 And that brings us to a little bit about Dr. Esther McGuinness. She is our extension horticulturalist for Eastern North Dakota and the director of the NDSU Extension Master Gardener Program. Her research includes evaluating plants for rain garden environments, pollinator plant preferences, high tunnel production, and spotted wing drosophila in fruits. And as a food and nutrition specialist, Esther and I often collaborate because food and gardening are directly connected. So with that she is going to talk about trendy and healthy houseplants and thank you very much for doing this this year. Thank you very much and I'm happy to call Julie my friend. Of course she would be my friend with garden as her middle name. But thank you for inviting me to participate in your field to fork. I always enjoy interacting with your audience. But we're going to talk about houseplants today and growing house plants used to be something that our parents did or maybe you know our mom, our grandmas did. But you know now it's becoming really trendy and we're seeing our millennials do it. So houseplants are enjoying a renewed popularity for a lot of different reasons. I mean they're very beautiful. You know we have beautiful leaves. You know some of the leaves can be multicolored. And we've got graceful flowers. And then we have unusual plants, our succulents, our cacti. So there's something for everybody. But another reason house plants are enjoying renewed popularity is that they help us keep in touch with nature. And I would bet a lot of people in our audience are feeling like they've got cabin fever. We've been housebound for a big portion of the winter. We would love to feel in touch with nature. Now if we can just surround ourselves with houseplants that seems to help a little bit. Houseplants are an important part of interior design. So if you open up an interior design magazine you'll find that houseplants will be in a great, maybe a majority of the pictures. They're becoming a part of our infrastructure. And then they help lift our spirits. But I want to ask a question of your audience. Now master gardeners cannot answer this. Master gardeners have probably already seen this presentation. But I want to ask the rest of the audience. And Julie I'll have you monitor the chat box. Who can be credited with reinvigorating the houseplant trend? And I'm going to give you a hint. It's a governmental organization. So I'd love to see some feedback in the chat box. And Julie if you could read read some of the answers. Alright, go ahead and type hipsters. Think more governmental USDA. Any other any other guesses? And I'll tell you it's not the USDA so you can keep guessing. Martha Stewart. Martha does love her houseplants. There's no doubt about that. We also have HUD and EPA as guesses. Well, none of those are right. I'll advance the slide here. It's NASA. And you may be asking why NASA? Well, that's because we have the space station. And the space station is essentially a building that is tightly sealed. Now you can think about the space station is having all the things that we have in, you know, they've got furniture, you know, maybe a little bit of carpeting, they definitely would have plastics and synthetic fibers and whatnot. And we know that a lot of our common furnishings and the finishes on different objects can off gas indoor air pollutants. Now we at home, we're lucky, we can open our windows, but we know that the NASA space station can't. It has to be tightly sealed. And we've known from news reports what happens when there's even a little tiny hole. They get very concerned. So NASA decided to do a study to try and find out how can they remove some of these indoor air pollutants. So they turned to houseplants. And they looked at the ability of houseplants to remove five different classes of indoor air pollutants. Everything ranging from benzene to formaldehyde, TCE, xylene and tooling, an ammonia. Now you can imagine, these are present in our houses because we have plastics and paints, carpeting and plywood, you know, and window cleaner. These are things that are commonly in our houses. So NASA decided to look at common plants that grow in low and medium light situations to see if they would have the ability to filter the air. Now these are a few of the plants that were mentioned in the NASA study. And they showed that peace lily and florist chrysanthemum removed all five of the indoor air pollutants to varying degrees. Snake plant, English ivy, and red-edged dracina removed four different pollutants. And even golden pothos removed three. But overall you can conclude that most houseplants remove at least one or two of the indoor air contaminants. And anywhere from one to three plants per 100 square feet is beneficial. The one thing I would caution you about are those that have allergies. I would think twice about putting household or putting houseplants particularly in your bedrooms if you have allergies to mold and mildew. But one thing I wanted to mention before we moved on is that we're still trying to figure out how does NASA have the ability or how does how do houseplants have the ability to remove indoor air contaminants? Is it the leaves? Do the roots have an effect? Is it the potting soil or or maybe even the microbes in the potting soil? And we're finding that they all play a role. We do know that the potting soil in general with its microbes play a very big role. So