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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It, on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. We're just a couple of weeks away from the longest day of the year, which means currently, we're getting at least 15 hours of daylight. That's 15 potential hours your plants could be photosynthesizing. If you yearn to grow something, now is the time. We brought back an expert to talk with us about how to take advantage of all the sun and warmth.

Chris Satch is a professor at the New York Botanical Gardens, and also has his own plant consultancy, a business called NYC Plant Help. Yes, he makes house calls, and he's here in studio to give us all the advice about caring for our plants, when and how to step up watering. We might even get into a little plant trivia. Welcome to the studio.

Christopher Satch: Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, call us with your growing questions, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Here's a fancy thing, you can text to us at that number now, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Want to know how much daylight you need to grow basil indoor? Whether or not you should move that house plant outside? Do you want to know if that sticky substance on the leaves of one of your houseplants is sap, or something worse? Call us, text us, 212-433-WNYC.

You can also reach out on social media, @AllOfItWNYC. I would like you to finish this sentence for me with the appropriate plant-verb subject pairing. We're doing mad libs, June is the perfect month to?

Christopher Satch: Plant plants.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: What is it about June and plant plants right now?

Christopher Satch: Well, it is finally past our last frost, so if you've been growing seedlings indoors, now is the time to put them outdoors. Now is the time for all of your sensitive and non-cold tolerant plants to go outside, and like you said, it's the longest day of the year coming up soon, June 21st. Our days will continue to be longer than our nights until about September, which is the end of the growing season. Right now is prime time for everything you want to grow, so I'm super excited.

Alison Stewart: With all of this extra sunlight, what are some things we should be considering, given all the extra daylight?

Christopher Satch: Whether you're growing indoors or whether you're growing outdoors, one thing remains the same. With more light, comes more heat, and with more heat, comes more frequent watering. If you're indoors, maybe you'll notice that you're watering your plants twice a week, because the soil's drying out. A pro tip is, if you have indoor house plants, always feel the soil before you water. Don't try to guess it unless you're a super pro.

You'll know, if you're at that level. Outdoors, it starts to get a little dicey, or rather, I should say, more involved. Outdoors, you might be, especially as the heat waves start kicking in, in late June-- I was expecting a heat wave by now, usually, June it starts to cook pretty hot. When those heat waves do kick up, you might be watering almost every single day outdoors, and more often, maybe even twice a day, if you're growing in containers, especially on a sun-drenched balcony, terrace, or rooftop.

Alison Stewart: Does misting do anything, or does it just make us feel better?

Christopher Satch: Depends on the plant.

Alison Stewart: Oh, good answer.

Christopher Satch: It depends on the plant. For most of your garden variety house plants, misting does nothing. In fact, I would say misting is detrimental, because it invites the opportunity for fungal spores to germinate on the leaves, and for fungal infections to happen on the leaves. If you have random black and brown spots on the edges of your leaves and they're asymmetrical, and usually, they'll have a yellow halo-- Those are infections. Those are fungal infections.

We're often told that it's humidity, also, just as a general rule, misting doesn't really raise the humidity. It might raise the humidity for about five minutes, and then the rest of your room just cancels that out. [laughs] There are plants that do need the extra humidity and do want to be sprit. Those are what we call epiphytes, those are your orchids, those are your air plants, those are your bromeliads, and certain types of ferns. Not all ferns, but certain types of ferns, as well.

Alison Stewart: Speaking of orchids, we have a comment. Orchids, what's their freaking problem?

Christopher Satch: I love orchids, and I love orchids--

Alison Stewart: You're the problem. [laughs]

Christopher Satch: No. [laughs] No. I love orchids. They're actually the main attraction in my own personal collection. I have orchids, and the thing about orchids is, because they're epiphytes, they grow differently than other plants. They're not any more difficult, they're just different. If you want to learn more about orchids, there's a wonderful plant club in New York City, the Manhattan Orchid Society, manhattanorchid.org.

You can join, and there's plenty of cool people in there, I'm a part of it as well. We have speakers every month, that tells you how to care for your orchid, so it's just a little different.

Alison Stewart: I've got two snake plant questions, so I'm going to put them together. The first is a text, 'My 10-year-old snake plant has grown, but many of the leaves aren't firmly growing up. Instead, they curve, I don't believe I overwater, and they're in low light room with Western exposure. How can I get them to grow upright and firm?" That's question one. Let's take question two. Tracy, from Staten Island. Hi, Tracy. Thanks for calling, you're on with Chris Satch, aka The Plant Doctor.

