How to increase humidity for your houseplants

What are the best ways to increase humidity?

Keeping the humidity levels correct for your plants can be a bit of trial and error. We’ve found that the best ways to increase the humidity for your houseplants are; Misting, Keeping a pebble tray, Showering your houseplants, Placing your houseplants in the bathroom and utilising humidifiers. Testing a couple of these simple tips and tricks should make super easy for you to increase the humidity for your houseplants, keeping them happy and healthy.

Misting your houseplants

Although a short term solution, one of the simplest ways to increase the humidity for your houseplants is to mist them with a spray bottle. It’s best to mist them a couple of times a week and important that you only do it for humidity loving plants like ferns or monsteras. You can get spray bottles of all different kinds too that will definitely suit the style you’re looking for — we love these amber bottles.

It’s best to mist your houseplants in the morning so that all of the water that lands on the leaves and stems has time to evaporate and bring that humidity right up.

Pebble Tray

This method is great for keeping a more consistent humidity level for the immediate vicinity. It’s pretty simple too, just place your houseplants over a tray of pebbles with fresh water over the top. Over the day water from the tray will evaporate giving the plants above exactly what they’re looking for. The pebbles stop the bottom of the plant pots reaching the water in the tray, ultimately stopping your plants from getting waterlogged and developing nasty problems like root rot.

It’s best to fill with a small amount of water every couple of days instead of filling the tray and letting it sit for weeks. This reduces the risk of any stagnant water gathering a bad smell in your home.

Showering your houseplants

To quickly raise the humidity and wash down your houseplants of any long-standing dust, you can always give them a quick shower. Simply pop them in the shower and wash them down with lukewarm water, this will clean off the leaves and give the soil a good soaking. Once washed leave them in the shower a little to let any excess water run off before returning to their normal spots. Over the next couple of days, your plants should have a good boost in humidity levels. You can read more about how to shower your houseplants here.

Place your houseplants in the bathroom

If you’re lucky enough to have great lighting in your bathroom you can move in a couple of your houseplants that need the help of increased humidity. The running water will vastly increase the humidity of the room, especially if you often use the showers.

A top of being great for the plants, it’s also really nice to include some greenery in your bathroom as they bring a good amount of life to any room. Some recommendations for bathroom plants would be anything tropical (Monsteras, bananas etc…) or ferns, these will thrive in the increased humidity environment and look great!

Humidifiers

Looking for the easy solution? Getting a humidifier is definitely the way for you. They’re relatively affordable little devices and they make keeping a consistent humidity level so much easier. Most will allow you to place them on a timer so they run on a fixed schedule, and some will even have a built-in monitor so they automatically turn on and off to keep the humidity exactly where you want it.

This is likely the best way to go if you find that you just can’t keep the balance right with any other option, or if you travel often and can’t keep to a consistent schedule for misting or refilling a pebble tray.

There’s a whole host of ways to help increase the humidity for your houseplants. Most of the methods that we’ve gone over here are really very simple to bring into your maintenance schedule and will keep all of your plants happy and thriving through the colder, drier months.