely recommend a timer. It takes the guesswork out. You’re not plugging it in, unplugging it. It really minimizes the effort you have to put into that. And then one note on what is called photoperiod. And you may have heard this term. I like to put this slide in in a lot of talks, because it’s a very common term in horticulture, photoperiod. But people see it and they teach it as long-day plants or short-day plants, right.

It doesn’t have to do with long days and short days. It has to do with length of darkness. So what’s really happening in the plant is, what’s happening during that length of darkness. It has nothing to do with how many hours of light it’s getting. It has to do with really the hours of darkness. So I say this because for one, I’d like to clarify that. It’s just a common misread way to think about photoperiod. It’s not a short-day plant. What they really require is long nights. And photoperiod is always? Yes, always in relation to flowering.

So if you you’re having trouble getting a plant to flower, whether it’s an orchid or maybe you’re growing indoor basil and you don’t want it to flower, it’s bolted on you. Photoperiod is often your answer to solve that problem because you’re not giving it short enough days. Kalanchoes, if you’ve grown those. Christmas cactus are a famous one of those. Cattleya orchids are one of those that require long nights to bloom. So you may have it on a normal 16-hour day, but when you wanna trigger flowering, you make those nights longer. It’s a common trick in commercial. That’s how we get Easter lilies to bloom right on Easter. We manipulate photoperiod. So it has a lot to do with when that plant’s gonna flower.

And then there’s day-neutral plants, and they don’t care how long or short the days or nights are. And a good example of that would be a tomato. It’s going to flower whether it has long or short days. Which is great, if you’re growing them indoors. A note about media. Do use high-quality potting soil. It lasts longer, you’re investing in it less. And the best properties really are, most importantly drainage, because we talked about how important that is. Some of them, not all of them, have starter nutrients. So they have just a weak fertilizer already in there to get the plant going.

Some of them have a wetting agent, and what that is is something to keep the soil evenly moist, instead of draining out the side of the pot, or maybe it’s too wet at the top and not at the bottom. It kind of evens out moisture in the entire column of the soil. So that’s always a plus. Commercial mixes that greenhouses use definitely have these things. We happen to use one; it also has a bio fungicide. So it has naturally-occurring substances to ward off things like root rot. And some have even mycorrhizae in them, which help promote root growth, healthy root growth. So even if you’re using the best of soil, obviously if you have the plant for a very long time, it’s a good idea to repot once in a while. So should I repot or should I not? I get this a lot in the greenhouse. And then in fact, they just bring ’em to me to repot.

And sometimes I say, “It’s really just not ready. ” Or, “Oh, man, yeah. I can see why this plant isn’t doing very well. ” Because they’ve dug up some garden soil from their vegetable garden out backyard. I’ve seen all manner of soil and rocks and things people plant their plants in. But if it comes time, and you’re like, “Ah, should I repot this?” You really should wait ’til the roots are somewhat crowded. If they haven’t even reached the end of the pot you’re in, unless you’ve just using a way too big of one, you really should wait until it’s filled that column. That way, when you transplant, you’re disturbing that root system the least, because it’s all gonna come out intact. A lot of plants, and if you’re having trouble flowering, this could be a big one for some plants. A lot of plants wait until they are root-bound or pot-bound.

That means the roots are all the way to the edge, they’re all the way to the bottom. And they’re kind of getting crowded, which is referred as pot-bound. Some plants have to have that to bloom. Hoyas, if you can’t ever get your hoya to bloom, that’s one of them. Cactus actually bloom quite readily when they’re pot-bound. Everybody thinks it’s a fertilizer trick, or some other trick. It’s really a pot-bound trick. And you have to do nothing but let it sit in that pot. Don’t be tempted to repot certain things. We often get comments, if you know snake plants, or mother-in-law’s tongue, sansevierias.

I get so many people like that, and a spider. “I’ve never seen one bloom, and I’ve had one forever. ” That’s one of those plants that likes to be pot-bound. And people tend to pot those things up too soon. If you do transplant into a bigger pot, I definitely would recommend doing it while the plant’s actively growing. And I think it’s a common mistake. People bring their plants in for the winter off the porch. At least I know I do. And now you’re not gardening. So you think winter’s the perfect time to repot all this stuff, so when I put it back out in the spring, they’ve all got a fresh start.

