plant post
Today I repotted a couple of my plants, so I decided to take some pictures as I did it.
Here you see the stuff I'm going to be using. That potting mix is mainly sphagnum moss, which is great for plants that need a lot of water. It's important that you buy potting soil that doesn't contain any fertilizers. Plants need fertilizer, but you want to know what kind is going into the pot and how much, and you don't have any control over these things when you buy pre-fertilized soil.
This means that you never buy ANYTHING from Miracle Gro. I don't think I can ever emphasize enough that Miracle Gro is evil and you should avoid everything they make.
The fertilizer I'm going to be using is bone meal and blood meal, ever my favorites. Bone meal provides phosphates and some nitrogen, while blood meal is practically pure nitrogen. Blood meal also acidifies soil somewhat, which is something to keep in mind - not all plants like acid soil, so for those that don't you'd want to use a different nitrogen source - but it also contains tons of iron, and I find that a lot of chemical fertilizers lack sufficient iron.
Neither of them contains any potassium, which means that I have to add potassium separately. I do so over time with some liquid potassium not shown here. The water in the milk jug is pure tap water with no additives - liquid potassium can be dangerous to plants if overused, and so I never add it when I'm repotting.
This is the first plant I worked on:
This is some kind of unspecified ivy. I don't usually like to buy plants when I don't know exactly what they are, but I liked the shape of the leaves and the sort of sun-and-shadows varigation.
This ivy lives on my desk at work, with my fluorescent desk light about six inches above it. When I bought it, it was about 1/4th this size, and I've had it about two and a half years now. It's actually grown more than this, but starting around December I started to trim off the ends of the longer vines and root them into another pot for one of my cow-orkers.
Keeping plants at work is sometimes tricky. The office is inhospitable to most kinds of plants, being fairly dry with inconsistent temperature and often drafts, and unless your desk is next to a window the light is going to be poor. Proper plant selection is important when you want to have a desk plant - not every plant is capable of living under office conditions. You need to match your plant to the conditions in the spot where you want to keep it.
It also helps to get a plant that grows very slowly. You don't need kudzu on your desk - you'll spend more time trimming the plant than working.
At any rate, if this ivy looks kind of lopsided, that's because it lives in a corner. There is a definite front and back to this plant.
This isn't the usually recommended way to bend a vine, heh. That's a twist-tie wrapped around the base of that vine, which is definitely not the ideal bonsai wire. It started out growing straight up, and then as it got longer its weight started to pull it down. But it wasn't pulling far enough, and the vine was sticking straight out like an erection. So I tied a twist-tie that I had at my desk around the vine, and forced it to bend downward. I'll leave it on there for a few months and then hopefully it will stick.
Here's the new pot it's going into. Although it's a far more attractive pot than the little purple one, I don't like it as much because I couldn't find a liner pot to fit inside it. Here you can see what I mean:
Having a smaller pot inside the larger one makes it worlds easier to water the plant. This is a nursery pot, as evidenced by the fact that it's ugly, but some pots have inner liner pots that are clear. It's nigh-impossible to find a pot and a liner that fit together when they aren't made for one another, and unfortunately most nurseries and garden centers around Louisville fail to account for people who want pots with liners. >:E
But, as you can see, the new pot is slightly bigger than the old one, and my goal with this was to give the ivy a little room to grow.
The first thing to do is prepare your new soil. This is the easiest way to do it. I've taken a plastic grocery bag from Kroger and stuck it down inside an unused pot. Into the bag goes the potting mix. I tend to not measure this stuff out exactly, but there's 4 or 5 cups of soil in there.
Then I added some fertilizer. There's 2 tablespoons or so each of bone meal and blood meal. You don't need to add a whole lot of this stuff - it's hard to overdo it with these types of fertilizers, but not impossible. Too much, especially of the blood meal, will slowly burn the roots as it releases nitrogen and damage or kill the plant. It's also always better to under-fertilize than over-fertilize, so err on the side of not enough. You can always add more fertilizer later, but it's way harder to take some out if you put in too much.
