Hi All, Interestingly Toni, I found this varieg. one tougher to grow than the regular, which I also used to grow. Have since given up on Spaths, watering a bit too tricky for me now & it's a houseplant, that while quite lovely, I ended up quitting for the sake of more succulents & of course, more Hoyas! For interested parties, these sometimes show up in supermarkets (nice sized one my at my market 1 or 2 yrs. ago for $9) &/or box stores, often called Spath "Domino".

Oh I do not think you are being silly at all. I have only had my peace lillies ( yes I have ended up with 3)almost 3 months now but I have learned from each one of mine They each are different as far as watering so I have to watch them each day to see if they want a drink. One I have blooms a lot, one still has blooms on it, and one never has bloomed. I am very glad you are enjoying you new plant and if it makes you smile then it is always good. Keep up your good growing habits. Ann in So Ut

I'm sorry, Rebecca, but IMO there's a lot of unsupportable information and conjecture in the advice you've received on this thread so far. Allowing the plant to dry down is going to cause leaf tip and marginal leaf necrosis (dead tips & leaf edges). The plant needs almost NO fertilizer indoors, so it's dangerous to the plant to fertilize one week with fertilizer 'A' and the next week (even the next month - especially "all through the seasons") with 'B'. With this plant, that type of fertilizing virtually guarantees greater leaf burn unless you are growing in an extremely fast soil. IF you were to adopt that regimen, you could only use a tiny amount of fertilizer in each gallon of water - a drop or two, or you should expect burn. This plant actually tolerates low humidity (to about 15%) IF the plant is fertilized properly and not over-fertilized. It's NOT the lack of humidity that causes leaf tip & marginal necrosis (though when the plant is over-fertilized, it IS a contributor), it's a high level of soluble salts in the soil that makes it difficult for the plant to absorb water that is almost always to blame. Over-fertilizing, as suggested, will simply exacerbate the problem. Alternating fertilizers with a bloom-boosting blend would also be very counter-productive. The plant uses about 6 times as much N as it does P, so there is no way to justify adding fertilizers with unnecessarily high levels of P to the soil that cannot be used by the plant. The added P simply causes more burning. Allowing this plant to go 2-4 weeks w/o water will force it into an 'environmental dormancy' as a drought response. This kills the top growth (leaves) which are making the food for the blooms in the next bloom cycle. I don't think that's what you need to promote blooming. IMO, Superthrive, used as a tonic is useless. (I'll provide a link to some experiments I performed if you're interested). Misting the plant, IMO, is also counter-productive and more apt to cause problems than solve them. It's generally accepted that the presence of 'real soil' in container soils is best avoided. It compacts, slows drainage, and greatly reduces the most important characteristic of container soils - aeration. I'm wondering why, if someone "... learned this trick several years ago. Alternate fertilizers. For instance, fert with an All Purpose one month or week, however often you fertilize, then use a flowering type fertilzer [sic] the next feeding. Continue doing this throughout the seasons." there would be this offering just a little up-thread: "... I rarely fertilizer PL's, though I'm not suggesting others do the same. Last year (2008) mine got one spring feeding, before that, they went two, possibly three years without. Other than once a month Superthrive and fresh soil, (true soil, not soil-less) they were on their own. Yet they bloomed, several times, in the last 3 years." That seems like a complete contradiction to me. May I suggest: A south window behind window treatments that diffuse a good part of the light or an east window. Keep the plant at 65-90* - no lower than 65*, very low doses of any 3:1:2 ratio fertilizer whenever the plant is growing robustly, whenever you water - water thoroughly and flush the soil of salts each time - then allow the plant to dry just to the point you notice the slightest bit of wilting and water again. Watering with deionized (distilled) water when you're not watering with fertilizer solution will go a long way toward curing the burn problem and you wouldn't need to flush the soil at every watering, either. Take care - wishing you well with your plant. Al

The best time to repot your PL is in summer, when blooming is waning or stopped altogether. How large the pot can/should be is not dictated by the rote formula 'one size larger', but by the three-way relationship between plant size, container size, and the physical characteristics of the soil. If someone uses a blanket statement to suggest that you only pot up one size, without knowledge of all three factors, it speaks to a lack of understanding of the 3-way relationship mentioned. You can grow very, very small plants in very, very large pots if the soil is appropriate. We should also try to understand that no plant will "do well when it's pot-bound" if you are using a plant with plenty of room for its roots as a comparison. If plants did better growing under root-bound conditions, Mother Nature would have arranged for in situ plants to grow with their roots in tight little cones or cubes, yet we never see that occur. While it's true that we may be able to use the STRESS of our plants being root-bound to bend plants to our will and achieve OUR goals, the fact is that this serves US well, and not the plant. Growth - increase in biomass - is the measure of how "well" a plant is doing. Tight roots restrict growth and reduces the potential increase in mass, so even if we THINK plants are doing well because we use the stress of tight roots to get them to bloom or grow in a particular habit, the truth is they would rather have plenty of room for their roots to grow so they could grow as mother nature intended. No one is more aware of the negative influence tight roots has on growth than the bonsai practitioner who uses that tool extensively to bind down the plant's growth habits so the will of the grower, not the plant, prevails. Al