You really need to wait until the end of winter or the beginning of spring, because that plant’s most likely not actively growing. So it’s not gonna appreciate the extra soil and the extra water that that soil is carrying. And so you’ve made the decision. Now you’re gonna pot up. When you do that, don’t go too drastically from one size to a much bigger size. As tempting as that can be, ’cause you’ve got this gorgeous pot that you’d like to use. You really shouldn’t go more than two inches bigger. So if it’s in a four-inch pot, you should really only move it to a five or six-inch pot. Because that’s really adding lot of soil or water volume to a plant that’s used to much less. If you tend to over water or you tend to over fertilize, do consider growing in clay pots, because they wick moisture out.

They also wick salts out. So the plant dries out a lot quicker. So if you’re really just an over-waterer, clay pots can be your friend. Otherwise, having said that, if you’re a good waterer, I wouldn’t recommend them, because they’re taking out the water you just put it in there. And you’ve got it right, so why mess with it? One of the primary signs that it’s time for a repotting is that it just dries out so quickly. You feel like you’re watering it all the time. So it’s drying out really quickly, or it’s so root-bound that it’s growing out the bottom of the pot. It’s time for a new pot at that point. Or the soil is just worn out. You’ve had it in that pot for so long.

Maybe the roots aren’t coming out, but that soil has broken down so much that it’s no longer carrying the air space you need, or things like that. So most people, when they think of. . . What do you think of when you hear indoor growing? I get a lot of different answers to this, but they primarily boil down to, the things people think of the most are when do you grow plants indoors? If you never do it any other time, you do it when you’re seed starting. Maybe that’s the only time you do it in the year. Maybe it’s overwintering plants. I kick all my stuff out in the spring, and I hardly have a plant in the house for as much as I can get away with it. Overwintering plants can be, in my case, some of the only time I have indoor plants, except for my food. I’m talking more, my tropicals.

And then growing your favorite pet plants. I’m gonna give you some ideas to help you maybe think outside the box. There is no reason why, especially if you invest in a good setup, and now you’ve got some knowledge, and you’ve got a good grow light, why you can’t be growing really awesome stuff all year long. So we’re just gonna touch on seed starting, ’cause it’s the most common thing people do inside. It’s a very inexpensive way to get a lot of plants, cheaper than you can get them at the garden center. My personal favorite thing about growing seeds indoors is I can get exactly what I want. I want that variety of poblano pepper. I don’t want the generic poblano that they have at the stand at Lowe’s. I want that poblano. So you can really dial in what you’re growing, and get very specific about what you’re growing, which I love.

There’s some great seed selections here. And I like the unusual stuff, so. The average garden center doesn’t usually fit the bill for what I wanna grow. You can get a head start in the season so you have a bigger, healthier plant going into the year versus buying one that’s probably been over-watered on the shelf at the big store. And you can do this throughout the year. There are some specialty seeds that take a very long time to germinate. So they don’t all have to be done in the spring. There are some great house plants that propagate by seed quite easily, sensitive plant. There’s a lot of them that you could be doing. So you could be doing that at any time of the year, not just during seed starting season.

Again, a chart that I don’t want you to memorize. But I’m sure you are aware that these are out there. This is a seed starting chart. So if you are gonna start them indoors, when should you start them so you don’t have too little of a plant, too big of a plant? You really have enough time to get it to germinate, and Jung Seed is here today, and they have a wonderful seed starting chart for this area in Wisconsin, since that’s where they’re based. If you follow one of these, I’ve seen so many very inaccurate ones, which is the only reason I really included it. Because most of you have seen a chart like this. A lot of them are just way off. Most of them weren’t intentionally written way off. That person was knowledgeable. But it’s for Tennessee.