you're going to be seeing more and more research on this in the future. But I think it's a safe bet that including houseplants is a good idea in your house. Today we're going to discuss some other health benefits of plants. We'll talk about how to care for your plants and then specifically three or four families of plants that do have these health benefits. So we'll start off with three or four different studies here. This is a study from 1996 talking about plants in the workplace. Now you can imagine a computer lab. It doesn't have any windows. Now in this study they had two different groups come in and take a time computer task. They were able to control for variables you know such as gender and age and whatnot. And what they did was for the first group of people they put houseplants around the perimeter of the room. For the second group there were no houseplants. The two groups took the time computer task and they found that the group that was surrounded by houseplants performed better on the computer task. They had 12 faster reaction times. They also displayed lower blood pressure and reported that they felt more attentive while they were performing the task. And we have another study done in 2008 regarding the job satisfaction of office workers. Now once again they controlled for variables you know such as age and gender and salary and job description. And what they really surveyed was whether these individuals had plants in their office and whether they had windows. And then they looked at all all the combinations of plants and windows. Now in this table look at the mean score. A mean score of 108 or higher indicated more job satisfaction less than 108 was less. A lesser amount of job satisfaction. So regardless of whether they had windows the individuals that didn't have plants reported having lower job satisfaction than those individuals that had plants in their office. Now I'm not going to tell you that houseplants are going to make up for a bad boss. They're not going to make up for a lack of a pay raise or some of these other things but they can help you incrementally improve your mood and that's a good thing. So it's a good thing to be able to incorporate plants into your workplace. At school they have done studies. The study was done in Taiwan looking at junior high classes. We had two classrooms side by side. In one classroom they had houseplants. The other classroom did not. They then looked at four different things. How did the kids perceive the classroom? Were they sick a lot? Were there punishment records? Were the kids sent for detention or sent to the office to meet with the principal? And then they looked at test scores. They found that the students that were in a classroom surrounded by plants scored better in three to the four categories. So the students perceived the classroom as being friendlier and more comfortable if they had houseplants. Remarkably they had fewer sick leave hours in that classroom as opposed to the adjoining classroom without house plants and they misbehaved less. So there were fewer punishment records. Now unfortunately houseplants can't improve your test scores but if we can improve three out of these four categories I think we're doing really well in our schools. How about nature and hospitals? The seminal research was done by Alrick in 1984 and this has been a very important study to prove the importance of plants and nature in our health. So Alrick did the study and he looked at several years worth of records only during spring through early fall. And these were all gallbladder patients. So we know that patients that have their gallbladder removed have kind of a standardized treatment. Now what changed is their hospital room. Did they have a hospital room with a window overlooking a courtyard with beautiful trees or did they face a brick wall? Now in looking at the records Alrick noted that there were more negative notations in the hospital records for those individuals that faced a brick wall. So nurses would note if the patient was crying, if they needed consolation, if they were complaining about pain. So these were the negative notations in the patient's record. There were fewer of these notations for the individuals that looked out over that beautiful courtyard. In addition those that faced the courtyard with trees took fewer painkillers and if they took a painkiller it was usually less severe meaning they were able to get away with taking acetaminophen as opposed to taking a prescription narcotic. They also had shorter hospital stays. Now surprisingly this study didn't really have a follow-up until 2008. Then we had Dr. Park and Dr. Matts and I think they were at at Kansas and they looked at what happens if we incorporate plants in the hospital room. Again we had a standardized surgery with standardized care. The only variable was whether they were plants in the hospital room. So for the first group they had eight to twelve plants in the room. You know they could it could be foliage plants, we had some flowering plants. The second group had no plants in the room at all. So in both studies they found that the surgical patients recovered faster if they were surrounded by plants. They took fewer pain relievers, had lower blood pressure and they reported less pain and fatigue. So what are you going to do now if one of your loved ones is in the hospital? You're going to buy them plants. Alright so we've talked about