Howdy my fellow plant people and future plant people!

I made a video of these instructions on my IGTV, but I wanted to write them out for anyone that doesn’t follow me there, or prefers written out instructions for either accessibility or personal preference reasons.

So you’ve got a leggy spider plant, and you want to figure out how make more of them? Great, let’s get down to propagating business.

Step 1: Have a spider plant that’s already trailing, and whose “spider plant pups” have nodes

This plant was ready to be cut, which I could tell from its fully grown spider pup plantlets. When my spider plants first started flowering (yes, flowering?!) and making offshoots, I was so tempted to cut them early because I was impatient. Having done it the right way now, I’m really glad I waited!

If your spider plant babies are ready to be propagated, they’ll look like this, with nodes that come out of the base. When I hopelessly googled “how to tell if a spider plant is ready for propagation” I couldn’t find an image that easily showed me what to look for. So, here you go. Don’t say I never did anything nice for you.

Step 2: Cut the plantlets off the main stem, as close to the nodes as possible

It’ll make sense with the next step, but you basically want your cutting to only be a spider plant pup and its nodes. No stems allowed!

Step 3: Place spider plant babies into a bowl with a damp paper towel, and leave for a few days

You essentially want to place the nodes onto the damp paper towel, and leave them there to sit. Make sure that the paper towel stays damp the entire time the pups are sitting in there. My favorite way to do this is to use a mister/spray bottle to keep the plants humid, too!

Step 4: After a few days, check for roots

The longer the nodes on your spider plant pups are, the faster your roots will come in! It can take anywhere from 3 days up to two weeks for the roots to be long enough to put in soil.

Step 5: Plant in soil!

My spider plants tend to prefer a 1:1:1 ratio of soil to perlite to peat moss. I keep them all watered once dry, and try not to over-love them. Mine do well in partially sunny spots! I repot them when they get rootbound, but beware, they’ll grow huge if you let them. The more rootbound they are, the more likely they are to create spider plant babies.

This is definitely not the only way you can propagate spider plantlets. I have personally stuck spider plant babies straight in soil, and I have also propagated spider plant pups in water before transferring. This is my favorite method, though!

Happy potting! Tag me on instagram if you decide to try this yourself.