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Prayer Plant or Maranta leuconeura erythroneura Family - Marantaceae
This plant will amuse you with its behaviour: close to the evening the leaves start slowly folding up, until completely closed in the dark. Then it will open the leaves back again in the morning. But if you noticed that leaves stay up at daytime, it might indicate, that your plant doesn't get enough light, try to move it to brighter location.
But then again, if location is too bright, the colors of the leaves might fade. You need to experiment with placing maranta, to find it's proper location.
Prayer plant likes warm humid conditions. If you live in place with cold frosty winters, don't put marantas on the windowsill too close to the glass in the winter. It gets pretty cold there, and your plant will get brown edges on the leaves.
That was my first mistake when I started to grow marantas. I thought those brown edges were from under-watering or over-watering; after number of experiments with watering (without any success), I tried to change plants location from windowsill to the wall opposite the window - and that worked well, at the same time fixing faded color of the leaves from too bright location.
As for watering - prayer plant needs to be watered regularely to keep the soil from drying out.
Also it's good to mist it in the morning with room-temperatured water. Once in a while I put my marantas in the bath and give them warm shower, they surely enjoy it.
For potting - the tropical soil mix is good.
I add a bit of vermiculite to better hold the moisture.
Here is the picture of the other Prayer Plant - Maranta leuconeura kerchoviana. |
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