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Best Care Tips For Maintaining Your Whale Fin Plant
Whale Fin Plant is scientifically known as Sansevieria Masoniana. This plant is commonly termed as Whale fin snake plant or simply whale fin plant. It appears aesthetically beautiful and possesses great benefits when kept in your room. It’s a beautiful decor plant along with natural benefits you will love to know.
Ever wondered why your plant is called a whale fin plant? You will know the reason by looking at your planter carefully. It has a unique shape and has unusually wide and paddle-like leaves resembling a whale. Although it grows very slowly it usually reaches an impressive length and size when compared to other members of Sansevieria Genus.
The leaves of the whale fin plant are very beautifully mottled with very alluring and aesthetic patterns of light and dark green color. Not only the flat surface is gorgeous, but it also has leaf margins often colored as pink-ish red.
Similar to other snake plants of the genus Sansevieria, the whale fin plant also has amazing qualities of purifying the air making your home feel refreshed giving amazing vibes. If you are a beginner and do not understand much about maintaining planers at home, it is probably the best planter for you as it requires very little maintenance and care.
You can gift this aesthetic planter to your kids as it is magnificent and your kid will sequel in joy!
With so many types of snake plants out there, you can expect the Whale fin plant to be the king of this genus due to its gigantic leaves. If you do not own one, this is a must-have in your planters collection.
It’s sometimes also known as Mason’s Congo Sanseveira, as it was initially found and collected in Congo in Africa and it is easy to care for and maintain. Let’s see some tips and methods on how to care for your fin plant.
Care Tips For Whale Fin Plant
Standard care tips you are familiar with for snake plants apply for this fin plant too. It is important to acknowledge a myth before proceeding to the care segment. You have read quite often that the whale fin plant is a low light plant. Yes, it is! but you will not be able to enjoy the utmost benefits of this plant if you just shove it into a dark corner anywhere in your house. A certain amount of sunlight and breathing is needed for all the plants.
That statement only means it will TOLERATE low light. Let’s have a look at what it requires to grow beautifully and fill our houses with purity.
Amount Of Light
By all means, you can do whatever with the plant and keep it wherever you feel it looks amazing, but make sure that point is somewhat near to the window. If you want to receive the most benefits, keeping it for few hours in sunlight near the window is beneficial as per experience.
Western and eastern exposing windows are extremely great for these plants. We shall not include north windows though when they are bigger and unobstructed. A slight bit of direct sunlight is always preferred.
South windows usually have the brightest exposure and they also work perfectly. If you are one of those that live in areas having very strong sunlight, you might want to filter direct light from the sun a bit. Having kept in brighter light after going through the advice, you can predict that the water will dry out quickly, which makes us want to talk about watering the plants.
Watering Whale Fin Plant
Watering thoroughly always is important. Yes! you read it right. You have to make sure the plant drys out in between you water it. Not only skip drying out of roots, watering your plants every day is a healthy practice and you should know this if you are a plant lover except for some plants like Aloe vera. This helps to maintain a healthy root system.
Also, be sure you thoroughly marinate the soil around the entire pot till the time water is seeping through the holes of drainage. You have to discard an excess quantity of water and do not ever allow your whale fin plant to remain seated in water for very long as this will ultimately cause the rotting of roots.
Be sure that you are checking again and again if water has collected in the roots or not in case you use cachepots for planting your fin plants. After you water the plant, you have to allow the soil present along with fertilizer to dry out entirely. Once it drys out, you can water the plant again.
Try that you are not the one to wait for terribly larger time periods after the soil drys out. Although it can tolerate a few extended periods unlike other plants, watering and drying intervals should be taken care of.
You may use your fingers to check the moisture or hold the pot in your hand to see if it has gotten lighter in weight or not. Without water after dying out, it will weigh lower when the water evaporates in sunlight or is absorbed by the roots for functioning. The best thing while having a whale fin plant at your house is that they do not whimper and whine in drought which indicates how tolerant they are.
The next very important or you might say the key factor of growing whale fin plant is soil mixing.
Mixing Soil And POTS
This plant likes a sharply draining mix of soil. Usually 2 parts of an amazing cactus mix of potting along with 1 part of pumice.
If you do not have pumice you can choose perlite instead of it. Pumice is usually preferred for plants like whale fin plant that has the need to dry quickly and requires very sharp drainage system.
As far as talking about pots use can most probably use your favorite potting system just make sure it contains a hole for drainage. Usually, terra cotta pots are classy, antique, and beautiful with all the required facilities to use.
Fertilization
Although the whale fin plant is a light feeder, you can use fertilizer the entire year for better functioning. You can always use Schultz Cactus Fertiliser. Look for the nitrogen content in fertilizer while going for one. Make sure to follow the directions listed on the label of fertilizer you are buying.
It is important to know that the fertilizer alone cannot make up for the healthy growth of your plant. It is just a supplement given to plants to enhance their quality, other than this, watering, soil, and sunlight are the main factors you need to look upon.
Propagation
Caution? A whale fin plant grows slowly. you have to wait for quite some time before there is a visible new growth in the plant.
Some plants take between a year or half a year to bear new leaves. You will definitely be excited to witness the fresh beautiful leaf it bears.
You may propagate whale fin plants using the 3 best methods including soil propagation, water propagation, and division method of propagation. All three are simple. The division method is the fastest among all three. If the pot contains more than 1 leaflet, this method can be used.
If you want to know about different planters that can be used in your house other than the whale fin plant to increase and enhance the purity of air along with improving sleep quality, have a look at these 8 planters to purify the air.
