Growing Indoors
Sometimes its hard to know where to place your new plant and sometimes you know exactly where you want a plant but struggle to find the right plant for that spot. Lets see if we can find a solution to help.
The basic facts are that your plants will need appropriate lighting in order to grow. So how do you know what that is the right amount of light? In todays age of internet searches it is so easy to find out how to care for your plant if you know what its botanical name is. As great as common names are they can be misleading and confusing as they often refer to more than one species of plant whose care could be vastly different. With the botanical name you will usually find that someone has written a concise care guide. I recommend that you read a few different guides to ensure that the advice you have discovered is sound and correct. It is also a good idea to take a look at where the plant grows naturally and what conditions it normally lives in this will give you an indication of what you need to provide.
You might be surprised to know that not all cactus enjoy or can tolerate full sun and some prefer to grow with a little protection from the harsh mid day sun to stop them from being burnt by the suns strongest rays especially if placed against a window. That said many cactus will become etiolated (grow tall and thin) if they do not get enough direct sunlight. I personally like to grow most of my cactus in a greenhouse that I heat to 6c in the winter, however there are some cactus that will not tolerate this cold so I grow those on my windowsill all year round and there is no reason why you couldn’t too. You could even give them a little holiday out into the garden over summer if you wanted too. One thing to consider is that cactus do like air movement so will love it if you open a window on those hot sunny days, this will also help to prevent them from getting burnt (Don’t forget to close the window when you leave the house though, your cactus don’t want to you to get burgled because of them). It’s also worth following my guidelines on watering your cactus over winter. I personally don’t water the cactus I keep in the house even though the temperature of the house is warmer. By keeping you cactus dry over winter they will be forced into dormancy and stop growing. This is important because as the day length shortens your cactus won’t receive enough light to grow properly.
What if you want to grow your cactus on a shelf or a table in the middle of the room, Is their enough light for it to grow? The easy answer is No, there isn’t. It will survive but it will turn a pale green and become etiolated. Because cactus grow so slowly this may take a year or more for you to notice. You can have your cactus in the middle of the room but you have 3 options.
Option 1: Grow it until it becomes distorted then throw it away and replace it with a new one. This is not an option that I support at all and it upsets me a little to think that people would treat their plants with such disregard as to just throw them away. Options 2 and 3 are my preferred.
Option 2: Grow it on your sunniest window. Now don’t become to complacent here and think any old window will do! I have grown cactus on a windowsill and it still became etiolated because it wasn’t getting enough light. It was however a tiny windowsill and surrounded by other things. I could have helped it’s chances if the window had been wider, letting in more sunlight.
Option 3: If you really want to grow your cactus and succulents on a shelf or table you can either move them to the window during the daytime when you are out at work and put them back in their desired spot when you get home from work but if you’re anything like me that feels like a faff. I would suggest you invest in some really good quality grow lights. I say invest because they are not cheep and whilst I have personally never used them I do know that you need to provide the right spectrum of light for them to be effective. Here at DJA Plants we hope to experiment with this over the next year or so in order to give you some actual feedback about what we have found to work and not work but we may need to feedback on something a little faster growing than a cactus in the short term.
I hope this has helped you to consider where you can grow your new cactus to ensure that it has a long and healthy life and grows with you for years to come.
* Please note DJA Plants are based in the UK and advice given is for others who live in similar conditions. The advice may be the same or may need to be altered depending upon local conditions.