Or that may be true in California. But here, with our very short seasons, that’s not the case for us. So be aware of that. And also be aware, with the light technology that’s coming on. A plant that says allow seven to, seven to eight weeks before last frost. That’s when you wanna sow it, right? Some of the new grow lights and the technology that they have provided can shorten that time a lot. So if you have, or you do invest, or you just don’t wanna start seeds in February. Peppers and eggplant take a long time to germinate. And you really just don’t want to be seed starting for four months. A really good grow light can actually cut that time down, which is a side benefit of that technology coming on board.

Just be aware that you’re using one for your region. And like I said, Jung Seed has one that you can pick up. When you do start seeds, I see lots of problems go wrong. But I’m telling you, watering is so important. And it can’t be any more important than it when it comes to seed starting. On this top picture, the picture prior to this is a little seed that you can hardly see. Between being a seed and coming out of the soil is the most crucial part of this entire process. If it dries out at any point while that seed coat breaks and that plant, the seedling is trying to emerge. If it dries out, the whole process halts, okay. It can’t dry out during that point.

They get tougher as they get older, like we do. But that point is very crucial. So if you’re never gonna be, if you’re gonna be very vigilant in any, be vigilant during the germination process. Seedlings, they’re delicate. And you do have to take care of it. It’s during the germination that I think most people fail, if they fail. And watering, it’s got to be evenly moist. We’re talking about a plant with little tiny root hairs. It doesn’t need to be soaking wet. It’s drawing up a very small fraction of the water most people give it.

Having said that, some are really hard seed coats, like Swiss chard, even spinach. And some of those benefit from soaking first. So that seed coat, that really hard seed coat, starts to imbibe water before you put it in the ground, and have to second-guess your watering. Morning glories are famous for that. Morning glories do so much better if you soak them first. Besides the germination phase and how very important that is, my second most important part of this is, you don’t need any fertilizer until your plant, your seedling has developed its first true leaves. And a lot of people mistake what first true leaves are. Your first set of leaves are actually called cotyledons. And it’s very obvious on a tomato or a spinach plant. They’re just, they’re skinny and strappy.

But then that first true leaf comes out, and it looks like a tomato leaf. So the true leaves actually look like the leaves on the mature plant, where cotyledons do not. A lot of cotyledons look alike. But you don’t have to fertilize until you see those first true leaves. And a lot of people want to get them big and strong fast. It’s not the way to do it, to start too early. Even when you get your first true leaves, seedlings require very weak fertilizer. So overwintering plants, this is is where my life becomes a total jungle. Bringing them in from outdoors, just be careful that you are scouting them for pests. It’s not a perfect process.

Some pests are in the soil. Some are so small, you can’t see them. So despite your best efforts, you may still inadvertently be bringing pests into your home. A lot of times, that’s a good opportunity to trim your plants back because you’ve got this enormous palm or whatever it is on your porch. And you just don’t have that kind of room in your house. Just remember when you’re trimming a plant, whether it’s indoors or outdoors or anywhere else doors, you really shouldn’t be removing more than a third of the plant at any one time. It’s too much stress on the plant, and you won’t see good results from that. So it’s typically recommended a third of the plant at most. You don’t have to take off a third, but don’t do much more than that. When you bring them indoors, you definitely wanna reduce your watering and fertilizer.

Outdoors, we’ve got the wind drying them out. We’ve got hot days drying them out. We’ve got all sorts of elements outdoors that we don’t have indoors. So definitely reduce watering and fertilizer. I do have a set of plants that are tolerant enough that I actually throw them in my dark basement with one light; they have no nothing else other than that. Like I said earlier, I don’t fertilize them. I might go down there three times, and give them a little bit of water. Plants are far more tolerant than we give them credit for. That’s not all my plants, but I have too many to get them all upstairs. Using saucers is a good idea, just because you can control the water through that bottom watering a little bit better.

And you can kind of get a better idea of how much water they’re really using when you water from the bottom, because you can see how much they’ve sucked up. Maybe you fill that, and a week later it’s still half full. Well, you don’t need to be giving it as much. You can’t see that if you just douse it from the top. And like I said earlier, it’s best to wait to repot into the spring, because that’s when it’s gonna start actively growing. So really, I mean, there is a plant out there for everyone. Everybody is capable. I know you are, because you’re here at a garden conference and you know a little something. But anybody on this planet can grow something at home. I don’t believe anybody has a strictly brown thumb.

