Why You Should Consider Quarantining New Houseplants

Let me tell you a little story about how a sad Carissa ended up having to cut her plant collection by about a third. In the last year, I have had to get rid of many of my houseplants (including the three in this picture)! I was in the process of growing my collection when I started to notice yellowing foliage and many dropping leaves. I also started to notice a sticky residue on surfaces near some of my plants. What ultimately caused me to investigate further was when we had ants on some of the plants and they ended up “finding a home” in Cara’s fur. She was itching constantly and couldn’t sit still.

Before you become too concerned about Cara, we gave her a bath very quickly after noticing her irritation which helped substantially. We also contacted the vet who recommended a specific shampoo that worked wonders! She was well taken care of but needless to say…. the plant with the ants had to go.

Before the ants, however, I tried many things to get rid of the sticky residue on the surfaces and the leaves. Dish soap in water took care of the stickiness, but it kept coming back. Ants kept showing up. Once again, as soon as it caused an issue to the puppy, we got rid of it. I still don’t know exactly what was wrong with the plant, but I’m assuming there was some type of infestation (maybe in addition to the ants).

After getting rid of that plant, I started think about other areas in the house that always seemed to be sticky. These were plants that were nowhere near the plant that originally was thrown out (that was a rescue plant that I had found, so it was thankfully always by itself)!

I started thinking about how the leaves seemed to be constantly falling off one of my Pothos plants and it was always sticky on the table that it was on. I decided to investigate further and looked closely at the leaves which had numerous little white mite-looking things on it. Some were larger and some were hardly visible. I did a google search and identified these little bugs as spider mites (I was wrong). I started spraying all the leaves of the plant and those near it with an alcohol/water mixture every three days. While it seemed to help a little bit, the plant was still covered with the mites.

I decided to investigate further on google, and concluded that these mites were probably more likely mealybugs. I really thought that I had taken pictures of them, but I haven’t been able to find any close up… sorry! I really didn’t want to get rid of my plants, so I put some rubbing alcohol into a bowl and used toothpicks to manually remove the bugs that I could see from my plants and I used the bowl of alcohol to kill them and remove them from my toothpick. I did this maybe once a week for a couple of months before realizing that many of them were too small for me to see and they were spreading to more and more of my plants. Ultimately, I had to throw out (and immediately take the trash out) all of the plants that had any evidence of the mealybugs. I also placed the pots outside (it was below zero outside at this time) so they would freeze.

I had gotten many new plants before noticing this from multiple sources. I was constantly moving them around and decorating with the plants. I had thought of keeping the “rescue plant” on it’s own (so that plant is not likely the culprit), but not any of the others that I had gotten as gifts or purchased from the store. While I am not sure which plant or plants brought in the mealybugs, I do know that they spread quickly at my house.

I realize that this is a lot of rambling about what happened to me, but I wanted to share this story because since this happened, I have started keeping new plants separate from all my established plants for a few months after getting them. I monitor them very closely for any signs of infestation or disease. Thankfully, I haven’t had an issue since, but for a plant lover…. getting rid of a large part of my collection wasn’t very fun. My hope in writing this post is that this won’t happen to you!

Keep your plants safe by quarantining any new plants for a few months! Keep them on a separate table or area of the floor… away from all other plants…. it could save your collection! I hope this information was helpful! I don’t have a lot of information of having to treat any pests or disease because this was something fairly new to me! While I hope I never need to experiment with another plant disease or issue, if I do I will be sure to share every step of the way with you! 🙂