Viewing post #1842912 by kaylenew

BigBill said:#1 Too much fertilizer! A Birds nest fern would do very well with a half strength feeding from a water soluble fertilizer. Perhaps twice a year. Your plant is getting too much nitrogen that is producing all the extra fronds!!
#2 it needs to stay evenly moist. In my experience they do not like to go dry. I have a medium sized one underlights and I water it every three or four days.
I can't help with the leggy plant but some one will offer advice soon.

omg thank you so much! i never knew nitrogen would do this. i never knew those stick fertilizers were this bad. do i try removing them? i have them in all my houseplants now (fiddle leaf fig, peperomia, ZZ, devil's ivy, xanthosoma, monstera adasonii, snakeplant), and does that mean all my other plants would be coming up with small leaves?? which sound like it should be a good thing? lol

Christine said:Your Arrow Head is meant to be more of a hanging plant not up rite, how much sun are the 2 getting? I was advised many years ago not to use the fertilizer sticks,now I'm having a senior moment as to why they are bad, anyway, I agree with Bill to much fertilizer.

i dont know about the arrowhead being a hanging plant but when i bought it from IKEA beginning of the year it was rather bushy and the growth seemed really nice and even with lots of leaves at the bottom. just wondering whether it was possible to recreate that "look" again. this is how it looks at the beginning :



not sure whether you can see this, i didnt take a closeup shot so i had to zoom in but it had very even growths.

the arrowhead is getting less sun than the birds nest, probably semi shade?

sallyg said:The arrowhead (Syngonium) will mostly grow at the tips. So cutting the tips and rooting them and adding them to the pot will give you more 'tips' (branches). I haven't had one for many years but I expect that brighter light would give it a shorter more dense habit. This plant is going to flop over eventually as the stems are soft.

agree, im thinking of moving it to a brighter spot. so far none of those stems have flopped over yet! they've been like this for almost a year, with new leaves coming out pretty slowly. some of those leaves also never really become big before turning yellow, so i just cut them off.

purpleinopp said:Arrowhead vine is just that, a vine. Only by propagating often & starting over with juvenile foliage can one have a "bushy" appearance.
Arrowhead Plant (Syngonium podophyllum)

Birdnest fern looks lovely! Each crop of new leaves will be bigger. Agree that it will not do well if the soil dries.
Bird's Nest Fern (Asplenium nidus)

I've not had any positive experiences from fertilizer sticks. A mild dose of liquid fertilizer at every-other watering would probably yield much better results by supplying an even amount of fert throughout the root zone, not just in 1 spot.

thank you! the new fronds are coming out very quickly and they're wiry with odd shapes (not tapered at the end) and they're sticking out everywhere. im not sure whether they will fan out nicely in time to come but now they just look like a very bad haircut lol. im thinking of switching to liquid fertilizer too. i've used a liquid type from daiso (japanese dollar shop) but its getting quite expensive since its a diluted kind where you just water with it as opposed to adding a few drops. what percentage of NPK do you normally use for houseplants?

AlyssaBlue said:Your pretty birds nest makes me miss the one I used to have before I moved across country! Very nice! In my experience the fertilizer sticks just get mushy in the soil and didn't seem to do anything for my plants. If you were to pull your plant out of the pot (don't pull it out to look, lol) you would probably see a green ball of mush in the soil. I vote yes on the water soluble fertilizer too!

ugh i didnt think they were this bad because it seems really convenient for lazy people like me lol. please share the kind of fertilizer you use, im a noob when it comes to fertilizing my plants!