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How to Deal with Less Sunlight for Your Plants During a SoCal Winter
Written by Kelsey W.
As the days get shorter and the temperatures begin to drop, much of Southern California remains beautiful and green despite the changing weather. If you have plants inside your home or a garden in your yard, do you need to make any significant changes to ensure your plants survive the winter?
In many areas of Southern California, the temperature never drops to freezing and only rarely gets into the 30-degree Fahrenheit range. The majority of native plants in the Southland can withstand cold temperatures as long as freezing weather doesn’t develop.
Similarly, with sunlight, most plants adapt naturally to receiving less sunlight in the winter, but there are some instances where you might need to make some changes to your plants to ensure their happiness throughout the winter months.
You don’t want to see your plants struggle needlessly when all it might take is a few small changes to maximize their winter experience. Let’s learn about some changes you can make this season for the benefit of your plants.
How to Get More Light for Hungry Plants
Some plants love a lot of sunlight, and you may want to consider switching their locations during the winter when you’re no longer getting a lot of sunlight through a particular window in your home. For example, plants like jade plants and echeveria, which like a lot of indirect sunlight, might need to move closer to the window.
Your cactuses and succulents will definitely like a move into the sunniest window in your home, but you might even consider moving them outside if you have sun-loving plants that you enjoy inside your home in the summer. Don’t worry, they’ll fare just fine outside as long as you’re not in an area where it freezes.
Tip: If you have plants in pots outside your house, take a look at how much light they’re getting as the days get shorter. You might want to move them into a sunnier location, especially if they’re sitting along a north-facing wall or fence.
Let More Light into Your Home by Making an Appointment to Clean Your Windows
Depending on the style of your home – whether you live in a high-rise apartment in downtown Los Angeles or a single-family home in the San Fernando Valley – you might want to look at cleaning your windows.
One interesting thing that happens to our windows, particularly when it rains in the winter, is that they get dirty. You’d think the rain would always clean the windows, but it always seems to leave behind some dirt. Cleaning your windows in the fall and at least once in the winter helps ensure you’re getting the most sunlight possible for your indoor plants.
Remember: Some windows have a lot of tinting baked into the glass, especially if they’re the newer “triple pane” windows that are commonly installed when you’re in a condo near a freeway or near one of the major airports in SoCal. If you move a plant into a window, but it still seems to fare poorly, consider that it might not be the lack of hours of sunlight per day but the thickness or coating on the windows.
If you notice the leaves on your plant starting to get pale or less green even though the plant is sitting in “direct” sunlight in a window, you might need to relocate the plant to a different window or try opening the window for a few hours to ensure it gets all the visible light possible without the filters. Window coatings are something you might need to think about in other seasons, too, not just the wintertime.
Set a Reminder to Rotate Your Plants Every Few Weeks or Monthly
You can’t control how long the sun shines into your windows, but you can control how it shines on your plants. One issue you might run into during the winter months is a plant that starts to bend oddly or stretch its limbs excessively, making it look unbalanced and a little strange.
Most plants aren’t supposed to stretch out like that and will only do so when they’re seeking more sunlight. To prevent your plants from growing strangely, simply turning them around by a few degrees every few weeks can balance the light the plant receives and help them grow more evenly.
Utilize Some Mirrors to Amplify the Sunlight in Your Home
In extreme cases, you can use mirrors or other reflective surfaces to amplify the amount of light coming into your home. If you live in a condo or apartment where your windows only get light for a small portion of the day because you’re right next door to another tall building, amplifying the available sunlight can help you maximize the light you do receive.
Obviously, you can always switch to low-light plants like ZZ plants and philodendrons if you feel the light coming into your home is insufficient, but it’s definitely worth trying some alternatives before rehoming your cactuses this winter because they aren’t getting enough sunlight.
Do You Need to Use Artificial Lighting in Winter in Southern California?
A radical solution for a low-light situation in your home is using artificial light for your plants, but you almost never need to take such a dramatic step to keep your plants alive. Since most plants stop growing or slow down during the winter, it’s not necessary to continue providing them with the full six to eight hours of sunlight a day.
Plus, Southern California isn’t at a severely northern latitude where the sunlight disappears for 22 hours of the day. While our days do get shorter, we’re not dealing with just a few hours of daily sunlight in the winter like someone living near the Arctic Circle.
Plants naturally adapt to receiving fewer hours of sunlight each winter, but in most cases, moving your plants to another window or placing them along a sunnier wall in your yard is the easiest way to give them more light.
Let Your Plants Sleep During the Fall and Winter
Many plants enter a dormant phase during the fall and winter, or they slow their growth significantly. During the short days of winter, your plants won’t need as much fertilizer, water, and attention as they might in the summer. These reduced needs actually make it easier to care for them.
You can normally put away the bottles of fertilizer and reduce your watering schedule by a significant amount during the winter. It’s actually pretty common to over-water plants in the winter, and more than one plant has perished from root rot because of a soggy pot in the middle of winter.
Consider, too, that your outdoor plants might be getting natural rain anyway, since the most likely time we’ll see rain in Southern California is during the months with the shortest days. If you have a drip-line running to your plants, you can usually safely reduce the frequency of watering, and your plants will be fine.
Similarly, you shouldn’t need to take a watering can to your houseplants nearly as often as you might in the summer. Any plant you were regularly watering once a week can generally be watered less frequently. Some cactuses can go without water for an entire month during the winter.
You can also put off activities like repotting until the spring. Let your plants sleep through the winter in their current pots. They shouldn’t outgrow them, and you can actually shock some plants if you replant them in the middle of their dormant season.
Help Your Plants Live Their Best Lives with Help from Green Thumb Nursery
Want to ensure your plants are happy, healthy, and ready to greet the spring after their sleepy winter nap? The experts at Green Thumb Nursery are here to offer all the advice and care tips you need to help your plants thrive in any conditions, whether they’re planted on a north-facing wall around your house or they’re sitting in a windowsill in your home. Drop by one of our Southern California garden center locations today to get started on preparing your plant friends for the short days of winter.
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