Tracy: Hi. Thanks so much. My house definitely has low lights, so I got a snake plant, thinking it was unkillable, and I've completely managed to kill it. the leaves are completely pale, they come out in clumps, and I don't know what to do.

Alison Stewart: All right, so we have one that's ailing, and one that has-- Rest in peace?

Tracy: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Okay. Chris?

Christopher Satch: Both of your problems stem from the light. Snake plants are often marketed as low-light plants, but if you do a little bit of research, they actually hail from the sunny, semi-arid portions of South Africa. For question one, if you do want your snake plants to grow very, very upright, you do need to blast them with quite a bit of direct sun, if you want them to be super pokey and straight. They do tend to flop at the top.

After they get about three feet tall, they do start to flop a little bit, so don't be worried about that. Then, for the second question, if you know you have low light inside your house, that snake plant should be pushed into a window. Keep that snake plant in a window, any exposure to the daylight, whether it's ambient daylight or direct sun, is beneficial to house plants, especially snake plants.

Alison Stewart: Good luck to our friends, with snake plants. This is a text, "Hi. We have a fourth-floor roof container garden. My Japanese maple is half dead, like split down the middle of the trunk, half dead. Any ideas on what we can do, how we can resuscitate it?"

Christopher Satch: When I do garden design for terrace and rooftops, I actually do not, not, not ever recommend Japanese maples for rooftops, because they hate the wind. It probably cracked in half because of the wind, I don't see it, so I don't know. It could have been maybe a borer of some kind, some kind of beetle chewing at the wood, but it's probably from the wind. They don't tolerate wind very well. Honestly, I would just replace the plant, because it's just going to be a lot of work and a lot of heartache. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: My guest is New York City Plant Doctor, Christopher Satch, he's also professor at the New York Botanical Gardens, and he has his own plant consultancy business, NYC Plant Help. Our phone lines are open, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call us, or you can text just that number, if you have any questions. You can also reach out on social media, @AllOfItWNYC. For folks who have balconies, what kind of things can we grow in a balcony, if you want to start?

Christopher Satch: For balconies, you have to consider what a balcony is, and what direction it faces. Do you have a south-facing balcony that's going to get a lot of sun exposure? Do you have a covered balcony? I've seen some balconies that are covered in New York, or totally encapsulated. Depends on the space, you do have more options on a balcony than you do indoors, but a balcony is also a commitment.

It's a commitment to work, and it's a commitment to, if you get gale-force winds, which does happen from time to time, when we get a nasty squall, you'll have to take those plants indoors for a temporary amount. While the amount of plants you can grow is greater, like, you can start growing herbs, vegetables, useful plants like that, out there, you really have to watch out for number one, the sun, number two, the heat, number three, the wind. Those are your three biggest factors for watching on a balcony.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Ruth, from Queens, on line three. Hi, Ruth, thanks for calling in.

Ruth: Hi. Oops.

Christopher Satch: Hello.

Ruth: Hi. This is very timely and I have to say, I have little hope, but who knows? I live in Queens. I have a small backyard. I have an over 50-year-old Concord grapevine, and it's been infested with those spotted lanternfly demons.

Alison Stewart: Oh, no.

Christopher Satch: Oh.

Ruth: Yes. It's very sad. I'm wondering if you have any advice for me.

Christopher Satch: When it comes to the spotted lanternflies, I mean, hand-crushing them or crushing them with objects is always ideal, because you know it's dead. They are an invasive species. We do need to squish them. We do need to kill as many of them as possible. I would use just about everything in the arsenal. I would put up one of those bug zappers, it's cheesy, but they are attracted to it. You will zap a bunch that take flight. You can also start spraying with insecticides.

There are various insecticides that will work against the spotted lanternflies. I know that the New York State Department of Agriculture has guidelines for spotted lanternflies, as well as any of the local agricultural extensions. We'll have guidelines for spotted lanternflies, but physically removing them, physically killing them, I've even known people to vacuum them up. If you have a Shop-Vac, just vacuum them up, then plug the hole, and just let them starve to death, or leave it in the sun, so they bake to death.

I've used that before, I'll be honest, and it has worked quite well, because you don't have to touch them or squish them.

