How to mount a staghorn

When your Staghorn outgrows the pot, you can—

🪴Move it to a larger pot, or

🛠️ Mount it on the wall, a tree, a fence, a gate, a door, or some other vertical place.

Here’s how...

👇

1️⃣ Find a board you can submerge in water.

In this video we use cedar we purchased from Lowes.

By the way, a Staghorn is a Epiphytye— a kind of plant (or plant-like organism) that grows on the surface of another plant and pulls its nutrients from the air, rain, and water— rather than the soil. So, Staghorns actually prefer a plank to a pot!

(An epiphyte isn’t a parasite— notice, it doesn’t suck the life from another living thing— it derives what it needs from the environment.)

2️⃣ Place wet spaghnum moss on the wood, so you can tie your Staghorn to the wood— with the moss between the plant and the plank.

(Remember, you don’t need dirt— this plant “eats and drinks” from the environment, not the soil.)

Make note of the two parts of your Staghorn— the shield and the fronds— so you know which part to tie to the wood.

🛡️The shield = the brown part. It’s a necessary element of the plant, so don’t cut it off or pull it away.

🫎 The fronds = the leaves, which look like antlers, giving the plant its name.

💥 Special note: in this example you’ll see a smaller Staghorn growing with the big one. This small one is known as a “pup.” You can pull the entire pup from the original plant and mount it as well— giving you two. You MUST have a shield on both in order for them to live, however

3️⃣ Lasso the plant to the plank with fishing line or twine.

Fishing line works great, because it’s designed to get wet. You’ll want to go around the entire plank AND the plant multiple times.

Tie it— with a regular knot. Then cut the excess.

Tip: don’t cover the brown shield. Give it space to grow.

Eventually the moss— and growth— will cover the twine.

4️⃣ To water your Staghorn, pull it off and submerge it for 30 minutes.

Then, let it drain for a few minutes and rehang it.

When in the wild, these plants often grow in the “fork” of a tree, between limbs. All the leaf litter, the rainwater, everything falls down onto that brown part— the shield. That’s how it gets its nutrients.

If you want to help it along, you can just put a banana peel up there occasionally— or have your kids or grandkids do it.