There is a plant for everyone. It’s just a matter of how much are you willing to put in it? There are fussy, high-maintenance plants. There’s some downright whiners when it comes to plants. That’s probably not what you want, if you want a low-maintenance plant. But if you are willing to put in the effort, the rewards are even greater. But even if you’re lacking skill, or you’re trying to get a friend. You give them a plant and they say, “I don’t know, I kill everything. ” There’s something out there for everyone. It just depends on what’s your space? Do you have the right light? Are they picky plants? You know, maybe you do have a very high light, or grow light, bright home. And there’s a lot of great plants for that.

If you have low lights, oh well. There’s a lot of really great plants that’ll take low light. The low light ones tend to be very tough plants too. They can take not only low light, but pretty tough and neglectful situations, as a general rule, not all of them. But you’ll notice sanseveria is in both lists, and that’s on purpose because, and that’s the mother-in-law’s tongue and snake plant we referred to earlier. Everyone can grow a snake plant. My father has one that only gets water once every six months when I go to visit. [all laughing] And it looks amazing. High light, low light, no water, too much water. Almost every situation, it’s okay with the sanseveria.

So if nothing else, start there. And everybody’s had a plant that looked like this, if you have house plants. Everybody’s had a plant, “Oh, what do I do?” So this is where you should probably trim off that long one that’s on counter. But don’t trim more than a third. Some of these, like aloes and agaves, oh my goodness. If you have grown any of those, they’ll grow a whole new plant right out of the bottom hole in the bottom of the pot. There’s times where they need some serious attention. And in this picture, that’s one of them. The first thing you wanna do is remove any dead or dying or diseased or just not good-looking leaves. Trim it back to the healthy growth.

So maybe the edges have gotten dried out, but it’s still got a nice crown in there. Trim it back to healthy growth. Repotting, if and when necessary. Look at what you may be doing wrong. In this case, it’s just overgrown the pot. Look at what you may be doing wrong, because I spend a lot of my time rescuing other people’s plants. And sometimes, more than often, it’s a very simple fix. So what are you doing? Maybe it is next to the heat vent, or an open window that, if you have 10 and 13-year-old boys like I do, get open and slammed shut, and there’s drafts everywhere. Maybe it is a simple fix like that. Watering is certainly something to look at first, make sure you’re doing that.

And if your plant is really just beyond more help than you want to give it. I could talk about propagation forever. It’s like one of my great loves of horticulture. And I’m not gonna do that here today, ’cause we’re talking about everything. Sometimes you just, you don’t have room for it. I’ve often wanted to start a rescue, a plant rescue, to revive these giant plants people don’t want. And they don’t know what to do anymore. But sometimes, you know what? It is time to throw in the towel, sometimes. And there’s a lot of, “My grandma gave it to me,” situations where you just really wanna save that plant. But sometimes, it’s time to throw in the towel, and you can start over.

But you can start babies off that plant. And if you haven’t propagated before, there are several ways to do it. I mean, all the way from grafting to just a simple leaf, like a lot of succulents can do. One of the easiest methods of propagating is just to take a stem cutting. And a lot of house plants do very well, and can start over quite readily. Others are certainly more difficult. But there’s a lot of really great plants. So it’s worth a shot, looking up how you can propagate that. You do have to be careful, especially like annuals, such as like Proven Winners or any branded plants. They are patent-protected, and it is technically against the law to propagate those.

So you do have to pay attention if there’s a label. If it is, it’ll have a label to tell you that it is. So, that’s the only caveat for that. But at the home use, especially for house plants, that’s rarely the case. So what you do in a simple leaf stem cutting, is to remove, you want at least two nodes. So where these arrows are pointing, in the middle. The top two arrows are pointing at what’s called a node. So you want to bury in the soil at least two nodes. And you wanna remove the leaves from those two nodes because that’s where your new roots are gonna come from. Plants are very, very smart that way.