Alison Stewart: What about plants-- Onward to pests. I read somewhere that lavender will repel mosquitoes, or does it just smell good?

Christopher Satch: This is timely, because I recently read an article on mosquitoes. There was this big study done, as to whether or not mosquitoes were attracted to body heat, whether they were attracted to carbon dioxide, or whether they were attracted to certain other human scents. They did find that carbon dioxide was the main draw, but I'm not entirely sure if they would be repelled by lavender. You'd have to ask an entomologist.

Alison Stewart: Okay. I didn't know if there were certain plants that were better to plant if you wanted a bug-free environment.

Christopher Satch: Citronella has always been the standard. They also have those mosquito candles as well, but if you have the luxury to do so, I would put fans in your backyard as well, because mosquitoes are very terrible fliers, and having fans, good air circulation, not only helps-- They congregate around moist areas. Not only does having fans around in your backyard, and I'm talking big fans, a couple of really big fans.

Might be a little breezy, might be a little loud, but you definitely won't get eaten by mosquitoes. I've actually done this before. This is pretty effective.

Alison Stewart: Nice. Thanks for the tip. Let's talk to Casper, from Brooklyn. Hey, Casper. Thanks for calling.

Casper: Hi, thank you. Thanks for taking my call. I have a question about the tomatoes. I have those pretty big outside planters, [unintelligible 00:11:56] raised planters. I did fertilize them with the compost over the winter, and added, for acidity, some of the coffee beans, used coffee. Now, I planted the tomatoes a couple of weeks ago, and they grow crazy big, so I'm just wondering if you could give some tips on how to prune them, or how to tame them, which parts to cut.

They are already getting flowers, and I even begin to see small fruits, so this is my question.

Christopher Satch: You don't have to prune tomatoes, but if you do prune tomatoes, you start with the bottom up. You want to make sure that there's no leaves touching the ground, you want to cut off all the leaves that are touching the ground, because that's just a wonderful way for fungal and bacterial infections to make their way up the plant, so definitely do that. It also allows more airflow towards the bottom of the plant, which will help prevent pests, and also help prevent fungal and bacterial infections.

You can definitely prune the tomato from the bottom, going up. It does help the plant reinvest its nutrients into its new growth. Also, specifically for tomatoes, you must, must, must use any kind of fertilizer that has calcium in it. You have to be careful, because there's a lot of fertilizer products on the market. Almost none of them have calcium. There's very few that have calcium. The one that I particularly use, that does have calcium, is called Dyna-Gro, D-Y-N-A-G-R-O.

There's a reason why calcium doesn't make it into most fertilizers. It's because calcium itself is not very soluble in water. It doesn't help when it's in crystal form, you need to try to dissolve it, and when it's in liquid form, it would rather precipitate out of solution. That's where we get that calcium buildup around our sinks, is because calcium, even though it dissolves in water underground, once it comes above ground, it just settles out.

Dyna-Gro does have a special mixture of calcium that is soluble, so if you don't give your tomatoes, or all of your plants really, I should say, calcium, they will become weaker, they may become more floppy, and for tomatoes, particularly, they'll get blossom and rot.

Alison Stewart: My guest is NYC plant doctor Christopher Satch. We'll have more with Christopher. We'll talk about maidenhair ferns, LED room lighting, if indoor plants should ever go outdoor, and vice versa. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour is Christopher Satch, the New York City plant doctor, taking your calls. We got a text that says, "I inherited a maidenhair fern from a friend who passed away. It's healthy-ish, but I want it to thrive, as I see it in a symbolic way. Please share any tips for these plants I did own before, and it died, so I'm worried."

Christopher Satch: Maidenhair ferns fall into that category of some ferns that need the humidity. Maidenhair ferns have evolved pretty early in Earth's history, when the world was very, very wet, and they also have very primitive vascular systems, so because of that, they're not very good at transporting water, plus the fact that their leaves are so thin, very easy for them to dry out. For your maidenhair fern, never ever, ever, ever, ever let it dry out, never let the soil dry out, and bonus points if you can keep the humidity high.

I only have my maidenhair ferns inside either my vivarium, which has the automatic spritzers, or in a glass terrarium thing. You can get a nice, big glass jar from Home Goods, or whatever, and you can plant your maidenhair fern in there. It doesn't mind-- As long as you're not flooding the plant, as long as the roots get a little bit of air and dry out somewhat between waterings, that's the best way. By the way, they're weird, because they're also higher-light plants.