the benefits of plants. Let's talk about how to care for your plants. So I'm going to have some general comments first before we dive into specific plants. I think it's a good idea to do research before you bring the plant home. So figure out what their native habitat is like. Are they in epiphyte or do they grow in terrestrial situations? So an epiphyte would be like an orchid that lives on the branch of a tree and not in soil. A terrestrial situation would be where the plant is living in soil. They're going to have very different media requirements. You'll look at temperature. Does a plant grow in a tropical location or does it grow in a desert where it may have cool temperatures at night? What about water and relative humidity needs? Think about light. Does the plant grow in full sun or is it growing in the shade of a tree? And then think about finally nutrients. Is this a plant that requires a lot of fertilizers or not? So some good things to think about before you bring the plant home. Now once you bring the plant home you need to think about watering. And this is probably the hardest skill that we have as plant parents. So how to water the plant? Well the general rule of thumb is to water deeply but infrequently. So this means that you want to saturate the pot when you water it. How do you know if it's saturated? You look to see if there's water draining out the bottom of the pot. Now you don't want the water to collect for too long in the sauce or beneath the pot. You know after five minutes or so you may want to dump out that water. Now dump it back on the plant. This water that came through the pot can actually be heavy in salts. So we don't want to put that back on the on the plant. Instead we want to dispose of it. So that's how to saturate the plant. But then you want to allow the soil to dry out in between waterings. So do you need a moisture meter to check this? No. You have a moisture meter. It's your finger. Stick it in the soil about an inch deep and then at that depth feel the soil. Does it feel dry or does it feel moist? If it still feels moist you may want to wait to water another day or two. Now when it comes to watering think about the time of year. I know there's some people that like to water once a week but this is probably not the most the most efficacious way to do it. Instead you need to water more during the summer and less during the winter. Again be guided by your finger. You know wait for the soil to dry out. It's going to take longer to dry out during the winter. Now as for watering there's special considerations for African violets. We don't want to wet the leaves of an African violet. We know that if we do that the leaves are going to rot. So it's better when you're watering to water below the leaves. And then finally think about your water. A lot of us have water softers particularly for those that live in urban areas. Don't use softened water. It's better to use hard water if you can. The softened water once again has salts and sodium in it and that can be detrimental to the plant. Now other tips with houseplant care. You'll consider humidifying your plants that are native to the rainforest. You may have a room humidifier that can help. An easy way to raise the relative humidity in the room is if you group your plants together. They'll kind of humidify each other as the water evaporates from the soil. Now fertilizer. Fertilizers like water. You want to fertilize more frequently when the plant is actively growing. So I tend to fertilize my plants more frequently in spring, summer, and early fall. And then I cut back or even stop during winter. Now with temperatures, houseplants struggle when the temperature is less than 55 or 60 degrees. This comes into play at this time of year. I know a lot of you like to travel. We probably have a lot of snowbirds too. So if you're gone for a week I know you want to turn down the temperature on your house. Don't turn it down so much that you're killing the plant. Other temperature concerns are what if you're growing your plant on the windowsill. It may be tempting to draw the curtain at night, but then you're trapping that plant between the curtain and the window. So this is going to be a pocket where it's going to be very cold. So if you have a plant on the windowsill you may want to move the plant off the windowsill if you're going to draw that curtain at night. Oh light is so very important. For most of us we should consider buying plants that like low light situations or maybe medium medium light. I really would kind of shy away from highlight or very highlight plants unless you're going to provide supplemental lighting. So I get a lot of questions you know what what sort of lights do I need to buy a special grow light. I tend I tend to actually recommend something cheaper than a grow light. I tend to tell people go out and buy a shop light. So a fluorescent shop light with cool fluorescent bulbs. These tend to work very nicely because it provides a broad spectrum of wavelengths and that's good for the plant. Now you would hang your lights maybe you know three four inches above the plants and then replace the bulbs on a yearly basis. Even if that bulb is still lighting up we do know that light levels drop after year or more. Now some of you may be wondering should I go out and buy an LED plant light and and I'll have to tell you there's a lot of research going on with LEDs but LEDs