Encouraging your peace lily to flower:
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First off, you’ll be much happier if you take the perspective that you play a supporting role in plant growth as opposed to “how do I make the plant [do thy bidding].”
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2️⃣ Take a look at how flowers emerge: peace lily flowers grow out of an established grouping of leaves. Based on my rough observations, the flower arrives on the back of the 4th or 5th leaf in a group – and there are many groupings within an entire pot.
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So you’ll get more flowers if your plant is able to produce more of these leaf groups. How can you encourage the plant to produce more leaf groups?
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*LIGHT*
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Peace Lily production guidelines suggest 1500-2500 foot-candles for ideal growth but (1) we don’t necessarily want production level growth at home as it would be inconvenient to keep up with watering and fertilizing, and (2) only a greenhouse with adequate shade cloth could get 1500 foot-candles from directly overhead.
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I’ve had my peace lily for over 6 years, getting consistently larger from a 6″ pot stepping up to 12″. Most of its time was spent with 200-600 foot-candles when the sun was NOT shining directly on the plant. In some of the places where it lived, it saw at most 3 hours of direct sun (measuring 3000-4000 foot-candles – that’s sun through a glass and at an angle). I water whenever I see the leaves droop a tiny bit and use 3-1-2 fertilizer whenever I see new leaves growing.
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I love this Peace Lily as it is – flowers are just an occasional treat.
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P.S. I purposely haven’t cut away the dead stuff so you can see that this is part of how it grows – I’ll clean it up soon.
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