They have undifferentiated cells that, until triggered by some metabolic process or environmental influence, don’t know what to do with these cells until a process tells them what to do. So they may, the same cell may become a root cell or a leaf cell. So removing those leaves, that’s where your new roots are gonna come from. And remember, healthier roots become healthier. Healthy roots mean a healthy plant. So the more roots you can develop, that’s why when you plant a tomato in your garden, you’re supposed to strip the bottom and plant it really deep. You got all those nodes. And that many more nodes creates that many more roots, which creates a bigger, healthier, more fruiting plant. So a very simple diagram on, perhaps it’s time to just start over. And another thing, a lot of people like to root in water.

It’s not my preference, because I feel like there’s a lot of root damage done. Eventually you’re gonna wanna put it in soil or put it outside, or wherever you’re gonna put it. And it is a lot of transplant shock to go from a hydroponic situation to a soil situation. But there are so many plants that just like, they don’t care. They handle that very well. But if you are propagating in soil, make sure it’s a loose, well-drained soil, and don’t cram your cuttings into them. Create manually a little hole for it, so you’re not crushing, because what you’re doing is crushing that fresh cut. You’re crushing all those little cells that are at the base. So you really want to not do that. And cuttings, again, I know I sound like a broken record.

But if you’re an over-waterer and you listen to me, you’re gonna have such healthier plants after today. Don’t overwater, especially a cutting. Why would you; there’s no roots. It has no way of removing all of that. All of it’s coming through the vascular tissue. There’s not a developed root system yet to require hardly that amount of water. So definitely not waterlogged soil. And I just wanna address, growing plants indoors, we do get to avoid a lot of the garden pests we can see outside by growing inside. But remember, you can bring them in on your. .

. If you’re overwintering plants from outside, you can easily bring in some of these things that way. This is not a comprehensive list, but they’re the three most common things you may encounter inside. And you may know what all of them are, because you also see them outside. Not so much fungus gnats, but you see these outside. And early detection is key. I can’t tell you how many times people have brought plants and it’s just too late. You’re gonna spray spray, spray. And then it’s gonna defoliate and defoliate. And you haven’t caught the game quick enough.

So early detection is absolutely key. If you notice a problem, definitely get it away from the rest of your plants. They’re looking to thrive and survive, those insects. So they’re gonna get on the next host as quickly as they can. So if you do have a problem, the best thing you can do is notice it early and separate it from the rest of whatever you’re growing near it. And again, sometimes it’s best to just start fresh, and dump it and start anew, with a new plant. So fungus gnats just quickly. They have a 28-day life cycle, which is both good and bad. It’s good because it takes them quite a while to get through that, and we can interrupt that. The best thing you can do from a pest management standpoint is to interrupt a life cycle.

Because if they can’t lay a new generation of eggs, you can stop the problem from being a problem. And that’s the case. So adult fungus gnats, those are the things that fly around. If you have an old banana on your counter, probably got some fungus gnats. And they lay eggs in the soil. They won’t lay their eggs in soil that’s not moist. So if you’re an over-waterer, you’re gonna have more fungus gnats because your soil is always lovely and moist for fungus gnats. If the plant can tolerate it, if you really let them dry out between waterings, which most plants can handle more than you would know, more than I could believe, until I really stressed them out to prove it to myself. They won’t lay their eggs in really dry soil. So if you can, if you’re having a problem, definitely cut back on watering.

Larva is the stage that they feed on the roots. So they’re still in the soil, the eggs hatch, they’re feeding on your roots, which can cause some damage. But for the most part, fungus gnats are really a nuisance pest. It takes quite a bit of them for a very long time, unchecked problem for a long time for it to really do some massive harm to your plants. Pupas just waiting to emerge, and then you have that adult. And that’s when they become a real nuisance. But we’ve actually had some really good luck using two very easy and organic methods. One is to let the soil dry out. And the other is, we sprinkle cinnamon. It is a hot oil.