are going to be different. You're not going to be buying an LED bulb that's white. With LEDs in order for it to work you need to buy specific colors of bulbs. So that's why we see this particular unit that has red and blue bulbs. This next slide will will show you why. Now plants do absorb absorb light all across the the visible light spectrum. However they need more light in in the the blue spectrum and they need more light in the red and then a little bit of of the far red. So that's why they're doing a lot of research to optimize the colors that we provide but you'll find that most of the LED plant lights that are on the market have both red and blue but they're starting now to think you know do we need to add green do we need to add for far red. So you're going to see a lot of change regarding this. We're just barely starting to scratch the surface when it comes to LEDs and what we need for our plants. All right so now we've talked about how to care for plants. Let's talk about specific plant families. Did you know that plants have families like we do? They have cousins in fact. You'll find that these plants are related they're related on the genetic level and they'll also have some characteristics where they they look alike even. So we're first going to talk about the arum family and the arum family looks alike in that it has flowers that are similar. So you'll see the flowers look like the piece Lily in the in the corner there. They have what we call a spadex so that's that little column of tightly packed flowers and they have a spade which is that bract that looks a little like a petal but it's actually more of a leaf like bract. All right so back to the arums and they can have these poisonous leaps. If you were to look at the juice from a leaf under a microscope you would see these little crystals or little needle-like structures. They're microscopic but they have this potential to greatly aggravate your tongue. They can even cause your throat to swell up. So this is why we don't want to eat leaves from the arum family. And we do in fact have quite a few yeah let's try. We do have quite a few commonly grown plants in the arum family includes the piece Lily, Chinese evergreen, Swiss cheese plant, dumb cane, philodendron, and golden pothos. So we want to make sure that we train our children not to be chewing on our plants. Now with our pets it's a little bit harder. We may need to put these plants in a locked room or a room where our pets can't get to them or put them up high. So piece Lily. Piece Lily is one I mentioned at the very beginning having the ability to remove many different classes of air pollutants. This is what I like to call the funeral plant. I get questions time and time again on this plant because people give these to to people that are grieving you know at funerals. And I think they do so because it's a beautiful plant and because they're easy to care for. They like low to medium light situations so perfect for our houses. So a couple a couple tips on growing them. We water them more frequently you know from spring through early fall. We want them to be in a high humidity situation and then to consider that they're sensitive to salts. So what does that mean? The salts are that white crust buildup that you see on the top of your potting soil. Sometimes you'll even see it on the pot itself. The salts are coming from your fertilizer. They could be coming from your water or there may be some even in your potting soil. So it's quite normal for this to build up. But it seems to be a little harder on piece plants than on others. So the first thing you can do is remove the salt crust from the top of the soil you know do that with a spoon or something. But the problem is that these salts make it harder for the roots to absorb water. So it's really kind of an osmotic principle. We won't go into it but just understand that it makes it harder for the roots to take up water so the plant starts to look like it's drying up. So one way to address this is we can leech our plants once or twice a year and put the plants you know in the sink or bathtub. You know water it like normal until the water runs out. Allow the plant to drain for five minutes and then water once again. So what we're trying to do is get those salts which are water soluble to leech out of the soil and to come out with the water that drains out. Now be careful with this. I wouldn't do this during the winter months. I would do this at a time of year when it's much warmer and the plant can dry out faster. We just don't want to oversaturate the plant. But this is a way to leech out the salts during the warmer period of the year. Another member of the Aram family is Chinese Evergreen. And oh there's so many beautiful cultivars on the market. This is one I have at home. There's another cultivar that I need to get that has kind of a red edge to it. So there's just a lot to choose from as far as different patterns on the leaf. So Chinese Evergreen is a great one for those of you that are starting out. The big thing to consider is that don't overwater this plant. This is the one that you need to make sure dries out between watering. So wait until the soil has dried out a bit. So I talked about being careful not to sunburn your plant. And in fact you can sunburn your plant. It's no different than humans. When you sunburn the plant essentially you're kind of destroying the chloroplasts or the