The Best Way To Make Your Spider Plant Bushier

It's no secret that the spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum) is a favorite for those just starting their houseplant collection, as it's known to be easy to grow and almost impossible to kill. Some people may even begin to obsess over these delightful plants and start amassing a collection of different varieties that all look just a little bit different. Whether you've had your spider plant for some time or you've just brought your very first one home, no doubt you've familiarized yourself with the best way to take care of it so that it thrives. But what about if you want to make your plant bushier? There are a few things you can do to encourage bushy growth and even one little trick that you may not have thought of.

Primarily, the best way to encourage bushy growth is to take your plant's energy away from producing flowering stems and plantlets, and instead put it into growing more leaves. The way to do that is to remove any flowering stems promptly and fertilize your plant regularly using a lesser-known liquid that helps indoor spider plants thrive (fish food fertilizer). More fertilizer can often inhibit flower stem formation but should promote more leaf growth. You could even use a little trick that some growers recommend: Place the plantlets into the soil around the mother plant so that they take root and create the illusion of a much fuller and bushier plant.

Understanding how your plant grows can also help you to encourage more bushiness. Spider plants will produce those flowering stems and plantlets in response to a reduction in daylight hours and an increase in the length of nighttime darkness. You can use this knowledge to your advantage to limit the production of flowering stems and plantlets so your spider plant grows new leaves instead. To do this, use a grow light once the days get shorter, and leave this on for more than 12 hours each day. You should find that after a few weeks, especially if you've also applied some liquid fertilizer regularly, your plant will have much more leaf growth. Keep in mind that this is the opposite of what you would do to get babies from your spider plant.

If you don't have access to a grow light and your spider plant has already produced lots of plantlets, you can also use these to your advantage. Just place them on the soil around the parent plant while they're still attached to the stem, and use something like a repurposed paper clip, bent into a U shape, to hold them down. It shouldn't take long for these to produce roots of their own, at which time you can cut the long stems off completely. If you do this with a number of plantlets around the perimeter of the pot, once all the stems are removed, it will give the illusion that you have a nice, bushy plant. Finally, it's important to remember that these plants will grow much more slowly during the colder months, so you'll want to keep an eye on how often you water your spider plant in winter.