Most of the time, legginess won’t kill a plant or seedling, but it does need addressing. It will grow long, spindly shoots to try and reach the light, and these shoots will have fewer leaves because the plant won’t have enough energy to produce them all the way along its stem. The most common cause of legginess in a plant or seedling is a lack of sunlight.įor example, if you’ve positioned your jade plant on a high shelf where the light from the nearest window only reaches it for a couple of hours per day, it’s likely to get leggy or “etiolated”. Or, in other words, your plant might become too weak to physically hold up its growth. If a plant expert comes to your house (it’s of course standard procedure for us to turn up at strangers’ houses to examine their plants) and calls your plant ‘leggy’, it would be wise to act fast to save your plant from death-by-bendy-stem. It leaves the plant looking a bit weird and ugly, like it probably needs an intervention. In this situation, ‘legginess’ refers to a plant’s appearance when its stem and/or petioles (the bits that connect the leaves to the stem) become unusually long. You could call a plant’s roots its legs, but you would be kidding yourself. Well, in a way, this description also applies to leggy plants. You might have heard this word being used to describe a very tall person (usually a woman), due to the fact that they have particularly long legs.
In this post, I’m talking about the term ‘leggy’.
#Leggy seedlings series#
Find the entire WTF Gardening series here. Welcome to my WTF Gardening series, where I take common gardening terms and explain them for those who are new to the world of plants.
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