chloroplasts may even move out of that part of the leaf. It's kind of really interesting. But here this is actually my own plant. I make plenty of mistakes. This is how I learn is by making mistakes. So this one leaf was actually getting direct sunlight. And that's what burned it. So what I did was I've moved that plant away from the window. The other thing you can do is you can put it behind a lacy curtain. So if you're if you happen to have you know kind of sheer curtains that will still allow light to get through but it'll be less likely to burn the plant. No other arums to consider. We've got Swiss cheese plant on the left. Now I love that one. It's kind of a fun one. You do need to trellis it a little bit because it is a vine. Now for those of you that have traveled to tropical rainforest you'll see that the Swiss cheese plant is quite a vigorous vine. I've seen it grow up a 60-foot tree. No problems. That's what it would do in its native environment. It's not going to grow that that fast in your house but you will need to kind of train it a little bit on a trellis. Now the middle plant is a dumb cane and the dumb cane is kind of a nice tree-like plant. It does have that nice stem on it and then golden pothos. For a while golden pothos was kind of passe among plant enthusiasts and that's because it's so easy to grow but you know I think that's a great thing to have a plant that's really low maintenance. This is a plant that you can grow in an office environment that has fluorescent lights without any outdoor windows. It can certainly take that. All right going on to my next family on the bromeliads. This is kind of one of my favorite families. This is the pineapple family of all things. Now we have different kinds of bromeliads so you may want to take a look. Does it grow in the soil or is it an epiphyte that would grow more that would grow in something that's more well drained like a bark media. Now one thing that a lot of the bromeliads have in common is they have what is called a tank. So this is a cup where the rosette foliage comes together and it kind of creates little depression that would collect water if it was outdoors. There's kind of an evolutionary advantage to having a tank. You can in fact catch insects in it. The plant benefits by this if you have an insect that drowns and decays in there there's a small amount of nutrients that would then be available for the plant. So that's why bromeliads have that cup or tank. So with the bromeliads this is another one to make sure you don't overwater. For those of you that are a little on the fence about bromeliads you know maybe consider neglecting the plant just a little you'll actually have a little bit better a better chance with the plant so just don't overwater it. Now during the summer months you should place water in the cup but make sure it's good quality water. If you have a lot of salts in your water if you have a lot of chemicals don't use that then you might want to consider substituting distilled water. But you could do this you know keep the water in there in spring and summer early fall but take it out by late fall. This would actually increase the chance of of rotting the plant in the winter. So this is this is one of those plants you put water in the cup but just during the warm season and then make sure that you replace the water about once a week. So here's a beautiful bromeliad called Talanzia cyania. I actually grow this one at home. This is kind of a fun one it has that beautiful pink flowering stalk and the actual flowers are those little purple things. With our bromeliads they have an interesting life cycle. They will die after flowering but they'll give you a little bit of time maybe six to 12 months and in that time they will produce what we call a pup or a little daughter plant. So that's a little offshoot that will come off the base of the plant. So you want to you want to be able to grow those pups until they're a little bit bigger in size then you can sever them with a knife and then root them in some potting soil to produce the next plant. Whoops I think one thing I forgot to mention and I think it might even be missing from here is how to get your plants to flower. Bromeliads are kind of interesting. You may want to consider what it took to get a pineapple to flower in the old days. So they used to have to grow pineapple fields right next to the sugarcane field and we know they burn sugarcane fields. It was actually the burning of the sugarcane field that would induce the pineapple plant to flower. Now we we have sense figured out what the mechanism is. By burning something we are producing ethylene gas and ethylene gas is something given off by apples. So what you can do to get a bromeliad to flower is enclose it in a plastic bag and put an apple or two in it. The apple will produce ethylene gas. That's why we say that in apple one bed one bed apple spoils the bunch. It's because it's producing this gas. Now if you enclose the apple with the bromeliad in a clear plastic bag you know do so for about seven to ten days. Leave maybe just a little corner of the bag open to allow there to be a little air exchange but we do want to concentrate the ethylene gas. That will then induce the bromeliad to flower. And then this is our most famous bromeliad the pineapple. So we're going to move on to the ficus or fig family. So these are all in the same genus. Ficus they're just different