And they can’t lay their eggs in it because it’s very hot to them. It’s a hostile environment. So we sprinkle organic cinnamon over the top layer of our soil-grown plants. And we’ve really had a great improvement on the number of fungus gnats. But another thing, you could use these. This is a monitoring card that are commonly used in greenhouses. You can buy pack of five for home. Because they’re flying insects, you’ll be able to really monitor your population like, okay, I’ve got a lot of them. Maybe it’s only one or two, you only catch a couple a day. That’s nothing really.

The other thing we have learned indoors, especially for food crops, which is what we trial most. We use, we don’t use a professional potting mix. We use a 50/50 blend of cocoa core and vermiculate. The vermiculate is very coarse. They’re like little knives for soft-bodied insects. So they can’t, they don’t wanna lay there. It’s a very hostile environment for laying eggs. And that has helped us bring the population down a lot, just simply changing the type of media we’re using. Cocoa core too, which is the shavings of coconut, are very abrasive for small insects. Aphids, most anybody who’s gardened for any amount of time has seen an aphid.

They’re really quite cute. Even in Bug’s Life, the little ant princess had a pet named Aphy, who was an aphid. They are gregarious, meaning you’re never gonna see one aphid. You’re gonna see a whole bunch of aphids, if you see any at all. They multiply and reproduce very, very quickly. They have an exciting sex life, because they can both reproduce asexually. And in that case, they’re all female, they don’t produce a male generation. And they can produce a lot of eggs in a very short period of time. All those females can produce their own generation. So they multiply very quickly, which is why you really don’t ever see one.

But the good news is they are soft-bodied. And soft-bodied insects are far easier to kill than hard-bodied insects. And what they do, and see, this bottom picture. I wanted to put that in, because a lot of times, they’ve cured the problem. Like, “I’ve done all this stuff and I still have aphids. ” So if you have a problem. And there’s tons of different kinds of aphids, by the way. Some of them are little black ones. Most of them are green, which is peach aphid. But there’s several breeds of aphids.

And they can be different colors, distinctly different colors, and different sizes. What sets them apart is what called cornicles, which is in the back here. But those white things aren’t eggs or anything. Those are mummies. So as they morph, metamorphasize, they shed their old skin like a snake does. So you may see a lot of those white things, and not anything living. We’re really running out of time, so I’m gonna speed up a little bit for the last few slides. Spider mites is another one. To me, it’s the biggest problem, because you don’t know you have a problem usually, until it’s pretty well advanced, ’cause they’re so small. And oftentimes you have to use a systemic to get rid of them, so it’s in the plant every time they feed.

So I promised we’d talk about a little bit of creative methods. If you haven’t tried the Kratky method to grow greens and lettuce. I don’t even do those outside anymore. It’s so awesome and nearly foolproof, this method, to do inside. It’s a method of passive hydroponics that requires no pumps or any special skill. And we’re experts at that at Happy Leaf. So you could grow all these beautiful herbs in just quart jars. Microgreens, maybe you wanna make a little money on the side. Wisconsin, I love their farmers markets up here. Reimagine your space.

If you’re anything like me, you got plants everywhere. I grow all my food on a rack. So in a two by three foot footprint, I am growing a ton of food, all my herbs and lettuces that I’d ever want. And then my personal goal for the year is you know, you probably gathered by now I have a lot of plants, and I bring a lot of them indoors for the winter, but they’re everywhere. If there’s a surface or a dining room or a China hutch, anywhere, there’s plants on it. So my goal this year is why not display them? Make them part of your decor. And it’s my personal goal this year to actually display them a little more attractively than just putting them wherever I have places for them. So think about that. If you wanna come talk to us, if you just wanna go to Happy Leaf LED has a really great YouTube channel with a ton of tutorials that get much more in depth on some of these topics, like Kratky or microgreens, growing tomatoes indoors. We have an awesome Facebook group, which is really our customers just talking to our customers on what they’re doing, and how they hang the lights, and what they’re growing, and tips and tricks that they have.

The engineer for our lighting is actually about to publish a book. It’s called Lettuce in the Living Room. And it is a comprehensive guide to growing all manner of food indoors, year-round. And this is how you can contact us. And we’re absolutely happy to answer your questions, so. [audience applauding] Thank you.