How to Care for Dying Fortune Bamboo

If your lucky bamboo remains bright green, you can proclaim it healthy.

It's the ultimate irony: the bamboo plant you acquired for luck, good fortune and feng shui benefits appears ready to give up the ghost. Happily, it's easy to differentiate a dying plant from one that can be saved. For example, lucky fortune bamboo plants are vulnerable when they flower -- an early warning sign that your bamboo needs a diagnosis fast. On the other hand, if your bamboo has turned yellow, it's doomed. Cut your losses (literally and figuratively) to save the remaining green and healthy stalks.

Instructions

1. Address temperature-related issues. Maintaining a warm, comfortable, consistent environment for your fortune bamboo is important, so if there's a chance your plant is ailing due to a temperature drop, air-conditioning exposure or another environmentally debilitating cause, try bringing yours back from the brink using these tips: Immediately relocate the bamboo plant from its frigid environment to a room with a temperature that's 65 degrees F or more. Trim tips or leaves if they look droopy to heal the plant's internal trauma; switch from tap to spring water and add a little bamboo fertilizer.

2. Examine the plant's water situation. It's easy to drown a plant or leave it parched for water if you're busy or haven't been advised about the needs of your fortune bamboo. Either situation could be the reason your plant is looking or acting sickly. Sit by the patient's bedside for a couple of days to see if doing nothing restores a plant that's been over-indulged in the water department. As a rule of thumb, keep your lucky bamboo healthy and happy using the following watering guide: Keep the water level at 1 inch for a 4- to 6-inch plant, 2 inches for an 8- to 14-inch bamboo and from 3 to 5 inches if your plant is taller.

3. Banish the soil. Lucky bamboo plants don't need soil to grow and thrive. Yours may be begging to be liberated if it looks less than perky. Remove the bamboo from its earthy plot, give it a bath in a glass of warm spring water for several hours to clean, hydrate and re-acclimate outside the dirt. If you discover telltale black, brown or white signs of mites, mold or other biological matter once the plant has been bathed, you can still save it if the stalks are a healthy green color. Snip the roots -- healthy ones are orange, by the way -- and place the plant in a pot without soil, adding water in prescribed amounts.

4. Vanquish pests. The chief culprits are mites. To return a lucky bamboo to health if you find mites, try an insect soap or a spray formulated specifically to treat plants in the bamboo family. If you're insecure about trying these products, no worries. Get a second opinion from an experienced horticulturalist at an area university, or turn to nursery owners or garden clubs for advice. Save the plant and you earn the right to call yourself the bamboo whisperer.

References

• American Bamboo Society: When Bamboo Flowers by Ned Jaquith
• Strawberry Seeds.org: How to Save a Dying Indoor Lucky Bamboo Plant
• Lucky Bamboo Shop: FAQs