Hard water marks on phrag leaves

Slippertalk Orchid Forum

Help Support Slippertalk Orchid Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

TheLorax

Awardless studette
Joined
Aug 4, 2007
Messages
808
Reaction score
1
Location
Northeast Illinois
Several phrags I purchased have hard water marks. Not that this makes a plant unhealthy but I'd like to clean them up for the sake of aesthetics now that they are growing inside a home as opposed to inside a greenhouse. I took a damp rag and gently tried to clean each leaf and barely reduced the water marks. What do you use to clean phrag leaves or do you just leave the hard water marks. I do realize they don't hurt the plant at all.
 
remember that is milk without Cherios :poke::D Milk gives a nice shine and I have used for that. Do an experiment, buy a lemon and do one leaf with each and report back for us which works better...thanks
 
Oh yes, but of course. A very controlled environment. I was planning on sticking the milk on a cat's tail before swiping it down a plant leaf while sticking the lemon juice on one particular dog's tongue to get other leaves. He seems to have acquired a taste for plants lately so might as well try to cure the dog of this bad habit while sprucing up my new babies a bit. What are your thoughts?

Smartass :noangel:

Oops, missed your post Ron. I can do some of the plants tomorrow with milk and the others this coming Sunday after I go grocery shopping. I'll post photos, you decide.
 
Hi all,
I think that vinegar, diluted or not, perfectly desolves salts...!!! Well, I don't excactly know how it will affect leaves and the smell is not very pleasant!!!
 
I assume it is the acid in lemon juice that dissolves the salt, vinegar should work too but I don't know if it is too acidic. I don't show plants...the judging center is just too far, so i have never bothered cleaning leaves and I use rain water for most of the plants so hard water stains is not an issue. Occasionally there will be marks from treating or fertilizing the plants but that usually eventually washes off with watering.
 
So I take it that nice silicone shine isn't the greatest for my new plants?

Here's what I can tell you so far, the milk didn't work too well. I had to rub a little bit more than I was comfortable with to try to erase some of the hard water stains. I'll pick up some lemon juice however my bet is that lemon juice has a much lower pH than vinegar so why not use vinegar?
 
I recently bought (and used) one of those leaf shine products from home depot. It worked great, but recently I had an unexplaned event that almost every plant I used it on dropped all its old leaves and bud blasted. This is probably over 2 months since the application, but its a funny coincidence:confused::confused:
 
Try WD -40--supposed to be good for everything:D.It's basically Fish oil!cleans grills & bugs off windshields etc
 

Latest posts

Back
Top