Houseplants for beginner gardeners

SALT LAKE CITY — As the winter carries on, many people have found that now is a good time to start getting into houseplants. However, where is a good place to start?

KSL Greenhouse’s Maria Shilaos and Taun Beddes said the snake plant is often a good beginner houseplant.

 

“[Snake plants have] a very unique look because [they’re] very upright,” Beddes said. “They sometimes are variegated with yellow and green leaves or just straight green.”

According to Beddes, snake plants are one of the most “durable” and easiest houseplants to care for.

He also recommends the pothos.

“It’s one that is so easy to grow,” Beddes said. “They come in all sorts of kind of a very types of variegation. So, you can get white and green [or] yellow and green. But to keep that variegation, they need to be in brighter light. So a west window, or a very bright room. If you put them, say, in your office and you don’t have lot of natural sunlight, they will turn green, but they’re still perfectly happy.”

The spider plant is another hardy houseplant.

“Once you get it, it’s almost impossible to kill,” Beddes said. “I have seen some that actually burst their pot [and] they got so big.”

These plants are also easy to propagate, producing lots of “pups” or an offshoot from the original plant. Beddes said preschools and elementary schools will often use spider plant pups to teach about gardening and plant growth.

“You can cut those pups and put them into little Dixie Cups,” he said. “As long as the Dixie Cup has some holes in the bottom, it’ll root out and you have a new plant.”

Maria Shilaos and Taun Beddes contributed to this story.

Devin Oldroyd is a digital content producer for KSL NewsRadio. Follow them on X.

Follow @oldroyd_devin