In recent weeks (months?), plant enthusiasts all over the US have been excitedly discovering that Walmart, Trader Joe’s, Home Depot, and other large stores suddenly have the highly coveted Monstera deliciosa “Thai Constellation” available. What’s more, the plants are finally at normal-people prices: I’ve seen them for sale as low as $40 each for a plant with 5+ leaves.
Compare that to the height of plant insanity in 2021, when they were rarely below $300 for a similarly sized specimen, and good lucky trying to find one for sale in the first place. It was the age of “wet sticks” and trying to grow the coveted plants from “nodes”, and everyone (including me) was just a little bit crazy about getting the exact plants they wanted. Back then, rumors began of a large grower starting to develop them from tissue culture – a method that produces hundreds or thousands of clones of the exact same plant, making it feasible to produce them for low enough cost per plant to offer them for sale at big box stores (as we’re seeing today).
The first batch didn’t succeed as well as was hoped, and the release of these tissue cultured plants was delayed.
Rejoice, though, because if you’re one of the folks who’s been waiting for one of these bad boys since the height of the crazy plant bubble: they’re here!
And now…for the other shoe to drop. Now that you have one, what do you do? How do you keep it happy and healthy? How do you encourage more variegation? More fenestration? More…MOREness???
Don’t worry. I gotchu. I’ve been growing multiple Monstera deliciosa plants for years, at this point, and got my first Thai Constellation as an import in 2019 – before there was even a whisper of the dreaded ‘Rona. For receipts, I’ll link my past posts (my “care diaries”) right below. This post is going to be an overview of how I grow mine now, common mistakes, and how you can keep yours looking amazing.
- First post about my Thai from 2020
- An update last spring, including my Albo
- How to prevent leaf burn (even though I don’t always follow my own advice)
Since I last posted about my big Monsteras last year, not much has changed! Mine are still in the same spot, with the same soil mix, and still enormous. I got very sad not long after my post, as our landscaper trimmed all but two leaves off my big thai. He meant well; the dogs thrash the leaves every summer and they were ratty, but I feel pretty strongly that it’s better for the plant to keep the leaves as long as it wants or needs to.
However, we’re talking about what to do with your newly acquired big box store nursery plants, and how to keep those alive.
First things first: Repot them!
Pots & Soil for your new Thai Constellation
Since these are all tissue-cultured, that means they’re probably all potted in the relatively sterile coconut coir mix that is popular in large nursery settings. While this works well for large nurseries, who are watering with a mix of fertilizer and water and flushing the soil each time the plants are watered, it is far from ideal for anyone else.
Within the first week or two of bringing your plant home, you should repot it.
Lift it up and check the drainage holes at the bottom. Are the roots climbing out, and you can see multiple roots inside the pot? Or if there’s one climbing out, does it seem like it’s mostly dirt in there?
Lots of roots = prime time to upgrade the pot size. Look for something about 1″ bigger around than the pot the plant is currently in. Resist the urge to jump right into a huge pot right away! That’s a recipe for rot and fungus.
Make sure the pot you use has a decent size drainage hole at the bottom!
Water needs to be able to come out of the bottom of the pot to allow for the roots to breathe, and to prevent the soil from turning into a disgusting, swampy mess. If you want your Thai to look its best, drainge is a must.
Soil Matters
Having grown multiple monsteras over the last 5 years, the biggest change for me in how large they grew and how happy they were was switching from just pure houseplant soil to mixing it up for better drainage.
Now, I stick with this ratio:
- 1 part cactus/succulent soil
- 1 part rich houseplant soil (happy frog, usually)
- 1 part orchid bark
- 1 part pumice
Dog for scale, November 2023
By using a mix like this, that’s got less of the nutrient-rich but fine particle (poor draining) houseplant soil and more chunky materials, I’m giving the thick monstera roots more room and air to grow. In habitat, these plants are VINES, and they climb up tree trunks with their aerial roots. They’re adapted to thrive in relatively poor soil.
Thick chunky mix for thick chunky roots, and you’ll have happy monsteras.
Of course, with this chunky mix comes a different need: for feed! Fertilizer, really.