species. We're going to talk about fiddly fig. The rubber plant and weeping fig. Now fortunately this family is not toxic to cats and dogs. Probably the trendiest of all house plants right now is that fiddly fig. Do you know what I'm talking about? You open up the you open up the magazines and I swear there's one of these in every house shoot that they do in the interior design magazines. So these plants can be spendy. I've seen a good-sized fiddly fig for sale in Fargo for $300. I think the plant that's pictured here would probably be a $500 plant. Fortunately you can go to a big box store and maybe buy a plant that's only a foot high and then grow it to four to five feet high. That's a lot more reasonable. I purchased one for about $20 and within a year you know I've got a plant that's about four feet tall. Now these are very interesting. It has kind of an architectural structure to this plant. It's tree-like and then it has these big coarse leaves that look like a violin. So these look absolutely fabulous in a home. So fiddly fig does like high humidity. So it's a good thing to group it with other plants or have a room humidifier and then it needs medium light not low light. So here we have it in an east-facing window in Loftsgard Hall and it's doing just fabulously. Now I wouldn't put this in the hottest summer sun that could in fact burn it but you know being close to an east-facing window should be pretty good or a few feet away from the west-facing window. Now with these big leaves they're going to trap dust and I'm sure you've seen dust on your house plants so it's a good idea to wipe them. You don't have to buy a commercial product just take a damp cloth and then wipe them clean. So this is very important for many reasons. You know first it looks better to have a plant that's dusted but it's also helping the health of your plant. If there's a thick layer of dust that's going to reduce the amount of light that is hitting the plant which would reduce the plant's ability to photosynthesize and make its own carbohydrates. So we want to remove that layer of dust. Another benefit is that by doing so you may be removing some of the spider mites. You're wiping the spider mites off the plant. That's a good thing. Now one caution is this only applies to leaves that are smooth. You don't want to do this on a hairy leafed plant like an African violet. All right so another cousin of the fiddle leaf fig is the rubber plant. So the rubber plant this was so popular in the 1970s. I know my mom really wanted one of these and I don't know why we never got one but these were just so popular. They're popular again because they've got these beautiful oval glossy leaves. They're dark green and they do have that tree-like form to them. Now this requires at least medium light. Supplemental light is probably a good thing if you can if you can provide that. Rubber plant likes the soil moist but not sopping wet. If you're not providing enough light to your plant you're going to know. You're going to notice that the lower leaves drop off of that plant. That's how you know in a lot of situations if your plant is not getting enough light. If you're losing those bottom leaves the plant is shedding them on purpose because it just can't photosynthesize enough. It can't produce enough carbs to feed the plants on the bottom. This plant is called rubber plant. Now this does not produce real rubber but it does exude this latex like substance if you break the branch. So I wanted to show you what a rubber plant looks like in the wild. It's this massive tree. So that's just something to think about particularly if you've got a house plant that's a tree. Google it and see what it looks like in the wild. I think you will be absolutely astonished. Fiddly fig is another one that grows to be pretty tall as does our weeping fig or Ficus benjamina. So Ficus benjamina will grow to be about 100 feet tall in the wild. So why is it only going to grow to be about six to eight feet tall indoors? Well there are a lot of reasons. First of all your plant is not going to be getting as much light but you also need to think about the root system. That root system is in that little pot. It only has a little bit of soil and frankly when you are restricting the roots that's what we call bonsai. So in actuality our weeping figs and our other house plants that we grow that are growing to six or eight feet tall that would otherwise grow to be 100 feet tall in the wild are essentially bonsai. So just something to think about. So our weeping fig absolutely beloved by many people. It does require at least a medium light situation but I would bet a lot of you out there would say that the weeping fig is kind of persnickety wouldn't you say? I would tell people if your weeping fig is growing really well just leave it. Don't change anything you're doing. You've hit that sweet spot. We do find that weeping fig is susceptible to leaf drop if you move it. So if your if your plant is doing well just don't touch it. I think it's happy the way it is. Now be careful. Don't underwater your weeping fig. If you underwater it your tree is going to assume that it's the dormant season and may lose its leaves. So if you're noticing that the leaves are starting to turn yellow and starting to drop your plant may be underwater. Underwatered and the plant may may want to go dormant. All right our last family is the orchid family. All right so