Trisha Divides Container Plants - Central texas gardener

A friend of mine recently asked me to help her revive this plant; it's kind of a special plant to her. It's an aglaonema and she wanted to know what had happened to it and why it had gone downhill. And this like many plants has been planted in a soilless plant mix, it's basically just soil that there simply to hold the roots in place, it doesn't really have a lot of nutrients so you really have to use chemical fertilizers to keep the plant healthy and use them on a regular basis cause this stuff is not really feeding the plant. Most of the soilless mixes are very, very lightweight so that's one way you can tell them. The plant has got a lot of dead material on it so I would definitely trim all of that off. And it just needs to be put in some new potting soil and the plant pot actually needs to be cleaned up too. I would put it back in the same pot but you can see that there is a lot of salt residue on the inside of the pot left over from the chemical fertilizers so I would soak that in a bit of vinegar water to get all of that residue off before I put the plant in. Then I would choose a good potting soil mix that's got some compost and nutrients in it. And then for feeding this plant I like to go in with regular applications of seaweed fertilizer, just a liquid seaweed, there are many good organic fertilizers available now to feed our plants with and that work very, very well. I also like to add like to a little vinegar to the water, apple cider vinegar, every time I water just because it helps the alkaline water that we have here in the Austin area. The more acidulated water just keeps the plants greener and healthier it really works. Now sometimes you'll have plants that you purchase that do really well for a while and then they start to go down hill this one is starting to have some leaves that look very damaged because its just too crowded. You'll notice that when I pull it out of the pot its just a solid mass of roots there, there is not a lot of potting soil left for this one so that why the leaves are starting to look kind a bad. So with this one I really need to break up this root mass a little bit and open that up so that the plant can separate the roots so it can get going well again. And you might even want to pull the plant apart and break a few plants off just to separate a little bit in the pot or plant it in a bunch of smaller pots. The pot that you put it in is important I like terracotta pots because they do dry out more quickly between waterings so for a plant like sansevieria that's important they don't like to be over-wet. Now don't choose a pot that's too large for your plant go up maybe two inches larger than the pot that it's in. If you put a small plant in a very large pot you can over water it very easily and that will definitely lead to the decline of the plant. So when I put a plant in a pot I like to put a little vinyl screening, you can get this at hardware stores it comes in rolls, and this vinyl screening when you put it inside the pot will help to keep insects from coming into your pot. Then I like to use a little pot shard and that helps with drainage. Put my fresh potting soil in, separate these plants out and that's going to be a much better plant very soon. And I would cut off all the leaves that are damaged. Here is an aloe vera that's got a lot of new growth and it just needs to be divided. These things will tend to multiply very quickly. For an aloe I like to add a little bit of coarse sand to the potting mix they just really respond well to that increased drainage. Now sometimes you have plants in pots and you want to keep them in the same pot and not change the pot to a bigger pot all the time. This is a Boston fern, believe me it was, and I've let it go kind of dry and then I take a serrated knife or a saw and actually just saw off some of the root ball of the plant. You can cut off the bottom, cut off the sides and then put that same plant back in the same pot. This is great to do for bougainvilleas or hibiscus where you have a large pot already and you don't want to keep adding larger and larger pots that are hard for you to manage. So those are some ways that you can handle planting and repotting some of your container plants and enjoying them for many years in the future.