Ferns

I don’t have a lot of ferns because I’ve never been a good consistent waterer. This is one of the reasons I switched to LECA. While I have many many plants in the monstera, philodendron, hoya, and orchid categories, I only have 2 ferns. Instead of the normal writeup I will tell you my story.

Like I said, I'm a very inconsistent waterer and with ferns, you forget them for 3 days and they drop all their leaves. I conducted an unintentional experiment with my blue star fern pictured here, about 6 months ago. After losing half the plant because I let it go crispy dry, I decided to put the whole rootball into a self watering pot. This is the same pot I use for all my LECA setup. Why did I do that? Well I intended to put it into LECA, but after seeing the root system I was entirely not prepared and was too scared to proceed. The unintentional experiment is basically saying I chickened out, but the alternative is letting it die - so straight into the self watering pot it goes, dirt and all. I figured it would survive for a while but likely will be too moist and die of root rot. But after a few months I was pleasantly surprised that it was thriving. At some point I made the decision to tackle the roots and get it into LECA. This may look like a mass of black rotted roots but I assure you it is not. Fern roots are very dark and I'm pretty convinced they won't rot. The whole root ball is a solid mass. I bet I can drop it and the whole thing won't budge.

So -- if you are willing to tackle a fern ball - take a look at the before and after of the crocodile fern above. You won't be able to get all the dirt off, but I don't think it will be entirely detrimental either to its progress in LECA.

LECA is the only way I'm allowed to have ferns. This is one of the reasons I love LECA and semi hydroponics - you can change the way you grow a plant to suit your lifestyle.