The Tortoise Table

Hello all, I'm new to the forum and was wondering what your advice is on shop bought plants and whether they are safe to feed? Thank you. Apologies if this has already been asked, I couldn't find anything when I searched.

Hi Chinchika, and welcome to our forum! We always advise not to immediately feed the leaves and flowers of shop bought plants, in case they have been sprayed with insecticide, as tortoises are very sensitive to weed killers and insecticides. You should wait for new growth of leaves and flowers and then feed those. You can also re-pot the plant into a compost that is not heavily fertilised, like John Innes no. 1, but personally I don't think that is as important as avoiding plant material that might have been sprayed with insecticide.

Nina


Chinchika wrote:
> Hello all, I'm new to the forum and was wondering what your advice is on
> shop bought plants and whether they are safe to feed? Thank you.
> Apologies if this has already been asked, I couldn't find anything when I
> searched.

Thanks for your reply. So if I wanted to plant some into the enclosure, if I washed and repotted them into plain topsoil, do you think they'd be ok after a couple of weeks? I'm mainly thinking of things that they wouldn't (hopefully) eat a lot of, and also for the indoor table like Bromeliads and similar.

It's really difficult to say. Plants that are sold for the garden are slightly less likely to have been sprayed with insecticide than houseplants, but you just don't know. Washing the leaves would help, and of course if it is a plant that tortoises are unlikely to eat then that's even better, but many tortoises will take a bite of something just to test it.
There are a number of aphids that do affect Bromeliads, but I don't think they are a plant that is especially at risk from aphids. It's difficult to know if the growers have sprayed plants with insecticides, and the shop you buy them from is almost certain not to know, as their plants will have been grown somewhere else and bought in. Luckily Bromeliad leaves are not too difficult to wash as they are tough, so you could try that, but there are no guarantees. What are the plants that you've bought that you intend to plant into the enclosure (some will be less likely to have been sprayed and others could be fast growing so that in a week or two you could pinch off most of the old leaves, and expose the new growth)?

Nina


Chinchika wrote:
> Thanks for your reply. So if I wanted to plant some into the enclosure, if
> I washed and repotted them into plain topsoil, do you think they'd be ok
> after a couple of weeks? I'm mainly thinking of things that they wouldn't
> (hopefully) eat a lot of, and also for the indoor table like Bromeliads
> and similar.

Thank you, Nina for your comprehensive reply. It's given me things to think about.

One more question if I may? Would you consider plants from a reptile shop (safe varieties obviously) would be fine to use? The supplier in question says that they are organically grown and "cycled" by themselves before sale.

Many thanks.

That sounds good to me. You can never know 100%, but to have been grown organically, and then presumably grown on until there is new growth (which i'm assuming the cycling is), sounds like they are safe.

Nina

Chinchika wrote:
> Thank you, Nina for your comprehensive reply. It's given me things to think
> about.
>
> One more question if I may? Would you consider plants from a reptile shop
> (safe varieties obviously) would be fine to use? The supplier in question
> says that they are organically grown and "cycled" by themselves
> before sale.
>
> Many thanks.

I assume that's what they mean by "cycling". Maybe I'll question them a bit more to be sure.

I also thought that anything sold as safe for reptiles and amphibians in general must be ok, because there are some very delicate amphibians around that would fare very badly if they came into contact with chemicals etc.