If you go Upstate New York, or in the backwoods of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, you will see them more in exposed areas, by waterfalls or in low-lying wetlands. It's a paradox, because more light, usually, it dries out faster, less light, it dries out slower, but they want a lot of light, and they want a lot of water. They also want a lot of fertilizer. You will have a huge maidenhair fern in no time if you give it all three things.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about indoor plants for a bit. How often should we repot indoor plants? Are there certain containers that are better than others?

Christopher Satch: There's two rules for repotting, when it comes to indoor plants. When you first get the plant, you should repot it within two weeks to a month. Now, if you're getting a plant that's in bloom, like an orchid, or something else, wait till the flowers fall off, and then you can repot it, because usually, it's potted for greenhouse conditions and not home conditions. That's rule number one. Rule number two is, you can get away with having your plants be in the same soil, year after year.

Absolutely no after four years. Four years is the maximum. One year, generally, is how often they say to repot, but I've pushed some plants to three or four years without repotting. The key to that is, if you're not going to repot every single year, you must, must, must be fertilizing, because that plant will exhaust all of the nutrients in the pot.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that makes sense. Someone wanted to know, "Are there any plants that can survive with basically no natural light and LED room lighting only?"

Christopher Satch: I was going to answer that very differently, until you said the second half of that. The LED lights makes total difference, because plants literally eat the light. They're living solar panels. If you're using LED lights, there are plenty of plants that you can grow under lights. I know many orchid growers in the Manhattan Orchid Society, they grow many types of orchids under lights. There's certain kinds of LEDs that you should use over others, but yes, it is possible.

Alison Stewart: What is a no-light plant? Is there such a thing, as a plant that can get away with little to no light?

Christopher Satch: There is no such thing. You must have your plants in the window.

Alison Stewart: It eats, to your point. They eat light.

Christopher Satch: They eat the light. No light, no food, they starve to death.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Giuliana, from Montclair. Hi, Giuliana. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Giuliana: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I have a specific question about cilantro, specifically about the ones you get at the grocery store. I'm obsessed with cilantro. I need it almost every day, so I bought so many of the ones that they sell at the produce section, and I just cannot keep one alive. It goes bad so quickly. I can keep my basil alive for a good amount of time, but never the cilantros. They just completely go bad.

I was just wondering, are they just meant to die, as just as a food item, or is there anything I can do to replant them? Should I repot them? Inside, should I keep them-- My house has low light, so I don't know how that is affecting how often to water. If I wanted to bring out, can I do that, or is it just meant to be inside, for those ones you get at the grocery store?

Christopher Satch: Cilantro, there's a multi-part answer to this. I love cilantro too. Cilantro is amazing. I am not one of the soapy cilantro tasters. I know that there are some people who taste it as soapy and gross. I do not taste it as soapy and gross. With cilantro-- Any plant that you want to do something or produce something, you need to give it the energy to do that. That means a lot of light. Where most indoor herb growers go wrong is, they don't give it as much direct sun as possible.

For cilantro to be properly grown indoors, you need six or more hours of direct sun blasting the plant, or about 12 to 18 hours under LED lights. You can get an LED light. If you're going quick and dirty and you don't really care what it looks like, you can get a Home Depot clamp and put in a garage floodlight. Most garage floodlights will work, as long as they're of the daylight spectrum, and above 1400 to 1500 lumens. You can have that about two to three feet away from the plant, and you will grow cilantro.

I pair that in a window. I put it in the window, and I give it the LED lights to try to maximize the quota of light that the plant is actually getting. If you're buying it from the grocery store, you do want to repot it. Although personally, it's both cheaper and more interesting to grow them from seed. Plus, it is pest free if you grow them from seed. I've bought a couple of plants from the store, once upon a time, and they had spider mites, there were mealybugs, or it was just covered in fungus.

Seed is the cleanest way to start, and cilantro's a pretty fast grower, once you give it the light that it needs, so it will come back and it will regenerate. When you're harvesting it, the newest leaves are the tastiest, but the oldest leaves, you want to harvest first. They might be a little more bitter. Just experiment with that.

Alison Stewart: I planted for the first time in 10 years. I'm very excited. I have a little bit of outdoor space. I love what I've done, but I'm afraid. I always wonder, "Do these plants get along?" Does it matter what I plant next to each other?