If this were pure sphagnum moss, I would also add some vermiculite, but this brand of mix already has some vermiculite and perlite in it.
Then you throw in some water and mix it all up.
Looks a bit like a cowpat, doesn't it? It's also about the size of a cowpat, because I decided I needed to dilute the fertilizer a bit more and added another two cups or so of potting mix.
For small amounts of soil like this you can mix it around with your hand outside the plastic bag; with larger amounts you'll need to get your hands dirty. It is imperative that you moisten your soil well before you put it around the roots of your plants. Too many people skip this step and put dry soil around their plants. This causes two major problems:
1. it's harder to get the soil tamped down well around the roots when it's dry.
2. getting soil which is completely dry to take water is not easy when you can't mush it around. When my ivy dries out again I'll make a post to show you how easy it is to "water" a plant and end up with the soil remaining, unbeknownst to you, completely dry.
Even the company that makes this brand of potting mix is trying to give you a clue, in multiple languages.
Right then. So, with my soil prepared, I removed the plant from its old pot.
Check out the crud on the surface of the soil, and around the base of the vines. That's mineral build-up, just like the gunk that CLR is intended to dissolve. I don't recommend you use CLR on your plants, though. Louisville city water is pretty hard, meaning it has a lot of minerals in it, and while this is awesome for my fish it's not so hot for plants grown in containers.
The thing about container plants is that everything you put into the pot stays in the pot. The minerals in your water don't just vanish into space; when the water evaporates or is used by the plant, the minerals stay behind. The plant uses some of these, but nowhere near all of them, and the remainder builds up in the soil. It's especially visible at the surface, where the water wicks up and evaporates, but these minerals permeate the soil.
A lot of people will say that the major reason why you want to repot a plant is to refresh the nutrients in the soil. This is a lie, and a dangerous lie because it implies that you can avoid having to repot if you fertilize regularly. The real reason is so that you get rid of these accumulated minerals, which will eventually damage the plant.
There are ways to minimize the build up of minerals, but it's impossible to avoid them entirely. So periodic repotting is necessary in the case of ALL container plants.
Knowing this, you now know that it's important to get rid of as much of the old soil as possible.
A pointy stick helps out here. Especially with a plant this small, your huge clumsy fingers are not going to be able to loosen the soil without breaking a bunch of the roots.
Breaking some of the roots is frankly unavoidable, especially in a situation like this one where some of the roots are dead. Don't stress too much about these tiny, filament-like roots. You want to preserve as many as possible, undamaged, but breaking some is going to happen no matter how careful you are.
If you look closely here you can see the difference between the live white roots and the dead brown ones. The reason for the dead roots is that this pot originally contained 3 more vines than it has now, and the additional vines died. This is common in "community" plants like this one, where several different plants are in the same pot together. Plants which are not closely related to one another compete with each other for space, water and nutrients, and sometimes one wins and the loser dies. The remaining vines are, more than likely, all clones taken off the same mother plant, and therefore they aren't competing with each other.
Even the live roots are looking a little peaked though. I left this plant in the same soil too long.
Don't take all the soil off the roots. It would be tempting to do that, and wash the roots clean before you repot them, but this would be a mistake. I removed about half the soil from this plant and left the other half in the root ball.
Then I put some fresh new soil down into the new pot. Some guides instruct you to cover the drainage hole(s) with screen, gravel or broken crockery. This is unnecessary, and in the case of gravel or crockery pieces, wastes valuable growing space. If you really feel a need it doesn't hurt anything, but you don't lose as much soil as you might expect through an uncovered hole.
The plant goes down into the pot next.
And then I filled up the gaps in the sides with new soil, tamping it down gently to ensure that there were no voids down inside the pot that weren't visible.
