Happy Fall. Finally we have been having some cooler temps in Texas and I am for one enjoying it. Fall is my most favorite time of the year for sure. Lately I have jumped on the Houseplant bandwagon. It is more popular with the milleneals and Gen Z per most articles I have read - and although I am neither, I am still enjoying this whole houseplants idea except for Fungus Gnats (Which is a story for another time).
Although I have had some house plants over the years, I had not managed to keep them alive and I always thought I did not have the green thumb. But my friend M aka Maneesha dissuaded my beliefs and gave me a few plants that she had propagated for me to try out and my journed started then with a small spider plant and a baby monsterra. Now I have over 40 Plants in my house and it warms my heart.
Today's post is about rescuing three of my plants from my own mistakes - Overwatering and choosing a bigger pot than the plant needs. Over a time period of growing plants I have learnt a few things. Overwatering is the main aspect of it - I killed my plants mostly by overwatering. Again thanks to Maneesha - now I own a moisture meter and when I doubt I double check before I water the plants and I can happily say that most of my plants are doing well now. Keyword being Most - some are still struggling due to my watering zeal.
Second mistake that I was doing was choosing a pot that was bigger than what the plant needed. Most indoor houseplants like to be compact and root bound is what I have figured out. Also bigger pots means more soil and more water retention thus causing root rots.
For all the three plants that I rescued today - I did the following pot mix with whatever ingredients I had. I did not have all the things that are mentioend by different plant youtubers.
2 Parts Orchid Bark (this is what I had on hand) 2 Parts Perlite 2 Parts Cactus soil mix (I used this as I did not have compost or coco chips or peat moss and I felt like this would be less dense than the regular potting soil mix) 1/2 Part of coarse sand (this was just regular sand I had at home - it is medium coarse I would say)
You could obviously do more ore less of any of these and use other ingredients as you have them. If you search Youtube for aroid soil mixes there are gazillion videos out there.
1. Pachira Aquatica or Chinese Money Plant This plant of mine was doing really good and I was trying very hard not to overwater it. But what I had not realized was that it was a nursery pot within a ceramic pot and when I waterd more, the extra water was sitting inside the ceramic pot keeping the bottom part of nursery pot mosit and thus causing root rot. As I removed the plant fro pot, I could easily see two of the plants had root rot (it was five plants braided together) and then just broke off easily. So I removed those, checked the other three to make sure they were okay and then repotted it in the same pot as the pot size for now seemed okay (until next spring) with my new soil mix. I was happy to see that water drained quickly and now I will take it out of the outer pot and then water it to make sure it is drained fully before putting it back in the ceramic pot.
2. Anthurium I had bought this plant from walmart and it was in a very tiny nursery pot and I felt like it was growing quite a bit, so I ended up repotting it in a new pot which in retrospect I know was too large for this. And being a bit ignorant about anthurium and what kind of soil mix it likes, I just used regular indoor potting soil which was too dense and retained a lot of water causing root rot. You can see from pictures below that there were two plants in that anthurium plant and I lost one to root rot. I am hoping that the other one will survie well with the new potting mix. So it is very critical to use a good pot size for the plants.
3. Kalanchoe This beautiful flower plant was gifted to me by my cousin, but we were out of country for almost 10 days and this plant had completely withered without water. I tried to revive it by overwatering - SIGH and it was just not doing good. Leaves completely dropped and then today I noticed that one of the stems (it had 3 stems) was looking really black and I immediatly realized it was root rot and that stem was dying. Again I removed all the excess soil from the roots and then repotted it with the above mix. I also recently learned that Kalanchoe is a succulent and it retains a lot of water in its stems. So I am hoping with this soil mix it will come back and thrive. Crossing my fingers. I forgot to take pics of this plant..sorry.
Here are all the three pots that I repotted today.
I am writing a blog post after a long time. Thanks for stopping by and taking time to read. Any thoughts and comments or suggestions, please feel free to drop a comment for me.
Happy Planting folks......
