Can Prayer Plants Grow In Water?

Can prayer plants grow in water? Yes they can! We cover all you need to know about propagating a maranta a.k.a. prayer plant in water and growing it there permanently.

See also: Prayer Plant Care or Maranta Lemon Lime for full guides to caring for this plant, as well as our other posts: How To Propagate Lemon Lime Maranta In Leca, How To Propagate Lemon Lime Maranta In Sphagnum Moss, How To Propagate Lemon Lime Maranta In Water.

They are fine to grow in water alone and they can grow well, although not as fast as in soil. You can see some of my prayer plants growing in a jam jar in the picture below, they root well and do just fine in water.

Can Prayer Plants Grow In Just Water

Prayer plants can grow in just water, but will grow quicker if you feed them a fertilizer, it needs to be much more diluted than you would use for soil, I would add 3 times the amount of water normally needed and then use that.

You can see in the image below come of my marantas that have started to root in water, they can take less than a week to start putting out roots from the nodes.

How To Grow Prayer Plants In Water

Take a cutting from below the node, the wider part of the stem where the branches grow from. The cutting will produce roots from here.

You need to give the cuttings a few hours for the open wounds to seal up, then just put them in a jar of filtered tap water to root.

They normally start to root in a few days. Keep an eye on the water and keep it topped up so that the nodes are under the water.

You can see in the image below a lot of my plants that are growing in water, you want to make the leaves are all out of the water as I have done, because they can rot if they get submerged.

What To Do If The Plants Rot Or The Water Turns Cloudy

If the water starts to go cloudy it is a sign of rot and you need to change the water, and remove any rotting material from the jar. It could well be a leaf that has fallen in.

Good luck with your propagations!

You can find all our articles on water propagation here, like the Philodendron Burle Marx Water Propagation article.