Tired of looking at hard water stains on the leaves of your gorgeous plants? If you live in an area where your municipal water is filled with minerals, you know the pain. You water or spray your plants, and when you come back an hour or so later, the water has evaporated and left white, smudgy drops on your foliage. In this post, I will provide a DIY method to remove hard water stains from your plant’s leaves.
Why You Should Clean Your Plant’s Leaves
Cleaning the leaves of your plants is important to their overall health. Not only does cleaning help remove and control pests, doing so prevents dust, debris, and mineral buildup from interfering with your plant’s transpiration process. Transpiration is how your plants breath; by taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen and water vapor. This occurs through your plant’s leaves. Hindering this process will slow your plant’s growth, and we don’t want to do that!
How To Prevent Hard Water Stains
The best way to prevent mineral deposits from building up on your foliage is to avoid using hard water in the first place. You may want to consider filtered, reverse-osmosis or rainwater. Distilled water is another possibility, but this will get expensive in the long-term. If none of these options are available to you, below is a cheap, DIY method to effectively clean your plant’s leaves.
DIY Hard Water Removal Recipe
Acids like lemon juice, lime juice or vinegar are the best natural remedies to dissolve hard water stains. If you’ve used vinegar to remove crusty mineral deposits on your bathroom or kitchen surfaces and fixtures, you know what I’m talking about.
Despite their amazing cleaning power, you don’t want to use any of these acids straight without diluting them. The pH of lemon and lime juice and vinegar is between 2 and 3 on the pH scale. Anything below 7 is considered an acid, and the closer it gets to 0, the more acidic it is. As you can imagine, a pH of 2-3 may not be good for the leaves of your houseplants if left too long!
Personally, I also prefer using lemon or lime juice over vinegar. Although vinegar can be just as effective, I would rather breathe in the refreshing scent of lemons or limes while cleaning my plants. But use whatever you prefer or whatever is convenient, #youdoyou.
To DIY a hard water removal solution for your houseplants, you can use this recipe:
- 3 parts water
- 1 part lemon or lime juice, or vinegar
Mix into a spray bottle and spray your plant’s leaves until wet. Let it sit for a couple of minutes and then wipe them with a cotton cloth. An old T-shirt would be ideal. I prefer it over bathroom towels, which can leave behind fibers, or napkins, which will leave behind crumbly paper residues.
Microfiber cloths also work but I find them a bit hard to use when wiping off velvety-leafed plants. The microfibers of the cloth seem to latch onto the velvety surface of the leaves, and the friction makes it harder to wipe smoothly.
Additional Tips
It may take a couple of rounds of spraying and wiping to remove hard water stains from your plant’s leaves. Don’t rush your cleaning process. The last thing you want to do is get impatient and damage your plant’s leaves by being too hasty and scrubbing too vigorously.
Never use commercial hard water removers on your plants. These are very caustic, very powerful, loaded with chemicals and absolutely not designed for horticultural use. Leave the chemicals for the kitchen or bathroom cleaning—or better yet, avoid them entirely. But never, ever use them on your plants!
For other plant care tips, check out my Plant Care Archives!
Always Keep Growing,
Heather (a.k.a. The Botanical Chick)
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