"Don't Even Bother" – One Christmas Cactus Care Practice to Skip & A Better Way to Keep Your Festive Plant Looking Great

A blooming Christmas cactus is a joy to behold around the holidays. These beauties are tropical cacti native to South American jungles. Unlike their desert-dwelling cousins, Christmas cacti enjoy higher levels of humidity and can look quite sad if they don’t receive enough. Your Christmas cactus might even drop its blooms if the soil becomes too dry.

Christmas cactus plants draw moisture from their soil as well as the air around them. This is why many people suggest misting a Christmas cactus to keep the humidity levels up. But houseplant experts agree, don’t even bother with misting.

Misting your Christmas cactus isn’t effective and is a waste of your precious time. Let’s explore a better way to properly take care of your festive friend.

Skip the Misting

Christmas cacti are epiphytes who rely on moisture from their soil and also in the air around them. In the winter months, while our furnaces are pumping out hot, dry air, your festive plant is going to crave more moisture. However, misting your plants only raises the relative humidity of the air surrounding them a negligible amount. And misting is a very inconsistent method of increasing humidity. What happens if you forget for a day or two or leave town over the holidays? Your Christmas cactus won’t do well.

In addition to the inconsistency and inconvenience of misting your plant, if you mist too much you might end up with other problems like fungus and root rot. Stagnant humidity on the leaves and soil can lead to fungus growth that can kill your Christmas cactus and wreak havoc on your whole houseplant collection.

What To Do Instead

Skip the misting all together and try a simple and efficient alternative: the humble pebble tray. A pebble tray is a shallow dish filled with pebbles, rocks or large aquarium gravel and water. It sits under your Christmas cactus and steadily raises the humidity around it without you lifting a finger. Just fill your pebble tray with water and let it go to work. Ensure that the water level is below the tops of the top layer of pebbles so the plant doesn’t soak up the water through the bottom of its pot and become sodden. It’s as simple as that!

Take care of the regular watering needs of your Christmas cactus by watering it when the top inch of soil is dry. You can stick a finger into the soil to check or you can use a soil moisture meter like this 4-in-1 soil moisture meter from Amazon.

Christmas Cactus Humidity Essentials

Don’t even bother to mist your Christmas cactus. Let a simple pebble tray do all the work for you this holiday season.