How Often to Water a Spider Plant, and Why the Tips Go Brown

Water on dryness, not on a day of the week

A spider plant stores water in thick white roots that look like small tubers, so it tolerates being forgotten far better than it tolerates being kept wet. The working rule is to water when the top inch (2 to 3 cm) of compost is dry to the touch, then water until it runs freely from the drainage holes.

How long that takes depends much more on the pot and the position than on the plant. A hanging basket in a warm bright room can want water twice a week, while the same plant in a plastic pot in a cool hallway can go a fortnight. Find your situation in the table and treat every interval on this page as a starting point you adjust.

A pot bound spider plant is mostly root and very little compost, so it dries alarmingly fast in summer. If yours needs water every two days, that is a repotting signal rather than a watering problem.

How to water so the whole rootball wets

The thick roots pack a pot tightly, and water tends to run down the gap between the rootball and the pot wall without wetting the middle at all. That is why a plant can be watered regularly and still behave as though it is thirsty.

1. Water slowly and twice Pour slowly over the whole surface until water appears at the bottom, wait five minutes for it to soak in, then repeat. The second pass is what wets the center of a tight rootball.
2. Soak a very dry pot in a bowl If the compost has shrunk from the sides, stand the pot in a few inches of water for twenty to thirty minutes and let it take water from below, then drain it thoroughly.
3. Take a hanging basket down Watering in place either soaks the floor or gets stopped too early. Lift it down, water it properly at a sink, let it drain, and hang it back up.
4. Empty the saucer Tip away anything standing under the pot within half an hour. Roots sitting in water are the shortest route to rot, and it matters most in a cool room in winter.

Rough intervals through the year

These assume a pot around six inches (15 cm) across in an average heated home. Stretch them for a larger or plastic pot, and shorten them for terracotta, a hanging basket, or a plant that has filled its pot.

Reduce the frequency in winter, not the amount. A thin trickle wets only the top and leaves the storage roots dry, which brings on the brown tips it was meant to prevent.

Brown tips are usually the water, not the amount

Spider plants are unusually sensitive to fluoride, chlorine and dissolved salts, and the leaf tip is where those salts concentrate as water evaporates. That is why a plant watered perfectly well can still develop a dry brown point on every leaf while the rest of the foliage stays a healthy green.

Dry indoor air and a heavy hand with fertilizer both make it worse, and the two often arrive together in a heated room in winter. The damage does not reverse, so judge whether you have fixed it by watching the leaves that open afterwards, not the ones already marked.

Trim brown tips with sharp scissors following the natural taper of the leaf rather than cutting straight across. A blunt squared off end is far more obvious than the browning was.

Flushing the pot clears the salts

If the compost has a white crust or the browning is spreading across every leaf, wash the accumulated salts out rather than trying to correct it with feeding. Do this twice a year, in spring and again in late summer, and the tips improve noticeably on new growth.

1. Run water through at a sink Pour water steadily through the pot for two or three minutes, roughly four times the pot volume, letting it drain away freely each time rather than collecting in a saucer.
2. Scrape off the crust first Remove the top half inch (1 cm) of crusted compost before you flush, and replace it with fresh afterwards. Most of the salt sits in that layer.
3. Let it drain fully before it goes back Leave the pot to drain for an hour so the compost is damp rather than saturated, and do not feed for the following month.

Reading the symptoms

The same symptom means opposite things depending on whether the compost is wet or dry, so check the compost with a finger before you decide what to do. Keep a note of when you water and when you feed: a month of that record answers most of these questions faster than any diagnosis from the leaves alone.

When you cannot tell, slide the plant out of the pot and look. Plump white storage roots mean a watering problem you can correct. Brown, soft, smelling roots mean rot, and the answer is fresh compost and a long dry spell.