Houseplant411 Care Guide Scraper - Indoor Plant Data & Pet Safety Database

Scrape 140+ structured indoor houseplant care guides from Houseplant411.com — covering light, watering, humidity, soil, fertilizer, toxicity, pet-safety flags, FAQ entries, and images. Each record is a complete care profile for one plant, ready to import into a database or feed into an AI pipeline.

What does the Houseplant411 scraper do?

It crawls the Houseplant411 sitemap, filters to /houseplant/ care guides, and extracts a structured record for each plant. No JavaScript rendering is required — the site is server-rendered WordPress. No proxy is needed.

The dataset covers popular houseplants: Pothos, Dracaena, Philodendron, Monstera, Ficus, Jade, Orchid, Snake Plant, Peace Lily, and more. Plants are tagged by type — floor, hanging, table, flowering, bonsai, and clean-air — which makes it straightforward to segment the dataset for filtered queries or UI categories.

What data does it extract?

Each record contains the following fields:

Identity

• id_plant — URL slug (primary key)
• common_name — Common plant name
• botanical_name — Scientific name
• genus — Plant genus
• family — Plant family
• also_known_as — Array of alternative common names
• plant_type — Array of type tags: flowering, hanging, floor, table, bonsai, clean-air

Care parameters

• light_requirement — Normalized: low / medium / bright indirect / direct
• light_detail — Full light care instructions
• water_requirement — Watering instructions
• humidity — low / average / high
• temperature_range — Preferred temperature range
• soil — Soil type requirements
• fertilizer — Feeding schedule and type
• ease_of_care — easy / average / difficult
• growth_habit — Growth habit description
• mature_size — Mature plant size
• propagation — Propagation method
• repotting — Pot size and repotting guidance
• pruning — Pruning instructions
• flowering — Flowering information
• care_tips — Additional care tips

Safety and special properties

• toxicity — toxic / non-toxic
• toxicity_detail — Detailed toxicity text
• is_pet_safe — Boolean: safe for cats and dogs
• is_air_purifying — Boolean: air-purifying properties

Rich text and media

• common_problems — Array of disease and problem descriptions
• common_pests — Array of pest entries with treatment advice
• faq — Array of Q/A formatted strings from the guide's FAQ section
• image_urls — Array of image URLs from the care guide
• guide_url — Source URL

Sample output record

{
  "id_plant": "dracaena-marginata-how-to-grow-care-guide",
  "common_name": "Dracaena Marginata",
  "botanical_name": "Dracaena marginata",
  "genus": "Dracaena",
  "plant_type": ["floor"],
  "light_requirement": "medium",
  "light_detail": "Dracaena marginata plants prefer medium light, but survive in low light situations. Direct sunlight burns their leaves.",
  "water_requirement": "Over-watering causes root-rot and is the main reason a Dracaena marginata dies...",
  "humidity": "average",
  "temperature_range": "70-80 F",
  "ease_of_care": "easy",
  "toxicity": "toxic",
  "toxicity_detail": "Toxic to cats and dogs. May cause vomiting, anorexia, hypersalivation, and dilated pupils in cats.",
  "is_pet_safe": false,
  "is_air_purifying": true,
  "common_problems": [
    "Brown leaf tips — usually caused by fluoride in tap water or low humidity",
    "Yellow leaves — overwatering or poor drainage"
  ],
  "faq": [
    "Q: Why are the leaves turning brown?\nA: Usually fluoride in tap water or extremely low humidity.",
    "Q: How often should I water my Dracaena Marginata?\nA: Allow the top 50% of the soil to dry out before watering."
  ],
  "image_urls": ["https://houseplant411.com/wp-content/uploads/dracaena-m.jpg"],
  "guide_url": "https://houseplant411.com/houseplant/dracaena-marginata-how-to-grow-care-guide/"
}

How to use it

The actor has a single input field:

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum guides to scrape. Set to 0 for all ~140 guides.

To get a sample: run with maxItems: 10. To get the full dataset: set maxItems: 0.

Use cases

• Plant-care apps (Planta, Greg, Vera) — enrich plant databases with per-plant care parameters, light requirements, and watering schedules
• Pet-safety tools — filter plants by is_pet_safe and toxicity_detail to build cat- and dog-safe plant guides
• RAG / LLM plant assistants — the faq and common_problems arrays give a text corpus grounded in real care questions
• Plant marketplace enrichment — add structured care data to product listings for better buyer confidence
• Indoor gardening content sites — import categorized plant data by plant_type (floor, hanging, bonsai, etc.) to drive filtered browsing

FAQ

Is this data public? Yes. Houseplant411.com publishes these care guides publicly. The scraper reads only publicly accessible pages.

What formats can I export? Apify datasets export to JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and RSS. The faq and common_problems fields are arrays and render as nested JSON in JSON export, and as delimited strings in CSV/Excel.

How current is the data? Houseplant411.com content is stable — care guides are not updated frequently. Run once to build the full dataset; re-run periodically to catch any new guides added to the site.

Output is available in JSON, CSV, and Excel via the Apify dataset export panel.