Spider Plant Babies

Sometime in spring/summer 2011 I decided I wanted a house plant.  A spider plant seemed a good fit for me since I never killed the one I had as a teenager.  I almost bought one from a home improvement store, but Jeff said to wait.  It turns out that one of his coworkers is an amazing spider plant grower and offered me a medium sized "baby" from his "parent" plant.  I named the plant ZP because I'm a weirdo who names plants.  ZP lived on the deck until it got chilly, in the kitchen window until the cats started eating it, then moved to its current home in the guest bedroom window.  ZP has produced 6 babies which are now medium sized.  For this post, I'm going to root/plant the babies from "adult babies" as well as ZP.

What you need:

• spider plant growing "babies"
• plant pots
• potting soil
• scissors
• water

I had close to 20 babies growing from ZP's 6 medium sized children, so I needed a lot of small pots.  Being the cheapskate I am, I decided to make my own small pots for the babies out of newspaper from a tutorial I pinned onto my garden & outdoors board a while back.  I ended up with 20 pots because that's all that would fit in the Costco box lid I found laying around.  I filled them all fairly full with potting soil.

I retrieved ZP's children from their home in the guest bedroom window and prepared to cut off the babies.  Here's a really big baby that was one of the first I cut to plant.  I typically inspect the babies to make sure they have root nubs before I cut them off (not sure if you can see them in the picture below, but they're there).  If they do, I cut them off the stalk as close to the baby as possible.

When it's time to pot, I use my finger to poke a hole in the soil like this.  I try to make the hole deep enough that the baby's root nubs and a little bit of the leaves can be covered.

Just insert the plant into the hole and cover with more potting soil.  Again, I try to get the root nubs fairly deep down since I've had problems with some of the now medium sized babies trying to fall over since I didn't plant them deep enough.  I also plant 2 babies together in the same pot if they're both really small.  Eventually, you'll end up with something like this:

There's a good chance I'll eventually end up living in a jungle of spider plants if they keep growing babies at the rate they're going.  Anybody want one? :)