Too big, too fast for spiderplant

Spiderplants can be killed with kindness.

I have a spider plant that grew rapidly and got too big for its pot. So I bought a new pot that is twice as big as the old one. The plant has quite a bit of territory to spread now. But the soil won’t dry out and the plant is getting yellow. This pot has a drain hole and I am very careful not to water too often. What happened?

You’re killing the plant with kindness. In your desire to let the plant run wild and free in the big pot, you’ve created a potentially fatal situation. In the small pot, the roots were close to the edge of the container and were able to utilize the water. Moving to a big pot changed this.

Now, there is a huge amount of soil with not a single root to use up the water. So there the plant sits, marinating in saturated soil. The water is replacing air in the soil and the plant is essentially drowning and suffocating at the same time.

When you choose another container, here’s what to look for. The pot needs a drain hole and should be just an inch or so wider than the pot it was in before the big kettle. You can’t move from wearing a diaper to wearing men’s dress slacks. It’s too big, too fast.

Get new potting soil, too. The waterlogged stuff in the pot is fine to dump outside but it is ruined for other indoor plants, even if it is dried out. Pick off as much wet soil as possible when repotting.

Check to see roots are still white. Brown or black roots are dead, rotting roots. If this problem is relatively recent, the plant may come out of this water boarding incident without too much trouble. If there is a great deal of root death, it will be another addition to the compost pile in a matter of weeks.

I’m moving in with relatives very soon. Everything was fine until they began worrying that I would bring some kind of bugs into their house. I have lived in a separate house and have no pets or insects. Now they are worried about the rental truck. Could anything be living in the moving truck that would get into my things and then move into their house? I need an answer.

You have a better chance of being run down by a moose when you go out to your car today. Here are a couple of things to mention to the relatives. For insects, life begins after 50 degrees. Below that temperature, they are immobile. If the temperature is below freezing and they are exposed to it for short time, they can’t move. After a period of time being frozen, their cytoplasm ends being freeze dried. When, the insects’ blood is turned into dust and they are very dead.

My assumption is that the main worry is cockroaches. They are not going to be moving around at current outdoor temperatures. Most moving trucks have metal interiors. There are no cozy places to tuck themselves away or be insulated against the cold.

There are zero insects waiting in the truck. Insects have no ability to predict the future. Even if there were insects sitting in plain sight in the truck, how could they know that the truck would be rented and there would be boxes to climb into before they froze?

If you want more reasonable bug-gathering scenarios, storing things in a heated storage facility after someone with cockroaches had rented it before could be a problem. Or, picking up boxes from behind grocery stores in warm weather are at least possibilities. If you and your suitcases made a recent trip to a warm climate or a hotel with bedbugs, you might have brought home an unintended souvenir or two. If you are bugless before the move, you will be bugless after.

Contact Gretchen Voyle, MSU Extension-Livingston County horticulture educator at (517) 546-3950.