Preparing Plants to Bring Back Inside

Carol in Perry has a question about plants, “Good morning. My question is, I have a couple of plants that I want to bring indoors, and I would like you to review proper procedures to debug before I do that.”

Yes, that is a great question because we’re coming up on that for sure. You do want to make sure to inspect the leaves and see if you see anything underneath the leaves, which would be like mealybugs or scale, anything like that. 

You can use a soap spray on that, which is usually just like an insecticidal soap. The most important thing is to put systemic insecticide into the soil. That is like a granular, and you usually poke about, depending on the size of it, a few holes around the soil, and you would put it down into there, and it comes up through the root system. It lasts six to eight weeks.

It does help get rid of anything it might have, but it does help prevent it as well. That’s a very important thing to do. Then if you need to trim any of the dead out or anything like that, that’s also a good thing. But the systemic insecticide is very important.

There’s really no scent to that. That’s actually just like a granular that you would put into the soil, and it comes up through the root system. The plants suck it up through their roots, so there’s nothing to that. The insecticidal soap does have a fragrance to it, but it’s kind of a soapy smell. It’s not bad.

Both those will fade if you’re putting them on now, doing it while it’s still outside. That fragrance on both of them, if there is one on the other, it’s going to fade, and it won’t be bad when you bring it in the house. It takes a little while for the systemic to get into the system of the plant, too. It does last about six to eight weeks.

It is a good idea to give it a good drink after you’re done putting that in the soil, just because it’s going to help it settle in and start the uptake process. Yeah, you just want to bring them in before the fear of frost. We bring in really any of the houseplants that we have out or anything that we want to keep.

A lot of people do take their houseplants outside over the summer, like Scheffalera, Ficus, that kind of stuff. And you just want to bring those back in. But a lot of times there are things that we want to save, like a geranium, or something we use in a pot or

something like that. As long as before the fear of frost, once we start getting really cool, you definitely want to start bringing things in.

It’s usually mid-October, but sometimes, I’ve seen it as early as the first week of September. That’s only happened a couple times, but most of the time, we’re going to experience it in October, usually before trick-or-treating.

But then there’s times like last year where I don’t even know if we had a really good frost until November. It was a really late fall last year. And again, if we’re still dry, we want to continue watering those trees and shrubs. Don’t think that the rain was enough. If the rain got the soil wet three inches deep, your root system is a foot to 14 inches. You still have to put some supplemental water down for those plants. Now, as they start to go dormant, we have that frost that hopefully is coming here. I did look at the 10, 12-day forecast. I don’t see anything in that 38 degrees. And 38 degrees and below is where frost forms.

Even if we were to have that and be like 37 or 36 degrees, the ground is so warm right now, it’s going to radiate enough heat. It’s going to prevent the frost from forming. It would take many nights at those temperatures to produce a frost. Now, if we go down to 32 degrees one night, things aren’t going to freeze because the ground is still warm. But it might allow a frost to set in. And most houseplants really don’t like it below 50. They start to get a little unhappy.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).