[Music] Hello and welcome to the Plant School podcast. I'm Rachel Tenney and here we learn all about plants, how they work, how to care for them, and it's all taught in a way that anyone from beginner to expert can listen to, understand, and enjoy. So I hope that you will join me in Plant School. Today, before I dive into this week's episode, I'm going to do our giveaway, which I do every episode. So it's probably not a surprise to you at this point. But what I do is I take a winner from Spotify, someone who has commented on the most recent episode, and then I take a winner also from Apple Podcasts, someone who has left a review over there. So that way, whether you're listening on Spotify or on Apple, because those are my main two platforms that I have people listening you can enter in to win the giveaway. And like I said, they happen every single episode. What you win is a little care package from Market Botany. They send you a bottle of prop drops, which is a water propagation aid. I've talked about this before, but I love them. And then they also send you a bottle of leaf shine. And if you want to check out either of those products, you can go to MarketBotany.com and you can use code, Plant School podcast, and it will give you 10% off your order. Before our winners say, let's start with Spotify. And if you're wondering how to comment as you're listening to the episode, you scroll down and there should be a section where you can comment. And I will verbally be asking you some sort of question. So I will ask this episode's question in just a second so you can know how to enter in for the next giveaway. But first, let's take care of our winners today. So last episode was all about prayer plans and how to care for them. And I asked you guys if you have a prayer planned and what your experience has been with them. So our winner today is Emily Ward. She said, love your podcast is my go to for when I'm repotting and doing planty chores. I love that. She goes on and says, a rattlesnake calithia was the first plant I ever killed and two years and lots of experience later, I'm still struggling to keep my lemon lime moronta and stromant trio star alive. Their growth is stagnant, it seems. I'm wanting a white fusion calithia though. So hopefully this episode boosts my confidence in calithia care. I hope it was helpful to you, Emily. If you want to email me at
[email protected], that's te and in eY plants at gmail.com. We can get going with your giveaway package. And then over on Apple Podcasts, someone who is left to review our winner today is plant man. And I would try to pronounce your username, but it's honestly a bunch of random letters. And I don't know if there is a way to say it. And they say in their review, they say my nickname is plant man. So hopefully you know who you are. And they go on and say this podcast is amazing. I love it. I'm a bonsai guy, but I have others, but my faith is a phychus jinsing. I love that. I have a jinsing phychus as well. It's not my prettiest plant, but you know what? It's alive and it's still going and I have some plants for it. So hopefully I can get it to bounce back. But if that was you plant man, maybe you can give me some advice on my jinsing phychus, but also just email me so that I can get your giveaway package sent to your way. And like I said, if you want to win next episodes giveaway, every episode is two weeks. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts if that's where you listen. Or you can do both. You can go over to Spotify too and Apple Podcasts. I honestly does not matter to me. You can intern twice if you'd like, but if you're listening on Spotify, scroll down on this episode, find the place where you can comment. And for this episode that you are currently listening to, I want you to tell me if you have ever plant sat for someone cared for someone else's house plants. And how did it go for you? And that will enter you in to win a care package from Market Botany. Their prop drops and their leaf shine. Again, if you want to check them out, go to MarketBotany.com. And you can use code plant school podcast for a 10% discount. Alright, let's get into this episode. I have to give a shout out before I start because this whole entire episode was inspired by one of you, one of my listeners, Lauren reached out to me and had two amazing ideas for plant school podcast episodes, one of which is this one right now. The other will be coming soon and I am very excited to cover it. I always love your guys' ideas. If you ever have one, you can email me, you can message me on Instagram. I write them all down and I do try to get to all of them. And I really do appreciate you guys, you know, taking time out of your day. Just to email me and let me know some of the ideas you have. So thank you, Lauren, for doing that. Let's get into how to be a better plant sitter, how to successfully plant sit. And before I dive into exactly how you can be a better plant sitter, I also want to just cover our bases of, you know, what is plant sitting? What are your options when you leave your plants? And just some other interesting aspects about it. And then I do want to end with how we can all be better at plant sitting when we are called upon to do it. So first question, what is plant sitting? Basically, plant sitting is just a service offered to care for someone's house plants when the original caretaker is gone, whether they're on vacation or maybe they're unable to care for their own house plants. They can't do it. And so they have asked someone to do it for them. And my personal experience, I usually always just ask a neighbor or I've trained my plants to be able to go longer periods of time without me watering them. We'll talk about that. But there are actually a ton of options out there besides those two of asking a neighbor or just training your plants. So let's get into that. What are the options when you leave your house plants at home? First one, of course, is to find a neighbor or a friend. I feel