How To Care For a Caladium

Caladiums are amazing foliage plants with colorful leaves that have absolutely no frost tolerance. Can you grow Caladium plants indoors? The plant’s special needs make using Caladiums as indoor plants rather challenging. However, a few tips on how to care for Caladium indoors might see you enjoying the attractive leaves for a bit longer than outdoor grown tubers. Moving your Caladium inside will save the tubers for spring growth and can possibly extend the foliar season.

Ideal Conditions

Use these guidelines to keep your caladium healthy and happy:

• Light: The caladium prefers indirect light or moderate shade indoors. The narrower the leaves, the greater the sun it can withstand.
• Water: When leaves appear, keep the plant evenly moist. Never allow it to dry out. Keep the humidity as high as is practical.
• Temperature: The warmer the better that is the temperature at which tubers begin to grow.
• Soil: A rich, well-drained potting mix is good for caladium.
• Fertilizer: Fertilize the plant weekly during the growing season with liquid fertilizer or use slow-release pellets.

Where to place your Caladium at home

The best place to set up your caladium is near a window that lets a lot of light through, but isn’t in overly direct sunlight, especially during the warmest hours of the day.

• It is vulnerable to excess sun that might dry the plant up.
  The more light a caladium receives, the nicer its foliage.
• Absolutely avoid setting it near heat sources such as radiators, because moisture is what this tropical plant needs most.

Pruning and caring for Caladium

At the end of winter, if your caladium has lost many leaves, feel free to cut the foliage back entirely, this will stimulate the sending of new shoots and will rejuvenate your plant.

Remove damaged leaves regularly by snipping them off at the base.

Frequent Caladium diseases

Most diseases impacting the plant are those usually infecting indoor plants, like red spider mites, aphids and scale insects.

Growing Tips

Caladiums are a seasonal plant even in the tropics, where gardeners plant them in the spring and summer months when they’ll thrive in the heat and wet. In the home situation, they’ll do best with lots of heat, bright but indirect light, and plenty of humidity. Even under the best conditions, caladiums will only last a few months before their leaves start to die back and the plant goes dormant again. This is okay—they’re supposed to do that. Use masses of them as striking summer accents and conversation pieces. When they die back, save the tubers in a bag and replant next year for another show.