Fertilizing Your Monstera
After you first repot your Thai Constellation, you won’t need to fertilize it for at least a month. I wouldn’t use fertilizer at all until you see signs of active growth. Things like when you gently wiggle the stalk of the plant, it “grabs” onto the soil – the whole pot moves, instead of just the plant shimmying in the soil. That indicates there’s robust new roots that have grown in and are absorbing nutrients to feed to leaves.
New leaves can be a sign of the plant growing in, but isn’t 100% guaranteed. Sometimes they can try and put out a new leaf to absorb more energy from sunlight before trying to grow roots. The new leaf appearing before roots do is often a sign the soil you have it in is too wet. With lots of water available, there’s no need for roots to expand and find more of it, so the plant goes right into producing leaves.
While not terrible, it’s also not great – if your soil is that wet right when the plant has been repotted, you run a big risk of rot. Any roots that had damage from being repotted won’t callous over and heal, and if the soil stays moist for days or weeks on end, rot or fungus is soon to show up.
That means repot your Monstera, water once, then water sparingly until it’s grown in.
Once established with nice roots, then you consider what fertilizer to use. Back in the day, I used fish emulsion, but that stunk to high heaven. If you want purely organic, by all means – enjoy!
Same dog, same plant, August 2024 – you can see the yellowing from where the sun has been hitting the leaves on hot days before the shade covers them.
Depending on your level of organization and energy, there’s a few fertilizer options. Choose what works best for you!
For the organized and energetic, Dyna-Gro Foliage Plus is fantastic. I’ve talked about it before, and it makes for gorgeous leaves on your tropical plants if you stick to a routine. I just follow the directions on the bottle, no adjusting here.
If you, like me, also have cacti and succulents and don’t want to bother getting out another fertilizer jug, the 20:20:20 blue powder works fine. This summer, I’ve used both fertilizers on my monsteras, and can’t say I’ve noticed much difference…except in a big way with my albo, which I’ll show below.
For the laziest “these things are lucky I remember to water them” sort of folks among us (this becomes me the later in the summer it is), Osmocote is perfectly acceptable. If you saw little green or blue or yellow balls in your plants nursery pot, it was probably a similar slow-release pellet fertilizer.
For all of these fertilizers, just follow the directions on the package. As long as you don’t overdo it with extra fertilizer, the monsteras will do great.
I try to remember to fertilize my plants all spring and summer, and dial it back in fall and winter. My plants are outdoors and stop producing new leaves as the nights get below 50F, so they don’t need much in the way of extra food to produce new leaves.
Watering your Thai Constellation
These need far less water than you might think. I suspect a big part of why they do so well for me is that I treat them more like a succulent than a tropical plant.
They should be watered when their soil is dry, and shouldn’t be left to sit in a soggy puddle or saucer. Indoors, you may not need to water them much more often than once a month. Drag ’em into the shower so you can wash off the leaves and keep them dust-free.
Outdoors, I’ll use the hose to spray them off, and make sure that they’re watered enough that they drain out of the bottom of their pots. Through summer, I water them maybe once a week. This year I was particularly neglectful, and often skipped a week – so July & August, they were watered maybe every other week if they were lucky.
And they’re fine! A lil crispy with the oldest leaves, but fine.
Not only are they fine, but the large-form albo is producing two blooms for me!
How much water they need is tied closely to how much energy they are putting into growing…which is closely tied to the third pillar of their care:
Light for your Monstera Thai Constellation
These plants thrive with very bright, indirect light.
Translation: a single window in your apartment isn’t going to be enough.
They really love full shade outdoors, which is considerably brighter than anything you see indoors. You can’t rely on your eyeballs to judge adequate light, either. Our eyes adjust for lower light conditions, and as we are humans, not plants, we’re not very good at seeing how much light there is for a plant to grow in.
For your monsteras to get big, beautiful leaves with lovely fenestrations, you should aim for at least 400 foot candles for 10 – 12 hours a day. Use a light meter to measure the light hitting the leaves of your plant. That means hold the sensor on a leaf, facing the same way the top of the leaf does. That tells you how much light is hitting the leaf. Check this measurement at different times of day: morning, noon, afternoon, and evening.
Ideally, try to position your Thai Constellation to get a couple hours of direct morning sunlight, with shade the rest of the day.
My albo in the foreground, January 2024. We had a very mild winter this year, and the monsteras continued to grow through the whole season.
