A Few Tips On How To Provide Extra Humidity >> Archives >> Bromeliads Care Info

In this article I’ve come up with a list of several ways to raise indoor humidity for your plants.

How To Provide Extra Humidity

To provide extra humidity for a small, special plant, keep it on a bed of damp pebbles and cover it with a glass cake cover at night.

If you keep your plants on lights shelves, see if you can find a way to fashion plastic flaps that can be let down over the sides at night. Many collectors of fancy-leafed begonias or small ferns use such humidity tents at night to capture humidity within the enclosure. In the daytime, the flaps are raised to admit plenty of fresh air. Such an enclosure need not be made of clear plastic; cloth or roll-type window shades will do just fine!

One very simple strategy for increasing humidity is to place plants close together, because groups of transpiring plants form pockets of humidity on their own.

Placing bowls or glasses of water between plants, increases humidity while keeping water handy for dribbling into containers.

You can place plants on watertight trays filled with clean pebbles, which are then covered halfway with water. The water should not be so deep that it reaches the bottoms of the containers, which can cause roots to rot. The tray also needs to be rinsed every few weeks to keep them from becoming a secret haven for fungus gnats or other pests. Regular cleaning also limits the amount of salts that accumulate on the pebbles as water evaporates.

Misting plants, by spraying them with a fine spray of water, is helpful for plants that need usually high humidity, but for some plants it can do more harm than good. Plants with hairy leaves, such as African violets, dry very slowly, and leaves that stay damp for long periods of time can develop problems with disease. However, a few plants, such as bromeliads, actually take up moisture through specialized scales on their leaves, so misting them accomplishes two things - the plants absorb moisture, and they enjoy increased humidity.