How To Get A Spider Plant Bushier? 3 Easy Tips for a Full Spider Plant

How to make your spider plant bushier:

• regularly prune your spider plant to encourage tighter growth,
• repot your plant at the first signs of overcrowding, and
• propagate the baby spider plants around your mother plant to create a bushier feel.

Spider plants are always a wonderful addition to a garden – indoors or out. We love them because they are one of the easiest plants to care for.

But sometimes simply providing water and food isn’t enough to nurture them to their full potential. Without proper maintenance, a spider plant can become thin and leggy.

Below we will get to our top 3 tips for how to make your spider plant bushier.

How to Make Your Spider Plant Bushier

Spider plants are extremely common in households and gardens due to their easy – going and low – maintenance nature. But, just because they are considered low maintenance, doesn’t mean you can neglect them entirely.

If your spider plant is looking a bit thin, tired and leggy, it is likely signalling to you that it is in need of some help.

Here are our top 3 ways of reinvigorating your spider plant back to a healthier, bushier member of your garden.

1. Trim and Prune

Spider plants are fast growers. You’ll be surprised how quickly they grow when provided the right conditions. And because of their fast-growing nature, they also love haircuts.

Regularly pruning and trimming your spider plants is a great habit to get into for many reasons, like:

• it helps to prevent pests from attacking and infesting weak parts of the plant,
• you can catch any issues like disease and rot sooner, rather than later, and
• it allows you to keep your spider plant compact, neat and looking glorious.

We recommend pruning your plant in the spring and summer months, when it is growing faster. Grab yourself a pair of sterilized garden shears and don’t be scared to go hard on the pruning. Trust us, they can take it, and they will grow thicker and bushier than before.

2. Repot your Spider Plant

With their vigorous growing habits, spider plants can often fill out their planters a lot quicker than other plants.

Depending on how well you care for your plant, you could potentially be repotting your spider plant every 1 – 2 years. But this is a good thing! Especially if you want your spider plant to look fuller and bushier.

Repotting your spider plant helps to stimulate new leaf growth, rather than placing its energy into other forms of growing, like sending out runners (or stolons) to grow spiderettes (baby spider plants).

To repot your spider plant, follow these simple steps:

1. carefully remove your spider plant from the original pot,
2. perform a quick visual inspection of the condition of the roots and remove the brown or mushy roots, and
3. place the spider plant into a larger pot with your preferred potting mix, and backfill with fresh soil.
4. Finally, give your newly potted spider plant a good water, and ensure any excess water drains out of the drainage holes.

For a visual guide to repotting your spider plant, check out this video by Houseplant Hacks:

3. Propagation

The last tip we have for making your spider plant look bushier is propagation.

If you have been nurturing your spider plant properly, you should see plenty of stolons shooting out from the mother plant. This is one of the ways a spider plant will self propagate itself to ensure it survives.

Each stolon will grow spiderettes at the end, which will also develop small roots to become self-sufficient, new baby spider plants.

We can give our spider plants a helping hand, by cultivating these spiderettes and planting them around the mother plant to give them a bushier appearance.

Plus, propagating these little spiderettes is easy! The babies have done all the hard work already by developing the roots while they were attached to their parents.

To propagate the spiderettes:

1. wait until the little spiderettes have developed roots at least 1 inch long,
2. cut the stolon (runner) from the main plant and trim as close to the spiderette as you feel comfortable. Make sure you do not damage any of the roots.
3. Place the spiderettes in soiless potting mixture (made up of peat or sphagnum moss), and keep moist until roots mature (2 – 3 inches in length).
4. Finally, transplant the little spiderettes into the soil around the mother plant to mature and give a bushier feel to your little spider plant oasis.

Spider Plant: General Care and Maintenance

As we have mentioned numerous times throughout this guide to how to make a spider plant bushier, a healthy spider plant, generally means a happier and fuller spider plant.

We find the easiest way to keep a spider plant happy, is to maintain a regular maintenance schedule. Let’s take a quick look at what that should look like.

Lighting Requirements

Spider plants love plenty of indirect light. This means placing it in a position that has bright light, but not in a place that is in direct sunlight.

Spider plants thrive in positions with plenty of indirect sunlight.

A spider plant can tolerate low – light conditions, but they will not thrive. In fact, if your spider plant only receives light from one direction in a low light position, it can begin to lean to one side and grow lopsided.

Temperature and Humidity Requirements

For the best chances of nurturing a full and happy spider plant, keep it in a temperature range between 70-90° Fahrenheit (21-32° Celcius).

They will tolerate lower temperatures, but their growth will become stunted and may begin to thin.

The same goes for spider plants and their humidity preferences. They will tolerate conditions with low humidity. However, if you want to see a thriving and bushy spider plant, try increasing the humidity.

Water Requirements

Plants that like warm temperatures and high humidity conditions generally like plenty of water – which is exactly what your spider plant needs.

Make sure your spider plants’ soil has plenty of moisture available for the roots to access. However, this doesn’t mean you need soggy soil, or you are free to over water your plant. It means you need the right type of soil that has water retention capabilities, but at the same time, allows excess water to drain away. We’ll get into this more in the next section.

Water your plant liberally at least once a week. We recommend testing the moisture levels of the soil using the finger test on the top layer of your plants’ soil.

Soil and Fertilizer Requirements

When it comes to potting soil for your spider plant, we like to make our own ‘soil’. We’ve put that in inverted commas because the indoor soil mix we use isn’t exactly soil.

We use a specific recipe of coconut coir, perlite and vermiculite that has great water retaining properties. And at the same time, expels any excess water from the soil – leaving the roots moist, but not too moist.

Ordinary potting mix will work, but we still recommend mixing in a bit of perlite or vermiculite to aerate the soil and give your soil some good drainage.

The wrong soggy soil can lead to root rot and be an open invitation for pests to make a home and infest your spider plant.

Final Thoughts on How to Make Spider Plant Bushier

Spider plants are versatile, and robust plants that look great in the home or garden.

However, your plant may begin to appear thin and become a leggy spider plant if not properly maintained.

We recommend three easy ways to make your spider plants bushier and healthier; regular pruning, frequent repotting to allow good growth, and propagation.

General care and maintenance for your spider plant will also help to maintain a healthy and full spider plant.