Christopher Satch: For most of your plants? No, it doesn't really matter.

Alison Stewart: Good.

Christopher Satch: I'll caveat that with, as long as they go in the same conditions. For example, you do not want to plant a cactus next to a fern. They have very different water requirements, but you can plant all your herbs and veggies together. In fact, there's a lot of literature, there's a lot of documentation on, if you have the yard space, the three sisters that comes to us from the Native Americans, what is it? Beans, squash, and corn.

They can all be planted together, and you could plant all of your herbs together. I know that, pretty much as a general rule across the board, all herbs, vegetables, fruits are full sun plants, unless otherwise caveated. Just go in knowing that, and again, this goes back to the whole solar panel thing. The more light you give it, the more it can produce, because it's essentially making something from nothing. It's making a fruit from just basic elements that have no energy associated with them.

There's no energy in soil, there's no energy in water, there's no energy in air, but it's taking the energy of the sun and it's literally ripping molecules apart and reassembling them, in order to build the plant cells, in order to build the vitamins that we all consume from them.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Harold, from Brooklyn. Hi, Harold. You're on the air.

Harold: Hey. Long time. First time. How you all doing?

Alison Stewart: Doing great.

Christopher Satch: All right.

Harold: Cool. I got a bunch of fruiting plants indoors and outdoors, and I just moved my lemon tree from indoors to the winter outside. It started to get these black flies on it. I was spraying it down every day. They were [unintelligible 00:23:02] back, but then I started getting ants crawling up it. They, I think, ate off some of the black flies' eggs. I'm just wondering if I should take care of them or rinse them off, or if they're maybe hurting my citrus trees.

Christopher Satch: I'm going to take a wild guess as to what that-- When you say black fly, that could be a lot of things. If you have ants on your citrus tree, that's not totally unusual, and that's not totally uncommon. What you do want to watch out for is, if there are ants climbing all over your plant, find out if there's any kind of sap on your plant, because those black flies might be draining the sap from the plant, and then the ants are just there for the sap. They're coming there for the show.

This has been documented, many times in nature. When ants find a food source, they will defend it. You've got a little bit of nature, actually, an entire ecosystem, going on there. The ants are likely battling off the black flies, which are causing the sugar, but also, they're drinking the sugar. You can treat for it, you can treat for both of them. You can get rid of both of them. Some people don't like insects at all, and that's totally fine. The beauty of citrus is that citrus doesn't really need pollinators at all.

It's what we call, and I'm reaching for this word from the back of my brain, so I could be wrong, but I think it's apomictic. It's basically where the plant doesn't need to be fertilized. It'll just produce fruit from the mother plant's tissue. Most fruits come from a successful fertilization. Citrus is just weird. Citrus is a very interesting, weird plant, it's worth reading up on. The short answer is, just check for pests. You could always write in, you could always send me a picture.

My website, nycplantdoctor.com. You can write in, there's a contact form, you can send me photos there, and I could have a closer look at that.

Alison Stewart: We only have about a minute or so left. Is there anything you want to make sure people know about planting this time of year, any advice, any encouragement you want to give folks?

Christopher Satch: If you haven't planted before, definitely try it. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of patience. It's not as much effort as having a pet, which I like. It allows you to travel, as long as you get someone to care for the plants. Outdoor gardening, again, is way more involved than indoor gardening. Don't try to start something outdoors that you're not going to complete, because then, you're just going to set yourself up for failure, you're going to feel bad, and then you're not going to want to try again.

If you've never planted anything, my advice is to start with indoor plants, because you know the temperature's more stable, you've removed a lot of the variables that outdoor growing has, like pests coming in, temperature fluxes, wind, things like that. Start indoors, and then make your way outdoors. Then, for all of you indoor growers, if you don't know what a plant is, if you don't know what its light requirements are, put it in a window. Not next to a window. In a window.

Alison Stewart: A window. Christopher Satch is the NYC Plant Doctor. You should definitely check him out online. Our phone lines are still full. We're going to have to have you back.

Christopher Satch: Sure. I'd love to come.

Alison Stewart: Excellent. Everybody who called and texted in, thank you so much for making the time today. NYC Plant Doctor Christopher Satch has been our guest. There is more All Of It on the way. We'll discuss separating the art from the artist, and take your calls on that, after a quick break.

 

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