As long as I was futzing around with dirt and water, I decided to go ahead and do my sunburst plant, too.
This is the sunburst plant. It's an interesting-looking plant, with those bright orange stems.
As I was working on this plant, there was an ice-cream truck running around the neighborhood. It made me want a Dreamcicle.
Again, we first start with preparing the soil. I had a little dirt left from the ivy, so I added another 2 tablespoons each of blood meal and bone meal.
Then a bunch more potting mix. This may seem like a lot, especially given that I put the plant back into the exact same pot, but I used up every bit of this. When dry, soil always looks like it's more than it actually is.
I mixed it up with water again, of course, but I decided that another cowpat picture wasn't necessary.
A lot of really healthy roots on this guy. The sunburst has been in this pot for one year, and you can really see the difference between its roots and the ivy's. Some of that, however, also has to do with the fact that this is only one plant. It may look like a couple of plants growing close together, but it's only one, which has reproduced by crown division. So there is no competition amongst the roots.
Even this plant has mineral crud on the surface, especially around the base of the stems.
This is my pointy stick. I bought a pack of 100 of these for, I think, $3. It's nothing more complex than a bamboo kabob skewer, and I found them for sale in the baking-pans aisle at Kroger. I use these as stakes for very small plants, as moisture indicators in my orchids, and of course to tease old dirt out from around the roots of a plant that I'm repotting. Everyone who plays with plants should have some pointy sticks. They are cheap and useful.
Heh! As I was removing old dirt, I ran into the boundary between the plant's original dirt and the new stuff I added when I moved it into this larger pot last year.
I removed more than half of the sunburst's soil. You can see the little broken-off roots in the old soil.
It's really important when you're repotting not to let the roots dry out. If it's taking you awhile to do what you need to do, you should cover them up with moist paper towels, or in the case of larger plants, moist cloth towels. Today was a great day to do this, because it was cool and cloudy, and it had recently rained so the air was not at all dry. If it had been a hot, sunny day however, I would have needed to cover up these roots while I ran inside to check my photos.
I put the sunburst straight back into the exact same pot. When repotting, it's not necessary to move a plant into a bigger pot if you don't want to. You saw how much old dirt I was taking out - if you repot properly, a bigger pot is totally unnecessary to give the plant some fresh soil. Plants tend to grow into the containers you give them, and it's easy to get overwhelmed by a plant that starts out small and cute but keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Keeping the plant in the same size pot is sometimes enough to keep it from growing bigger than you want. Sometimes it needs to be pruned as well. It depends on the plant.
So, this looks pretty nice, right? A little dirty, maybe ...
OOPS! I planted it too high! Look how far above the surface of the soil the crown is.
The crown is the place where the plant's stems become roots. The crown should be exactly at the soil's surface. It's better to err on the side of too high rather than too low, because a crown that's below the surface can cause major problems in some species of plant. Citrus trees, for example, will often rot and die if the crown is buried below the surface. So it's better to plant high than low.
This is way too high, though. This is like an inch high. I wiggled this around a little and it was very wobbly, which is the major danger of a crown that is way off the ground. A wobbly plant can tip right over and rip itself off its own roots. Obviously we don't want that.
That's better. It's way dirtier now but the crown is properly positioned. I had to take the plant completely out of the pot again, remove some of the dirt from beneath it, and rebury it.
Two plants is all I'm going to do today. I need to repot my citrus trees, too, but that will have to wait for another day.
After you've repotted a plant, don't expect much from it for awhile. Plant health begins in the roots, and you've just screwed up the root system. The plant needs to re-establish its root system before it will deign to grow again. How much time it takes before the plant resumes growth depends on the type of plant and the time of year. For plants that you bring indoors in the winter it's best to do this repotting as early as possible in the spring, so that the plant is boosted back into a growth cycle by the warmth and sunlight. Some plants that stay in the yard are best transplanted in the fall or early winter, but don't be fooled into thinking that you can do the same thing with container plants. Early spring is best.