I keep mine in a shaded corner outdoors, where there’s full sunlight only until around 10 or 11 am.
This nice, bright exposure encourages the plants to express lots of variegation, and gives them the energy to produce nice big leaves. Outdoors, there’s a lot of exposure to indirect light – even if the sun isn’t shining on the plants, the sky is producing diffuse light, and there’s a whole lot of it that the plants can see when they’re outdoors. Much like even in the shade or on a cloudy day, you can still get a sunburn with enough time outdoors, there’s enough diffuse light for the plants to really thrive.
And…just like you can’t really get a sunburn inside, even if you’re sitting next to a window all day, the light coming through that window is never going to be as intense as sitting outdoors. Sure, sure, modern windows filter out harmful UV, but even without the window glass in there, you probably wouldn’t get a burn. Add a screen on top, and that also adds a degree of shade on top of the limited access to the sky through a window.
If you’re uncertain (your windows may be much brighter than mine – my house is quite dark!), that’s where that light meter comes in handy. Again, measure the light intensity at different times of day. Anyone who blithely assures you “just put it by a window, it’ll be fine,” isn’t considering how different everyone’s home and weather can be.
My big Thai Constellation, April 2024
You can also judge if your lighting is adequate based on the growth of the monstera! If it’s not growing at all, that’s not a great sign.
If it is growing, but there’s a lot of space (big, 2 or 3 or even 4 inches) between each new leaf that emerges, that’s a sign that the light isn’t bright enough. If the leaves mature and harden off smaller than the leaves below, that’s a pretty strong indicator that the light isn’t bright enough.
I do want to call out that new leaves will first open up small! They first emerge and grow in size over time. A leaf that’s still emerging will be a paler green than the older leaves near it. You can see a leaf that’s still hardening in the top Albo leaf on the right of the photo above, or in the one even further up (January 2024). The greens of the albo vs. thai constellation are nearly the same, and the dark green of a ‘hardened’ leaf that’s no longer growing in size are very similar.
How to Encourage Fenestration and Large Leaf Sizes
We all want those big, beautiful leaves with the swiss-cheese fenestrations.
Is there a way to encourage that quickly?
Not really. Your little baby tissue cultured monsteras are going to take time to get that size. I’d like to point back to my early post of my thai when I first imported it – those little leaves! I was so excited for that first leaf with the small center fenestrations. It took about a year from the plant with just outer fenestrations to the one producing the second layer.
I did start seeing the third row of fenestrations about a year after that.
If you want to jump right into better fenestrations, the trick is to take a top cutting and start from that. It seems to be related to age and the upper-most leaves, as well as light exposure.
If you check out my post last year about these two plants, you’ll see that my Albo had larger, wider leaves and more fenestration layers compared to what you see in my plant today. I trimmed back my albo last year, and kept my top cut – but the Thai is enormous, and blocked a lot of light. As such, the Albo is growing up towards the light, with longer leaves, and fewer fenestration layers.
Monstera deliciosa “albo”, large form, February 2024
Enjoy your Monstera Thai Constellation!
This particular variegated plant has been highly coveted by many people since they first started getting excited by plants – even before COVID!
With the accessibility of them thanks to tissue culturing, more folks can have access to this beautiful plant.
I will note this video from Kaylee Ellen last year, noting that there seem to be two clones of Thai Constellation. The link I included is time stamped from where she talks about this.
My Thai Constellation is from 2019, and I believe that makes it from the “Thai 1.0” batch. Based on what Kaylee is discussing, and how delayed these tissue cultured plants were at actually rolling out, I wonder if the newer clone wasn’t as robust. Maybe the ones we’re seeing in stores now are yet a third clone, or they returned to the first mother plant.
Who knows! I don’t.
But it’s helpful context as you shop for your plants. Snag those bargain tissue culture babies, and give it a go.
If you want them to start with big fenestrations, that’s worth paying extra for an established top cut. If you want one of those older plants for sure – ask questions! And expect to pay more.
Do you need to? Nah. At least in my opinon, it’s worth more to get something specific if that’s what you really want, but is there inherently anything wrong with all these tissue cultured plants coming out? Absolutely not.
I hope you experience tons of joy with your new plant, and that it gets big and gorgeous for you quickly!