like this is probably the most common option because it's easy to ask someone that you know and it's probably the most comfortable one. It's what I always go to, but there's a lot of other ideas out there. So if you don't have a neighbor or a friend close by, that you really trust with your house plants, maybe your house plants require a little more care, let's talk about some other options for you. So first off, there are Facebook groups that actually specialize in connecting people to reliable plant sitters. So for example, when I was searching, I found one called plant sitting in YC. There was another one called plant sitting in UK and other areas as well, where those people, local to those areas, would post their services, and what they're really good at, like one lady posted, "Hey, I'm available all these months and I'm really good with carnivorous plants." Or there would be people posting saying, "Hey, I'm gone these dates. These are my plants. Can someone recommend themselves or someone else that would be a good fit for my plants?" And if you look your area up on Facebook and it doesn't have one, perhaps you could create one. And obviously, you could probably create your own little side hustle of offering your services if you feel very confident in caring for plants, especially after listening to this episode. I'll talk a little bit about how much you can make in a second, and it was actually really surprising to me. So another option of where you can go when you leave your house plants, you can hire someone from specialized websites. There are a lot of them. For example, I found one called houseplantcitter.com. This was only for the Austin, Texas area, unfortunately, but this website they offered plant care, but they also offered people to come in and help you create maintenance plans, or help you come and repot your plants. And there were a lot of other websites like this, oftentimes they were localized to certain areas. Like it was a local business running these and offering their services. Another example is plantcitter.com. That was for the London area. I also saw on other websites that some people were just offering to take care of plants, as long as they could stay in your home for the time that you're gone for free. So they're basically getting a free place to stay, and they will take care of everything in your home for you. So that was kind of an interesting option. Some different websites that you can go to for big metropolitan areas, some more so for anyone in smaller communities. It's a little bit harder to find a website that is serving your area. Another option though, in case none of these are ringing true to you, you can actually set up a timed watering system, where you are buying a physical product that will water your plants for you. They cost anywhere from like $25 to $65. I would say for like the main range, of course there's ones that are much more expensive or much cheaper, but they have one specific to indoor areas and outdoor areas depending on where your plants are located. Maybe they're outside for the summer, maybe you're needing your garden water. They can also serve those areas as well. But yeah, they have indoor systems. I actually had one. I did a review on it quite a while ago on YouTube, and they ended up gifting it to my mom because she travels a lot more than I do. And for a few days,
a lot longer periods of time, so just being a grandmother and visiting grandkids, she travels a lot. So I gave it to her and she has used it for gosh, it's been like two years now, it's still going strong and it still works really well. Sometimes there are like a little mishap, she called me, I think it was last week, she had a little mishap where it had just started running and she didn't know and one of her plants was over watered and she was asking me, "What do I do? How do I fix this?" But for the most part in those two years, there's maybe been two phone calls like that. So they do a really great job, it's usually like a little pump with a timer on it and you connect a hose into a bucket of water or into a sink full of water and it will pull from that and you connect other tubing into your individual plants. They come with like little stakes that you can press down into the soil so they don't move anywhere and the water comes out right by that stake and you can set them to go off at whatever time of day that you like, however long so you can have it run for 30 seconds every Wednesday or 10 seconds every three weeks. They're honestly kind of nice. If you have a ton of houseplants that need really specialized care, this is obviously probably not going to work but if you have a few and they aren't too fussy, I would say anywhere from like 20 houseplants or less, maybe 30 houseplants or less, this could work really well for you where you can group them together, set them up with the watering timing system and have them watered at your schedule that you know that they will do okay with. So that's a whole option. I want to touch on that I mentioned that I do is to train your plants to be okay when you leave them and I know this is also something that is really hard if you have warehouse plants that are fussy and they need the extra care and you can't just train them to be okay. I have fairly well behaved plants. I don't have a lot of problem plants. Just not the stage of life that I'm in, I can't take them off with being a mom. It's just too much for me. Besides there's one exception to that. It's my Venus flytrap. That little guy needs a whole lot of water and so that one's a little bit fussy but I have been able to set up my watering routine to be about every two weeks or so. I am a big advocate for feeling the soil before you water but I'm just giving that timeline as a rough timeline of it's about every two weeks that I need to water my plants. Right before I go on a trip and hop in the car I water my plants and I do it pretty generously because I know I'm going to be gone. I also close my blinds not all the