Hello dear friends, followers and those who have just climbed aboard this creative journey. I've been bombarding you with quite a few new crafting ideas lately, so I thought I'd spend today talking about another topic very near and dear to my heart - plants! Well to be more specific, just a particular plant known as the "spider" plant, or, Chlorophytum comosum.
Above: This is the mother spider plant, which really consists of three small plants that I originally planted together.
Spider plants happen to be one of the most common houseplants, because they are easy to grow as well as propagate. Spider plants reproduce like crazy given the right growing conditions (bright light but no direct sun) and they produce their own ‘babies’ which are really tiny plants that can then be placed in water or dirt. Though I always thought spider plants were house plants, here in Israel they grow outdoors nicely (in the shade) even in my area which is like a "zone 5 or 6" in the United States. My spider plant did suffer last winter, but entirely replaced itself with healthy leaves and an exuberant shower of hanging babies this past spring.
As you can see from the photo above, spider babies are actually tiny spider plants suspended from a longer branch of the plant. You can leave the babies on the plant and they will grow while attached to the mother! Alternatively, you can clip the baby from the mother plant and place the bottom of it in water until roots form, and then plant the baby in soil or just put them straight into soil.
Plant your spider plant in a hanging pot and you can have a stunning fountain of babies hanging from the mother in seemingly no time! The photos I'm showing you here are just a few of the plants that I've raised from Spider babies all from the same mother. I've given away some and killed some and even thrown some out as I just had too many!
Spider plants are excellent starter plants and very forgiving! Assuming that you don't forget about it altogether or leave it to bake in the sun, your plant can last for years and years. They make great filler plants to plant at the base of large indoor plants (see above, at the base of my palm) and it's really fun to give the babies away to friends! And those friends will in turn raise spider babies of their own and in turn give that generation to friends as well. Isn't that nice? It 's really so very easy, and there's nothing like a bit of green in the house to literally liven things up a bit!