Here you see the stuff I'm going to be using. That potting mix is mainly sphagnum moss, which is great for plants that need a lot of water. It's important that you buy potting soil that doesn't contain any fertilizers. Plants need fertilizer, but you want to know what kind is going into the pot and how much, and you don't have any control over these things when you buy pre-fertilized soil.
This means that you never buy ANYTHING from Miracle Gro. I don't think I can ever emphasize enough that Miracle Gro is evil and you should avoid everything they make.
The fertilizer I'm going to be using is bone meal and blood meal, ever my favorites. Bone meal provides phosphates and some nitrogen, while blood meal is practically pure nitrogen. Blood meal also acidifies soil somewhat, which is something to keep in mind - not all plants like acid soil, so for those that don't you'd want to use a different nitrogen source - but it also contains tons of iron, and I find that a lot of chemical fertilizers lack sufficient iron.
Neither of them contains any potassium, which means that I have to add potassium separately. I do so over time with some liquid potassium not shown here. The water in the milk jug is pure tap water with no additives - liquid potassium can be dangerous to plants if overused, and so I never add it when I'm repotting.
This is the first plant I worked on:
This is some kind of unspecified ivy. I don't usually like to buy plants when I don't know exactly what they are, but I liked the shape of the leaves and the sort of sun-and-shadows varigation.
This ivy lives on my desk at work, with my fluorescent desk light about six inches above it. When I bought it, it was about 1/4th this size, and I've had it about two and a half years now. It's actually grown more than this, but starting around December I started to trim off the ends of the longer vines and root them into another pot for one of my cow-orkers.
Keeping plants at work is sometimes tricky. The office is inhospitable to most kinds of plants, being fairly dry with inconsistent temperature and often drafts, and unless your desk is next to a window the light is going to be poor. Proper plant selection is important when you want to have a desk plant - not every plant is capable of living under office conditions. You need to match your plant to the conditions in the spot where you want to keep it.
It also helps to get a plant that grows very slowly. You don't need kudzu on your desk - you'll spend more time trimming the plant than working.
At any rate, if this ivy looks kind of lopsided, that's because it lives in a corner. There is a definite front and back to this plant.
This isn't the usually recommended way to bend a vine, heh. That's a twist-tie wrapped around the base of that vine, which is definitely not the ideal bonsai wire. It started out growing straight up, and then as it got longer its weight started to pull it down. But it wasn't pulling far enough, and the vine was sticking straight out like an erection. So I tied a twist-tie that I had at my desk around the vine, and forced it to bend downward. I'll leave it on there for a few months and then hopefully it will stick.
Here's the new pot it's going into. Although it's a far more attractive pot than the little purple one, I don't like it as much because I couldn't find a liner pot to fit inside it. Here you can see what I mean:
Having a smaller pot inside the larger one makes it worlds easier to water the plant. This is a nursery pot, as evidenced by the fact that it's ugly, but some pots have inner liner pots that are clear. It's nigh-impossible to find a pot and a liner that fit together when they aren't made for one another, and unfortunately most nurseries and garden centers around Louisville fail to account for people who want pots with liners. >:E
But, as you can see, the new pot is slightly bigger than the old one, and my goal with this was to give the ivy a little room to grow.
The first thing to do is prepare your new soil. This is the easiest way to do it. I've taken a plastic grocery bag from Kroger and stuck it down inside an unused pot. Into the bag goes the potting mix. I tend to not measure this stuff out exactly, but there's 4 or 5 cups of soil in there.
Then I added some fertilizer. There's 2 tablespoons or so each of bone meal and blood meal. You don't need to add a whole lot of this stuff - it's hard to overdo it with these types of fertilizers, but not impossible. Too much, especially of the blood meal, will slowly burn the roots as it releases nitrogen and damage or kill the plant. It's also always better to under-fertilize than over-fertilize, so err on the side of not enough. You can always add more fertilizer later, but it's way harder to take some out if you put in too much.