way like to my clothes to one keep out people peeking in but also it really helps the evaporation slow down for your plants. They don't lose water as quickly because they aren't in super bright sunny conditions because those blinds are closed. Another thing is that I don't fertilize right before a trip or add any crazy routines or products that they aren't used to. I keep it very basic when I know a trip is coming up because I don't want them to be suffering and I have no idea because I'm not in my house. And I've kind of incorporated this two to three week watering schedule very slowly over time so that my house plants don't become too stressed and I would say it maybe took two to three months for them all to be fairly well adjusted to that schedule. Being okay with a little bit of dehydration as I kind of extended that period over the course of those months. But yeah that's another option for anyone when going on vacation. I would say I probably wouldn't be able to go on a vacation for more than three weeks doing that scenario. But some of these other ones you of course can leave for much longer periods of time. Okay and before we get into some of the steps to being successful at plant sitting I just want to go over how much you can make being a plant sitter. If you have the timed watering system no one's involved but for those ones where you're like hiring someone on a specialized website or you're going to a Facebook group or finding the neighbor or friend. Oftentimes you will pay them in some form and so when I was looking at it this mostly applies to like those websites where it is a business running them. But as I was looking at how much you can make the cost obviously depends on the number of plants how frequently you need that person to be visiting and what services you're wanting are you wanting them just a water do you want them to repot everything for you while you're gone things like that. And I even found data on zipper cruder because I guess they actually have data for plant sitting jobs. The average cost that people charge is anywhere from 18 to 35 dollars an hour. And that hourly rate probably depends on the person's experience. But for someone like me I don't have a huge collection. I would estimate it would probably take them oh 15 minutes to do so. That means that on the low side they would be getting paid 4 and a half dollars for a visit. On the high side it would be almost nine dollars for a visit and let's say I was gone for a whole month and I needed them to visit three times maybe that would be like 1350 on the low side and around 30 dollars on the high side. So honestly in those situations where it's just someone needing some minimal care it's not too much. My house probably wouldn't be worth it. But if you have a lot of house plans of course that price can go up for you because they are spending more time in your home caring for your house plans. And then what kind of blew me away is that there are whole jobs where your title is Plant Care Specialist. And this probably is referring to people who are hired in by a business. They're probably taking care of commercial properties like entire business units that are in a building perhaps like malls other indoor spaces where they are caring for these plants. But the median total pay for the title of Plant Care Specialist is about 87,000 per year. That's like a decent job. I was very surprised. And also GlassDory gave me a range of what you could make. The range was 66,000 to 115,000. I don't know guys. This seems like a pretty sweet job. I don't know how common this job is. I feel like once you get your foot in the door you would probably stay there for a while and I just don't know how many openings they would have. But if you have the chance to go and be a Plant Care Specialist full time it seems like it might be worth it. But anyways I feel like that's kind of on the high end of plant sitting right. It's kind of far fetched from what we're talking about. That's more of working for a business. You have the expertise to care for plants in business complexes and things like that. Perhaps there are Plant Care Specialists that completely do residential and they're taking in clients that have large collections. But being a plant sitter in general is usually you just going to someone's house and watching over their plant collection. So final topic, steps to being a successful plant sitter. And for these tips I scoured blogs and Reddit articles and personal experience and what I've heard from others and hopefully this will help us all be better plant sitters and maybe consider what to do when you are asking someone to plant sit for you. Because I feel like it takes a little bit more than you would imagine. But we're going to go about it from the role of being the person that's coming into the home to be a plant sitter. You're helping out a friend or maybe you found someone on Facebook that wants to hire you. So first thing, ask about the regular care routine. Find out how they water if they have a humidifier and when it needs to be on. How often they wipe their plants down if there are any pests. You basically want to get trained by the owner to be a knowledgeable plant sitter for their plants. And I would say a big key to this is understand what's important to them and what they expect from you. If they have some plants that are really near and dear to their heart, take note of that and make sure that you are giving them the appropriate care. And if the owner hasn't written anything down for you which I would highly recommend if you are asking someone to watch your plants do write things down, put sticky notes by your plants to remind them how to care for each one. I actually saw a lot of comments on Reddit for how to go about this as the person who is leaving your plants. Like I mentioned, you can do sticky notes. You can write a list. Some people like to group their houseplants by their watering needs. So all of their succulents and cacti they put together because they don't need a whole lot of water. And then they would put like their medium plants that just need to every so often together. And then the ones that need to be watered quite often. Maybe your carnivorous plants or other rare plants that just need a little extra attention. They would put those together just to make it simpler for the plant sitter to understand what's going on, especially if they aren't super familiar with plants. Because sometimes you explain it all to them and it can be really hard for them to remember [BLANK_AUDIO]
