A secret killer lurking in your kitchen is ruining indoor plants. It causes irreparable damage to your prized plants right in front of your eyes while pretending to be healthy. It sits on your kitchen counter. Yes, the humble fruit bowl is the topic at hand.
Have you ever channeled your inner hipster and decided to make smashed avocado on toast for breakfast on a Sunday morning? Popped down to your local supermarket and bought some not-quite-ripened-enough avocados? Don’t worry; this is going somewhere. So what did you do? I bet you grabbed your phone, checked the internet for the best way to ripen your avos as quickly as possible, and found tons of articles telling you to stick your little green bundles of joy into your fruit bowl with a bunch of bananas. The bananas will somehow miraculously ripen your avocados much quicker, and you’ll soon be in hipster breakfast heaven.
Now, the same workings that are happening here are also working on your indoor plants, and not in a good way, my plant-loving friend, not good at all. We’re talking droopiness, yellowing, and leaf drop. So what’s going on then? How can bananas make avocados ripen quicker, and what’s all this got to do with houseplants? We’re talking ethylene gas. Ethylene gas is a natural hormone that bananas produce as they sit there in your fruit bowl, ripening. And if nearby fruit and vegetables get a whiff, they get a boost in their fruit-ripening potential, and we’re in smashed avocado heaven quicker than we thought we were.
But here’s the crux of it: this is actually bad news for our precious indoor jungle because ethylene gas can and will cause untold problems. We’re talking the baddest of baddies like stunted growth, deformed or curled leaves, flower buds failing to open, and flowers dying early. All those years of hard work undone. So basically, a peace lily will be a very unhappy bunny when snuggled up to a bowl of bananas. So do yourself a favor and put it at the other end of the room.
But wait a minute, our child. Bananas aren’t the main threat. Ends up, there are bunches of different natural products that have this lethal potential. Let me start with a question for you before we get into the specifics of that: If you’re having issues with your houseplants but don’t know why, my brand-new, no-cost guide has you covered. From yellowing passes on to dark roots to irritating earthy colored leaf tips, my free handbook has all the normal plant issues recorded and how to fix them in an effectively edible handbook.
So those fruits that are blowing off copious amounts of gas? We’re talking apples, pears, peppers, peaches, Mr. Sheff’s favorite fruit, the kiwi, Mr. Sheff’s least favorite fruit, the melon, and even tomatoes are in on the act. And guess what? Even avocados find themselves on this list. Amazing, right? So these are the big hitters when it comes to ethylene gas. If you’ve got a little fruit bowl party going on with a mix of all these bad boys and you’ve got a collection of plants, you might be in a spot of bother. I mean, I do completely admire the fact that you’re so healthy with all that natural food going on, but it’s not all about you, is it? Your plants deserve to live in a home that isn’t slowly poisoning them. I think you agree.
I’m going to spill the beans on which common indoor plants are most affected by this evil gas so you know which ones to keep away from your fruit bowl. But first, you need to know that ethylene gas is most potent on flowering plants. So, fellas, when you bring home a bunch of flowers for your wife (that you most certainly did not buy from the petrol station on the way home) and she puts them on the counter slap bang right next to the fruit, you need to tell her the truth. And for our viewers across the pond, petrol is gasoline in the UK, and many a guilty husband have bought flowers from the petrol station to try and get back into the good graces with their wives. Oh, uh, is that just me? Anyway, have you ever wondered why your local supermarket has put the cut flowers section so far away from the fruit section? It’s because this problem is well known in the floristry world. It’s called “The Secret Killer,” in fact, and the advice is to keep them well away; otherwise, the stock in the supermarket won’t last long enough to make Mother happy, or Mother’s Day if your local supermarket has the cut flowers right next to the fruit section, then they clearly haven’t got the memo or they’ve got the solution that I mentioned earlier in place. More on that coming, I promise.
