Stewarts Office Plants

We supply many businesses across the South, from Sussex and Surrey, through Hampshire and Dorset to Wiltshire and Somerset. For more information about the services we offer visit our home page, or contact us here. In this blog you'll find news, interesting snippets, stories and pictures of our staff's adventures out on the road.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Plant care advice: varying your watering throughout the year

Apologies for the wordy post that follows: it's a no-brainer that your indoor plants will drink more in the summer than in the winter.

I say that but it's amazing how many clients who buy plants from us on a supply only basis go on to harm them by incorrectly watering them.

On delivery they will have asked me, "how much do I water this then?"

I will have replied, "the most important thing to do is test the moisture of the soil every time you water. If it's still wet don't water it. You'll also find it will use different amounts of water through the year. But at this time of year I'd say about half a can full of water a week."

What they will have heard is, "Blah blah blah blah half a can full of water a week."

Apart from the money, this is why we like to look after the plants we sell ourselves.

Anyway, I digress. The difference between summer and winter water consumption varies a lot, by as much as a factor of four I'd estimate. It's due to a number of factors, one of which I'll come back to below. Most important are hours and intensity of light, and temperature.

Light can be hard to judge. Some plants in a position away from a window in a dark room will actually get more light in the winter than the summer if the low position of the sun in winter gets to them.

Also very important is the size of container that the plant is in. When training new staff, I teach them to assess the water needs of the plant and the pot separately. Think about it: a pot of soil with no plant in on a sunny windowsill would dry out quite rapidly without a plant in, so you have to add enough water to account for that drying out then think about the plant's needs.

But the factor that really made me think about posting this is the effect of central heating. Most inexperienced technicians get caught out by a sudden upswing in the amount of water a plant needs at this time of year; it happened to me in the late nineties when I was a new technician at Heathrow Airport. Even though the building might be on thermostatic control all year, the same temperature achieved by heating produces drier air than that achieved by it being warm weather. Consequently, when the heating starts to kick in, the plants get thirstier.

This also highlights the big difference between how much office plants and house plants drink. Offices tend to be at a constant temperature, whereas houses tend to get cold in between times that the heating's on (I know mine does anyway!). The effect of this is that plants at home tend to drink a lot less.

Again, apologies that this post has got a bit wordy; I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like this and I have to get it off my chest somewhere!

Jonathan