Hello Ines_99. Im alittle late in jumping in here, so please forgive me. Im sorry you got stiffed on postage on here. It does happen. Some people just cant uphold thier end of a deal, and/ or are just plain dishonest. That said, Id like to ask you if you have any solid GREEN babies that are a decent size w/ roots. If you do, ill be more than happy to send you postage before hand for a couple of them! Please email me and let me know. Post here too so ill know to look in my email. I would really appreciate it. I miss my solid green spider. As for rooting babies with no roots, its fairly simple. A small cup or budvase that the plant can sit its "bottom" in water, and usually in a couple weeks or so, youll have roots. However, when possible, I wait until the "babies" already have ariel roots. Below is my spider plant history I posted on another thread. ********************************** I am alittle late in coming in here, but Ill share none the less. Ive usually had a spider plant. I think ive had a total of 3. They have usually been very long lived and the only one that never produced seeds or babies was my solid green one. You dont see too many solid green ones, and I kind of am partial to them. I currently have a small verigated one. I work in Downtown Washington DC, and the Smithsonian Castle's gardnes in the summer usually have many, very large hanging basket spider plants outdoors on light posts. They are ENORMOUS, and usually have hundreds of babies on each plant, if not more. They are all verigated. There are usually 40 or 50 of these giant plants around, and most of them are in direct sun, and do great. My last spider died a few years ago, it never even produced a bloom spike, let alone a baby. It was solid green. So, summer 2004 when I was on my luch break, I took a small baby from one of the gigantic outdoor spiders at Smithsonian. It lived in my office, in water for about a year, and did OK. It did almost die a few times. I took it home and repotted it in winter 05/06 in a small ceramic pot. At one point, it only had 3 leaves. 1 leaf on one, and 2 leaves on the other. Slowly, it put out a couple of new leaves. I placed it outdoors in full sun for the summer, and in less than two months it is 10 times the size it was, it now has about 30 leaves, and has a nice bloom spike that has been blooming for a month, and even has a seed pod. Im hoping I can get a "GREEN" one out of the seeds as id like to keep a verigated one, and a solid green one. So they definately can take full summer sun, at least here in Washington.

If you're planning on setting them outdoors, I would do so without cutting back. I might plant them horizontally to some degree and they might root out along their legginess?

Well, the vertical grower is now horizontal, and six foot under, so to speak. But the intresting thig is that I pulled out all of the hair curler plugs with the young plants in them and put them in a pan. I have been giving them some water everyday now and they are all still doing pretty well for their pitiful situation. I feel so sorry for them that I am going to plant them in the next day or two in the new trough system I am building. Here is a link that might be useful: from vertical to horizontal trough, no Aluminum this time

MsGreenFinger GW(8 Ireland) I didn't base my post on scientific research. But I did look up articles about 'air purifying plants based on a NASA research' which are actually the most common house plants. (Palm, spider plant, Sans., english ivy, peace lily, boston fern etc) Maybe it does matter what kind of plant one has, how many, what size and how fast they grow. But I am sure, having a dozen large specimens in your home will make the air quality better, just as they make the life quality better. You also can read this interesting aticle: Can House Plants Solve IAQ Problems? The idea of common plants solving IAQ problems is attractive. Most people like having plants in their homes and offices and in the hotels, stores, and public buildings they visit. However, important questions exist as to whether plants can actually affect indoor air sufficiently to warrant their use as air cleaners. Can House Plants Solve IAQ Problems-2.pdf (PDF document 38Kb) This is from this article: To date, advocates have not reported the results from actual field tests. One field study was begun and failed, according to a strong advocate of the interiorscape approach to IAQ control. Stuart Snyder is the president of Aqua/Trends of Boca Raton, Florida, a firm that sells irrigation systems for interiorscapes. He offered his explanation as part of a 13-page letter to Robert Axelrad, Director of EPA's Indoor Air Division. Responding to what he calls EPA's criticism of the NASA work, Snyder wrote, “In many ways small systems are better able to isolate factors, and more clearly define mechanisms at work.... Larger environments are too subject to conflicting variables. Real life, field studies with their complex dynamics are also valuable, and should be implemented at later stages of research -- they are however, more difficult to accurately stage and evaluate” Snyder continued, “Scaled up studies must be made at some point. Associated Landscape Contractors of America have already attempted a controlled study in an office building. It failed as a study because of these difficulties.” The office-building study was done for over a year under realistic conditions and with as much control as can be achieved in a field study, There was no indication that the presence of plants had any measurable effect. HBI Inc., which conducted the study, reported virtually no effect of plants on the VOC concentrations. John R. Girman (Chief of the Analysis Branch at EPA's Indoor Air Division) has prepared a memo that details some shortcomings of the NASA study's claims for the efficacy of plants. The memo was included in correspondence between Axelrad and Snyder. Girman's memo responds to some of the technical issues presented by Snyder and other advocates of IAQ control with house plants. The memo's title is “Comment on the Use of Plants as a Means to Control Indoor Air Pollution,” (undated.) Girman analyzes the notion that NASA research shows plants are effective at removing indoor air pollutants at realistic concentrations and time frames. He calculates that at the most favorable conditions, it would take 680 plants in a typical house to achieve the same pollutant removal rate Wolverton and his colleagues reported they achieved in the test chamber. However, scale-up considerations are also important. It appears that the average chamber volume used in Wolverton's tests was 0.5 m3. This means the results must be appropriately scaled-up for use in a larger environment to allow for differences in volumetric loading (the number of plants per volume of space). This does not appear to have been done. The volume of a typical house in the U.S. is 340 m3 with a floor area of 139 m2 (1500 ft2). Thus, the recommendation that one plant be used per 100 ft2 implies the use of 15 plants in a typical house. [ALCA recommends 1 plant per 100 ft2. Wolverton recently told us he now recommends 2 or 3 plants/100 ft2, but he says “he is “just throwing a dart."] This would provide for 340 m3/15 plants or 23 m3 per plant, not 0.5 m3 per plant as in the chamber. This means that each plant would have to clean 46 times more volume than it did in the test chamber or, as would actually happen, it will clean the larger volume less effectively. To be more precise, each plant will have a pollutant removal rate which is only 1/46 of the rate it would have in the chamber, i.e., only 0.002 h-1. Thus, plants at the volumetric loading recommended would be expected to contribute relatively little to pollutant removal in any indoor environment with typical ventilation To achieve the same pollutant removal rate as realized in the test chamber, one would need to have the same volumetric loading, i.e., 680 plants in a typical house (340 m3 divided by 0.5 m3 per plant). This does not seem practical and this forms the basis for concern that adequate and realistic scale-up considerations are necessary before the use of plants can be recommended as a means to control IAQ. Similar concerns apply to the use of plants to control IAQ in office environments. It is hardly surprising that the attempt to validate the test chamber results by Associated Landscape Contractors of America did not provide measurable success ellenr22 - NJ - Zone 6b/7a(6b/7a) another option would be to not pollute the earth, the air. I agree with you but people need to vote for the right people in the elections to do that.