a lot of botanists I think this is kind of an amusing family because there are over 24,000 species and 880 genera. So botanists say this is a promiscuous family. Well there's certainly been a lot of crossing and hybridizing in the wild and in cultivation there are over 100,000 registered cultivars. So there's been a lot of plant breeding done. So we're an orchid obsessed world. So it's it's really kind of fun. But a fun thing to think about is that vanilla beans come from orchids. Have you noticed that the price of vanilla is just kind of skyrocketed? Well think about the importance of pollinators when it comes to the comes to this particular orchid. The vanilla orchid is native to South America and it's pollinated by one specific bee. However most of the vanilla is produced in other areas of the world like Madagascar. I mean I've even I heard I've heard of a vanilla farm in Hawaii. They don't have the right bee. So think about it you're going to have to have somebody tediously hand pollinating these orchids to get the vanilla beans. And to top it off we recently had a crop failure from Madagascar. So that's why you're going to notice that your vanilla at the store is just sky high in price. All right so that was that was my little tangent. We're going to go back to orchids. Orchids are kind of fascinating. So I've got a picture here of the seeds. The seeds are microscopic. They're really interesting because they don't have endosperm. So they really don't have carbs to nurse that seed as it's germinating and growing. Instead that germinating seed has to rely upon a relationship with a fungus called a mycorrhizae. So it develops a symbiotic relationship where the fungus actually nourishes the seedling as it's growing. And then in turn as the orchid becomes established the orchid is able to nourish the fungus. So that's an example of a symbiotic relationship. But it also shows you that it's going to be really really difficult to start orchids from seed. We're going to talk about two orchids. Phalaenopsis. The moth orchid is probably the most commonly grown orchid. It's the one that's easiest to grow. So we're going to come back to the term epiphytic meaning that it does not grow in soil. You would find a moth orchid perched on the branch of a tree in the rainforest. So think of the orchid as in fact you know receiving rainfall and then drying out quite fast in between rains. So that's why we don't want to grow it in soil. We have a special mix I'm going to talk about. Interesting about some of the moth orchids is that the leaves I'm sorry the petals will change color once the flower has been pollinated. So this is the flower's way of signaling to the bee. Hey I'm already pollinated. You could move on to the next plant. So Phalaenopsis really easy to grow. One thing is you know make sure you don't grow it in direct sunlight. So you want to move it you know a couple of feet from the window particularly during the hottest part of the summer. So this is going to be a plant that does well in low light situations and it doesn't like cold temperatures. However it does need a temperature drop in fall. That's what initiates flowering in the plant. So when it comes to caring for orchids they have special needs. They really need high humidity. So everything I talked about before still applies but there's another way of raising the humidity around the plant. You can buy a special orchid tray or gravel tray with the orchid tray. You put water in it and then you put the pot on top of on top of the tray. You don't want the bottom of the pot sitting in the water but you do want water evaporating all around the plant to increase the humidity. Now there's special orchid trays out there or you could just take a saucer and put like river rock or gravel in it. Once again you put the pot on top of that but you make sure that you put water in the bottom of the saucer to a level where it's not not touching the bottom of the pot. We don't want the roots to sit in water otherwise they're going to rot. So instead we just want relative high relative humidity around the plant. So as I mentioned allow the roots to dry between waterings. Now what about ice cubes? So we see on Pinterest and some of these other websites that you can water an orchid with ice cubes. Well I'll tell you what I've got a colleague from the University of Georgia that thought this was some really bad advice. So he thought he would just run a quick experiment. He had everything he needed so he's like okay I'm just going to run this experiment. And what he found is that it's okay to water an orchid with three to four ice cubes you know assuming you know a decent size pot. What happens is that the ice cubes melt very slowly which provides water to the roots. But the water or the I should say the water that's melted from the ice cube has time to come up in temperature before it hurts the root system. So you can in fact water your orchid with ice cubes. Now I wouldn't put like a ton of them but you know we're talking like three to four in a decent size pot. So that kind of blew my mind but it's but it's showing you. We're still studying and we're still learning about how to take care for our plants. All right with orchids we never want to use a standard potting mix. We want to use something that drains far faster than a standard potting mix. So you can buy a specific bag of orchid media or you can make your own. It's usually