Fiddle dee dee

Yet again…I’m late on the trend train. Like, the train is in the next station late. Per usual for me. I’m not very trendy anyway, and on the rare times when I do get on with one I’m super late and usually on it’s way out.

I know you want to be cool like me. :)

One trend that I admired and never jumped on till this year was the fiddle leaf one. Funny that a plant can become a trend, right? But these plants with the beautiful large leaves are still everywhere:

I’ve noticed they come in two different forms – the more squatty version like this one that has much larger leaves:

And others have much smaller leaves but are taller and branch out into more of a tree shape. That one above was an IKEA find a few weeks ago and he was not in the best shape. Most of the leaves have some kind of damage but he’s doing much better so far.

The IKEA one was a super great price of only $13. I’ve never seen them for that low anywhere else, especially for the size. I got this one for our master bedroom last winter for a lot more than $13. ;) It is taller though:

This was my first fiddle leaf and I immediately started killing it. Like, right away. It’s leaves were dropping like flies and it was NOT happy in it’s new home.

So I started doing some pretty ingenious things to keep it alive…like watering it and making sure it had enough light. ;) Seriously, I think the key to these plants is LOTS of light. I’ve read they don’t like direct sun but mine looooove it.

As soon as I got this guy into the sun every morning he started doing great. Not before half of the leaves fell off though. Whomp. And now I water them about once a week – not a soak, just a good watering. Water and sun…who would have thunk it.

I’m not a clean freak by any stretch of the imagination but the leaves on this guy were grossing me out:

You can see the new leaves are bright and shiny. The old ones were filthy. I swear to you the rest of my house does not look like those leaves – I’m not sure what I did in the room that made them so dirty. Maybe because that window is open so much? I don’t know – the newer leaves that are about eight months old barely had any dust on them.

No idea but I finally decided to clean them up – I took a wet rag and wiped every. single. leaf.:

For real, I stood there and couldn’t believe I was dusting my plant leaves. Do most people do that? I don’t even know. I guess I’ve never had plants with leaves big enough to actually accumulate anything before.

I recently heard about a little trick to shine up the leaves and make them look brand new again. It sounded a little wacky to me but it worked – I just took a teensy dab of mayonnaise and wiped the leaves down:

I did this very gently by the way – the older leaves are nice and thick but I didn’t want to do any damage.

I have to admit it worked really well – the older leaves now match the glossier (more glossy?) new leaves:

Fiddle is looking pretty awesome I must say:

Excuse the cat butt.

Side note: I love green and gray together.

You can see from the older pic above that the tree lost a TON of leaves. But you should have seen it before I figured out how to bring it back. :) It has grown quite a bit since then – both out and up.

I LOVE these plants now – I’m completely hooked. If I can find more at IKEA I’d like to get one more. Their big beautiful leaves are lovely:

A few of you have asked about the cats with this plant. I waffled back and forth about getting one because I read conflicting reports over the years. But I’ve found the cats don’t touch these plants. Our palms they chomp on like food but they’ve never shown any interest in these at all. Also, when the fiddle leaf is healthy it doesn’t seem to shed leaves…this one hasn’t lost one leaf since I brought it back to life.

Have you jumped on the fig train? Are you a plant person in general or no? I LOVE them and love having plants scattered throughout the house – they give it life! I’ve blogged about plants that are safe to have around cats (and easy to grow!) here and here. I think the key to most plants is the light – pay attention to what their needs are in that area and you’ll be good. Most of our plants I water every two weeks or so and they do wonderfully.