If this were pure sphagnum moss, I would also add some vermiculite, but this brand of mix already has some vermiculite and perlite in it.
Then you throw in some water and mix it all up.
Looks a bit like a cowpat, doesn't it? It's also about the size of a cowpat, because I decided I needed to dilute the fertilizer a bit more and added another two cups or so of potting mix.
For small amounts of soil like this you can mix it around with your hand outside the plastic bag; with larger amounts you'll need to get your hands dirty. It is imperative that you moisten your soil well before you put it around the roots of your plants. Too many people skip this step and put dry soil around their plants. This causes two major problems:
1. it's harder to get the soil tamped down well around the roots when it's dry.
2. getting soil which is completely dry to take water is not easy when you can't mush it around. When my ivy dries out again I'll make a post to show you how easy it is to "water" a plant and end up with the soil remaining, unbeknownst to you, completely dry.
Even the company that makes this brand of potting mix is trying to give you a clue, in multiple languages.
Right then. So, with my soil prepared, I removed the plant from its old pot.
Check out the crud on the surface of the soil, and around the base of the vines. That's mineral build-up, just like the gunk that CLR is intended to dissolve. I don't recommend you use CLR on your plants, though. Louisville city water is pretty hard, meaning it has a lot of minerals in it, and while this is awesome for my fish it's not so hot for plants grown in containers.
The thing about container plants is that everything you put into the pot stays in the pot. The minerals in your water don't just vanish into space; when the water evaporates or is used by the plant, the minerals stay behind. The plant uses some of these, but nowhere near all of them, and the remainder builds up in the soil. It's especially visible at the surface, where the water wicks up and evaporates, but these minerals permeate the soil.
A lot of people will say that the major reason why you want to repot a plant is to refresh the nutrients in the soil. This is a lie, and a dangerous lie because it implies that you can avoid having to repot if you fertilize regularly. The real reason is so that you get rid of these accumulated minerals, which will eventually damage the plant.
There are ways to minimize the build up of minerals, but it's impossible to avoid them entirely. So periodic repotting is necessary in the case of ALL container plants.
Knowing this, you now know that it's important to get rid of as much of the old soil as possible.
A pointy stick helps out here. Especially with a plant this small, your huge clumsy fingers are not going to be able to loosen the soil without breaking a bunch of the roots.
Breaking some of the roots is frankly unavoidable, especially in a situation like this one where some of the roots are dead. Don't stress too much about these tiny, filament-like roots. You want to preserve as many as possible, undamaged, but breaking some is going to happen no matter how careful you are.
If you look closely here you can see the difference between the live white roots and the dead brown ones. The reason for the dead roots is that this pot originally contained 3 more vines than it has now, and the additional vines died. This is common in "community" plants like this one, where several different plants are in the same pot together. Plants which are not closely related to one another compete with each other for space, water and nutrients, and sometimes one wins and the loser dies. The remaining vines are, more than likely, all clones taken off the same mother plant, and therefore they aren't competing with each other.
Even the live roots are looking a little peaked though. I left this plant in the same soil too long.
Don't take all the soil off the roots. It would be tempting to do that, and wash the roots clean before you repot them, but this would be a mistake. I removed about half the soil from this plant and left the other half in the root ball.
Then I put some fresh new soil down into the new pot. Some guides instruct you to cover the drainage hole(s) with screen, gravel or broken crockery. This is unnecessary, and in the case of gravel or crockery pieces, wastes valuable growing space. If you really feel a need it doesn't hurt anything, but you don't lose as much soil as you might expect through an uncovered hole.
The plant goes down into the pot next.
And then I filled up the gaps in the sides with new soil, tamping it down gently to ensure that there were no voids down inside the pot that weren't visible.
As long as I was futzing around with dirt and water, I decided to go ahead and do my sunburst plant, too.