kind of a combination of 80% bark with 20% sphagnum moss. And then remember to transplant your orchids when the pot is full of roots and when you start to notice that the bark in the media is starting to break down into small pieces. We don't want it to break down too much because otherwise it will hold too much water. And then our final orchid is dendrobium. Now this is harder to grow than phalinopsis. This is what you can graduate to once you have successfully grown phalinopsis then you can try dendrobium. One thing to keep in mind is that this does need about twice as much light as phalinopsis. So you might want to consider growing this in a south facing window with a sheer curtain. Or you may want to consider supplemental lighting. With dendrobium you do want to grow them drier than phalinopsis. That's because of how the plant is structured. You'll notice that it has stems so it looks different than than phalinopsis. Now these stems happen to have the ability to hold water. So you don't have to water dendrobium as often as you do phalinopsis. So I wanted to end with just some plant recommendations. I do get a lot of questions from people that want to know whether plants are toxic to dogs and cats. Now this is just a small list of some of the plants that are not toxic to dogs and cats. If you want a more complete list go to the ASPCA.org for more information. Now if you're looking for a list of plants that are poisonous to humans you could go to Google poison control and list of toxic plants and you'll find a good resource there. So it's good it's good to be careful if we have pets or if you're running a day care or have children around. All right I think that's my last slide and I will entertain questions at this point. Well you had a couple questions come in. Okay. So Judy has two questions. I have read that it is unnecessary to fertilize plants that the fertilizer really doesn't benefit the plants. What are your thoughts about this? Well that's a pretty general statement. I do find that that plants do need some fertilizer and that that's particularly with the house plants. They're grown in a potting soil and the potting soil really is not a source of nutrients. So over time with watering you know like around once a week you're going to leach whatever nutrients are there out. So you will need to fertilize but it's kind of very infrequently. I think people over fertilize to tell you the truth but one way to tell if your plant is under fertilized is if the leaves are starting to turn yellow. If they're starting to turn yellow that's a sign that your plant has a nitrogen deficiency. But I would agree with you on one point that we do over fertilizer plants. We could get by with fertilizing them very infrequently. All right the next question and I could chime in. I'm looking at my office plant. Okay. How should you treat plants that have brown tips? Should you cut the section of the leaf that is brown or will this put stress on the plant? All right so with leaves that have a brown tip that's really frequent at this time of year that may be a sign that you have low humidity in the area. You know frankly I don't worry. I wouldn't cut I wouldn't cut off the leaf unless it's really unsightly because the rest of that leaf is still photosynthesizing. The rest of that leaf is still green and still still doing its job. So unless it's really bothering you I would just leave it and you may notice that as summer comes around that you'll have fewer of these tips. The other thing that could be causing this is sometimes when we have those high levels of salts that may make it harder for the plant to take up water and we may notice that. And someone asked about growing ivy. She has a hard time growing ivy. Do you have any suggestions? Okay I have to admit I've had pretty decent luck with ivy. Maybe growing it drier. The other thing I've noticed with ivy is that they can sometimes be susceptible to spider mites. So maybe that that may be the problem that you're encountering. So you may want to treat the spider mite situation and you know probably the easiest least toxic way of handling that would be to use insecticidal soap. So I do have a publication here that has various insecticide and other types of treatments. I don't know if you can see it but it's called Growing House Plants and Management of Pest Problems. This is available through NDSU Extension Publications. It should be online but we do have a lot of good recommendations for taking care of things like aphids and spider mites. So I'm hoping I answered the ivy question. And is that publication you just held up? Is that on our website? Yes. Okay so we will get that linked if it isn't already on the field to fork website along with the archived presentation that Esther just finished and also her slides in a PDF format will be on the field to fork website. And then Kay says, I have trimmed the leaves of a piece, Lily, giving it a new tip and it seemed to work for me. Oh, good to know. Any other questions before we wrap up today? I think we all want spring and summer. Yes we do. Well, I will close out our seminar today. Thank you for joining us and please join us for the upcoming webinars next week. We are going to learn more about fruit and the kinds of fruit that will grow well in North Dakota according to the research. So thank you everyone and thank you, Esther. That was very interesting. Thank you, Julie, for having me.