So yes, keep your flowering plants at home, well away from your toxic fruit bowl, my plant friend. We’re talking peace lilies, canges, African violets, and especially orchids. You see, ethylene gas accelerates petal wilting, color fading, and flower dropping, but it can also interfere with bud formation. So, flowers are doomed before they’ve even begun. Orchid blooms are meant to last weeks and weeks, but they’ll be seriously shortened or fail to come at all if you don’t heed this warning.
So what about non-flowering plants? Surely, those are much tougher than their flowery brethren and have a thick enough skin to not be troubled? Well, not so much. There’s actually quite a long list that can suffer the ill effects of your fruit bowl. It’s worth doing a quick Google on the plants you have at home; it’s quite eye-opening. The big hitters though are the ever-popular crowd-blazers such as bonia, shefa, euphorbia, and even fiddle-leaf figs. Yes, fiddle-leaf figs. Gosh, that is shaking me to my very core. I don’t know about you. The beloved philodendron that we adorn all over our house is susceptible to this treacherous gas, and my house is pretty much filled with the plants I just listed off and many more. My collection is doomed.
So what’s the damage then? Well, if you’ve got a yellowing philodendron despite all the love, care, and attention you give it, then have a look at how near the bananas are, etc., because this is a key symptom. Leaf drop is also a problem that can really rear its ugly head. This is all because ethylene gas interferes with chlorophyll production, you know, the green color of the leaves that helps with photosynthesis. It makes the plants sick, causing yellowing and leaf loss. It can also weaken philodendron plants and make them more susceptible to plucky pests and annoying diseases. So your guy might be severely immunosuppressed, and you had no idea why. All this time, you were blaming yourself, and it might have been your darn fruit bowl all along. And the number of times you fed your greedy bin with leafy pals too? Shocker.
So what can we do to combat the evils of the fruit bowl sat in your kitchen or dining room table? Well, the obvious one is to simply keep your plants well away. No mingling, not that you would anyway. But have a look at what plants you’ve got in your kitchen and consider moving them to a different room. So how far away from the fruit bowl do our plants need to be? This depends on the plant and the fruit, i.e., how sensitive the plant is and how much gas the fruit emits. Got a bunch of bananas, apples, and avocados all chilling out in the bowl? You’ll probably have to be more cautious. Now, philodendron and ficus are thankfully only moderately sensitive to ethylene gas. So the aim of the game with these guys is to keep them about four or so feet away. Orchids, African violets, and bromeliads are highly sensitive, so you really do need to give them a wide berth, of a good eight or ten feet. I’d probably keep them in a separate room entirely though, to be honest.
But what if you live in a smaller house like an open-plan apartment, where the living room, dining room, and kitchen are all in one big room? To put it another way, it won’t be easy to keep your fruit bowl on one end of the room and your leafy friends on the other. It’d look pretty weird too, wouldn’t it? Like they’re divorced but still living in the same home. Well, there is something you can do. Ethylene absorbers. What the heck are those, you ask? These, my plant friend, are little pouches or something or other that you can pop into your fruit bowl, and they will sit there absorbing all the ethylene gas that your nasty bananas and apples are blowing off. To be honest, I’m not really sure what’s in them though. It’s either something that reacts to and negates the gas or something like charcoal that absorbs the gas. Either way, they can be pretty effective. So just know, I’m not talking a load of old baloney. These absorbers help slow down the ripening process and extend the freshness of produce. So they can keep fruit and veg around for much longer than they should.
So, they normally come in little pouches like this, and the ones I got came with this rather handsome blue plastic apple container that doesn’t look too ugly when you stick it in your fruit bowl. And you can also keep these bad boys in the fridge to make your food last longer.
Now, as if this wasn’t all enough, there is actually another hidden nasty that is potentially slowly murdering your houseplants. And this time, it’s all to do with the water coming out of your tap. Yes, the pH of your tap water could be causing your plant to suffer from nutrient lockout, from being either slightly too acidic or slightly too alkaline. This could be the very reason why your plants just don’t seem to respond to the fertilizer you give them, no matter what brand you use or how much you dose them up with.