This is the sunburst plant. It's an interesting-looking plant, with those bright orange stems.
As I was working on this plant, there was an ice-cream truck running around the neighborhood. It made me want a Dreamcicle.
Again, we first start with preparing the soil. I had a little dirt left from the ivy, so I added another 2 tablespoons each of blood meal and bone meal.
Then a bunch more potting mix. This may seem like a lot, especially given that I put the plant back into the exact same pot, but I used up every bit of this. When dry, soil always looks like it's more than it actually is.
I mixed it up with water again, of course, but I decided that another cowpat picture wasn't necessary.
A lot of really healthy roots on this guy. The sunburst has been in this pot for one year, and you can really see the difference between its roots and the ivy's. Some of that, however, also has to do with the fact that this is only one plant. It may look like a couple of plants growing close together, but it's only one, which has reproduced by crown division. So there is no competition amongst the roots.
Even this plant has mineral crud on the surface, especially around the base of the stems.
This is my pointy stick. I bought a pack of 100 of these for, I think, $3. It's nothing more complex than a bamboo kabob skewer, and I found them for sale in the baking-pans aisle at Kroger. I use these as stakes for very small plants, as moisture indicators in my orchids, and of course to tease old dirt out from around the roots of a plant that I'm repotting. Everyone who plays with plants should have some pointy sticks. They are cheap and useful.
Heh! As I was removing old dirt, I ran into the boundary between the plant's original dirt and the new stuff I added when I moved it into this larger pot last year.
I removed more than half of the sunburst's soil. You can see the little broken-off roots in the old soil.
It's really important when you're repotting not to let the roots dry out. If it's taking you awhile to do what you need to do, you should cover them up with moist paper towels, or in the case of larger plants, moist cloth towels. Today was a great day to do this, because it was cool and cloudy, and it had recently rained so the air was not at all dry. If it had been a hot, sunny day however, I would have needed to cover up these roots while I ran inside to check my photos.
I put the sunburst straight back into the exact same pot. When repotting, it's not necessary to move a plant into a bigger pot if you don't want to. You saw how much old dirt I was taking out - if you repot properly, a bigger pot is totally unnecessary to give the plant some fresh soil. Plants tend to grow into the containers you give them, and it's easy to get overwhelmed by a plant that starts out small and cute but keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Keeping the plant in the same size pot is sometimes enough to keep it from growing bigger than you want. Sometimes it needs to be pruned as well. It depends on the plant.
So, this looks pretty nice, right? A little dirty, maybe ...
OOPS! I planted it too high! Look how far above the surface of the soil the crown is.
The crown is the place where the plant's stems become roots. The crown should be exactly at the soil's surface. It's better to err on the side of too high rather than too low, because a crown that's below the surface can cause major problems in some species of plant. Citrus trees, for example, will often rot and die if the crown is buried below the surface. So it's better to plant high than low.
This is way too high, though. This is like an inch high. I wiggled this around a little and it was very wobbly, which is the major danger of a crown that is way off the ground. A wobbly plant can tip right over and rip itself off its own roots. Obviously we don't want that.
That's better. It's way dirtier now but the crown is properly positioned. I had to take the plant completely out of the pot again, remove some of the dirt from beneath it, and rebury it.
Two plants is all I'm going to do today. I need to repot my citrus trees, too, but that will have to wait for another day.
After you've repotted a plant, don't expect much from it for awhile. Plant health begins in the roots, and you've just screwed up the root system. The plant needs to re-establish its root system before it will deign to grow again. How much time it takes before the plant resumes growth depends on the type of plant and the time of year. For plants that you bring indoors in the winter it's best to do this repotting as early as possible in the spring, so that the plant is boosted back into a growth cycle by the warmth and sunlight. Some plants that stay in the yard are best transplanted in the fall or early winter, but don't be fooled into thinking that you can do the same thing with container plants. Early spring is best.