That's why I recommend taking notes or if you are the person leaving them writing down notes for them. Alright, moving on, being a plant sitter, make sure you set some expectations, let them know what you're capable of accomplishing during your visits, if they're expecting you to be there for three hours watering and taking care of every single need for their houseplants, and that's too much for you, let them know that maybe you can only spend this amount of time and this is what you can get done in that time. If you're not the right fit for the job and can't handle certain plants, for example, I've brought this up before, but let's say they have like a carnivorous plant collection and you have no experience with carnivorous plants, let them know and let them decide if they want to get someone different, but just make sure that they know the expectations for this visit and what you can do. Alright, my next note for being a successful plant sitter is to take note of any special or fancy houseplants. So if they've spent hundreds of dollars on certain plants, take note of that and how to give them any special attention they may need, it's obviously you don't want to be the one to cause the downfall of these expensive plants for them. My next tip is to make sure that you have all the supplies needed or you know where all the supplies are kept for their plants. For example, if they have like a strict fertilizing routine and they need you to keep that up, know where the fertilizer is, know where the extra soil is if they want you to repot something, paper towels, mistors, humidifiers, things like that, just make sure you know where everything is, so you don't have to bug them unnecessarily. And then another tip, if you are getting paid for these services, know how much time you'll be spending. Take note of it on an app, maybe just pull up your notes app and make sure you keep track of it. If it's a friend and you've already decided how much they're going to pay you and you're fine with that, then that's a different story. But if it's like a service where they're paying you hourly, make sure you keep track of your time. Because if they need you in and out at certain times of the day, maybe they can't pay you more than a certain amount, you don't want to feel rushed if they have a ton of plants to care for and you have to clean up messes or anything like that. So just make sure that you have a reasonable idea of how much time you will be there caring for their plants. Another tip with being a successful houseplant sitter, and I would say for any houseplant owner in general, when you water, always check the soil first. Maybe they've told you that this plant needs to be watered, you know, every Wednesday at 2pm or whatever. But always check the soil first. The majority of houseplants need the top few inches of soil to feel dry before they are ready for a next watering. They get too much water, it causes root rot and it causes a plant to die and that's the last thing you want is a houseplant sitter. So if you're super new to it or you're feeling really scared about plant sitting, just check the soil first before you water. The other tip that goes along with this is to obviously don't bombard succulents and cacti snake plants, seasy plants with too much water. Those are plants that don't need as much water as others. So always be mindful that they are dry before you add more water to them. And then my last tip is to send text updates. Of course this is something that if they've asked you not to bug them, don't bug them. But just let them know like, "Hey, can I send you text updates of when I come by?" And if that sounds okay with them, just let them know that you were able to visit if things are fine and if problems do start to arise, you can let them know, ask if it's a common thing or not, before it becomes, you know, a huge problem, pivy end of their vacation. And also I feel like it's kind of just a thoughtful, extra mile sort of thing to do and would help you stand out as a plant sitter or as a friend just taking care of someone's house plants for them. Honestly, after going through all those tips, if you're able to follow those, I have high hopes that you can be a successful plant sitter and that I can be a successful plant sitter because it is something I have done as well. But anyways, thank you so much for being here and listening to this episode. Thank you all more and again for this episode and emailing me. If you have an idea for a Plantschool Podcast episode, let me know. I always love to hear them. And with that, I hope to have you back here in two weeks for a brand new episode of the Plantschool Podcast. Thank you so much for being here and for listening to the Plantschool Podcast. I hope that you will join me for our next episode. And if you would like to support this podcast and keep it going, there's a link down in the show notes of this episode where you can donate to this podcast. And I really appreciate all that help or you can go to my merch store, which is also linked in the notes of this episode. And you can find some really cool plant related shirts and stickers. And if you want to support the podcast, but it's been no money, feel free to share it with a friend. Leave a review. All these things greatly help me out and allow me to keep doing this. Again, thank you so much for listening and for being here at the Plantschool Podcast. [Music]
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