Snake plant transplant shock is a phenomenon that can occur when relocating or repotting your Snake plant and can be quite hard to avoid.
This can happen to the vast majority of plants and your Snake plant is unfortunately not exempt from this possibility.
Below you will find out what is transplant shock, what causes it, signs your snake plant is experiencing transplant shock and what you can do about it.
What is transplant shock?
Transplant shock is a common occurrence for plants and is characterized by usual or concerning symptoms whenever a plant is either repotted, or moved to a different location.
This issue can make your Snake plant not grow as well as before or make it look unhealthy compared to how it normally looks.
Often times the symptoms following transplant shock can be confused for other causes when it’s just the transplant shock taking effect.
What causes transplant shock?
There are actually a few different reasons why your Snake plant can go through transplant shock.
Mishandling your Snake plant or disturbing the roots too much is a major cause, but it can also be caused by changing the growing location conditions, using a different type of soil than before or by using a different type or size of container.
Basically these are major changes and this stresses your Snake plant out which will cause it to show signs of transplant shock.
It’s just like moving to a new home, it can be stressful making major changes and your plant will react by showing unusual signs.
Signs of transplant shock
When your Snake plant is going through transplant shock, there can be a number of different signs or symptoms letting you know the plant is stressed out.
Some of those signs can include the following.
- The leaves are drooping (bending, falling over, etc.)
- Leaf scorch symptoms
- Curling leaves
- The leaves are turning yellow
- Stunted growth
- Brown leaf tips
- The leaves start falling off
- Bugs have started showing up
If these signs or symptoms only started appearing after transplanting or repotting then the most likely cause is transplant shock.
However, if any or most of these things have been happening before you did a repot, then you should have a closer look at your care and you can check out my other articles listed above.
As for the bugs showing up, pests and bugs are attracted to plants under distress and transplant shock can certainly make your Snake plant more vulnerable to pests.
If you’re wondering how to get rid of them, you can check out my article how to get rid of bugs on Snake plants.
Overall those are most of the signs you can expect to see if your Snake plant is currently going through transplant shock or repotting stress.
Will my Snake plant recover?
The vast majority of the time a Snake plant will recover from transplant shock on it’s own, provided that you maintain great care.
It can take some time though.
You just have to keep your expectations in check as it can take anywhere from weeks to months for the mother in laws tongue to get back to normal after transplant shock.
There isn’t anything that you have to do, but there are some ways to ease transplant shock or make your Snake plant recover faster than it would on it’s own.
Tips to reduce transplant shock
There are actually quite a few things you can do in the meantime to help your Snake plant recover from transplant shock and some of those things include the following.
Minimalize root disturbing
Disturbing the roots is one of the major causes for transplant shock so it’s best to minimalize the disturbance as much as you can.
This means you don’t want to damage the roots when taking your Snake plant out of it’s container and try to keep as many roots intact as you can.
A way to minimalize this is by watering the soil before starting the transplant to reduce friction when removing and reducing the chance of tearing roots accidentally.
Prune unhealthy growth
By pruning unhealthy growth, your Snake plant will be able to focus more of it’s energy on fresh healthy growth instead of wasting it on unrecoverable growth.
This means pruning back heavily discolored leaves, leggy growth and even roots that have become unhealthy or rotted.
By the way, if the roots are dark or mushy when removing your Sansevieria from the container then you may have root rot.
If you suspect you have this issue, check out my article on Snake plant root rot so you can save your plant before it’s too late.
Transplant with indirect light
Although Snake plants can handle some full sun, after transplanting you should keep the plant in bright indirect light to reduce the stress that transplanting already provides.
You can keep it in this light condition for a few weeks before relocating if need be.
For more info on light needed, check out my article on Snake plant light requirements.
Keep everything similar
Since major changes can cause transplant shock, it’s best to keep everything as similar to before to reduce the shock.
This means using the same type of soil, light intensity and container type if possible.
With that said, if you weren’t doing things properly before like using the wrong type of soil or wrong type of light then you can ignore this.
Go easy on the fertilizer
While providing nutrients to your Snake plant is a great thing to do, you don’t want to add too much too fast until the roots have a chance to settle and establish themselves in the new location.
You can either hold off entirely until transplant shock subsides or you should just use much less than you normally would.
Try Epsom salt instead
There is some evidence that Epsom salt can help plants recover from transplant shock faster, most likely due to the magnesium content being added.
If you want to try this you can add 1 teaspoon of Epsom salt, diluted into a gallon of water and then water the soil after transplanting.
Water the soil immediately
Watering the soil immediately after transplanting is a great way to give your Snake plant some hydration and help reduce the stress of the change.
This would also be a good time to try out the Epsom salt in addition to the water.
Final thoughts
By now you will have a pretty good understanding on what transplant shock is, why it happens and what you can do in the meantime while your Snake plant recovers.
Overall just keep providing great care for your Snake plant and you will be good to go.
So have fun and enjoy the process!