Even with 2 feet of snow on the ground, you can be growing Bonsai! It's true! Tropical bonsai absolutely need to be indoors during the Winter, but that's actually a good thing.

In the Summer months, most people turn their air conditioner down to 65. But in the Winter months, they turn their heater up to 75. If your indoor temperatures are over 68 degrees and you put your bonsai in Southerly facing windows, your tropical bonsai will beef up and get healthy - within reason of course, first they are Bonsai in small pots and second, the photo period each day in the Winter is short.

Even with this, you can still ensure your tropicals stay healthy and don't drop leaves. How? Humidity!

When you break plant care down to it's bare essentials, you have light, water, air and fertilizer. All of these together make up the plants environment. When you control the environment, you can get amazing growth and beauty from your plants.

So you want light to be as intense as the plant desires for as long as possible each day; you want the water to be as much as the plant can use, no more, no less; you want the air to have the precise humidity that your plant wants, and you want to supply your plant with a wide range of "well balanced" nutrition. For plants, this means minerals - NPK and all the trace minerals in tiny quantities.

In the Winter, the light is out of your control unless you want to buy indoor grow lights. The watering and fertilizing are realtively easy to control. The main concern indoors is the humidity. Your heater will suck all of the humidity out of the air in your house leaving it like a desert.

So what do you do? First, realize that humidity makes everything feel warmer. So you will be more comfortable in your house with humidity. That's why the South is so uncomfortable in the Summer - the humidity. So boil water on the stove, use a humidifier, spray the leaves on your plants and use humidity trays. All of these will help to raise the humidity in your home and not only will YOU be more comfortable, your plants will too!