All you need to know about Aglaonema Chinese Evergreen 🌱

hi and welcome to swedish plant guys in this video we give you all you need to know about the aglonema also known as the chinese evergreen and as usual we divide this video up into four parts you have the purchase the planting the placement and the care of the plant so if you want to skip forward you can however we always recommend you to watch the entire video to get all you need to know now everything in this video is based on our over 20 years experience of taking care of indoor plants so please like comment and subscribe that really helps our channel a lot follow us on facebook and instagram so let's get started [Music] [Applause] [Music] so starting off with the purchase now when you go out to buy an aglonema you've probably heard that this is an easy to care for plot and it is it's quite easy however in this video we will be going through a couple of things you need to know enable to make it to be able to make it grow and thrive but there are a lot of different varieties and when you get out to the shops there can also be different names for this plot now the latin name is aglonema hybrid or aglonema commutatum and then you have a variation of this plant and we have i think seven different types of aglunimas here today they can also be called a chinese evergreen or also a philippine evergreen depending on where you live in the world i've also seen the name poison dart plant for this plant as well here in sweden we call it silvocala but it's not really a color but it doesn't matter it's a name for this plant so i will call this agloneima since that is the latin word and the most correct word for these plants so when you get out to your shop there can be a ton of different varieties of this plant as i said we have seven different varieties here i think here in sweden you can get almost 20 more than this so which one should you pick well that is completely up to your preferences what do you want in your house however this is a variegated plant which means that it has different colorations on the leaves and the coloration can be everything from green to white to creamy white to as we have here a little bit of red there are all different types of colors and the coloration here is the key because the more colors or variegations we have on the leaves the more light this plant requires so you need to know that when you go out and buy one and we'll go through that even more closely on the care of the plots but when we go out we need to know that if you want to buy one that has a lot of whites in it like this one here it needs more light than this one that has more dark colors and more green on them now if you want to know more about variegation what it is and how it works you can we have a video you can go and watch to know more about it but here we have seven different varieties and the first one here is called the ivory jade with which has these extremely nice looking leaves with a lot of white in them now all of these white parts of this variegated leaves here they cannot photosynthesize it's just the green parts that can photosynthesize so this is a plant we know okay it needs a little bit more light than perhaps one that has darker colors but this is the ivory jade then we have the iv green which is one of my personal favorites that looks like this now as you can see here this one also has a stem that is almost white it's creamy white but that makes the plant stand out even more since there is that contrast between the green and the white and yellow then we have this one here which has a lot of red in it as well this is not a personal favorite of mine because i think that on the leaves it actually looks a little bit like it has pests on it it doesn't it looks like this but i know a lot of people love this plant this is the aglonema crete and we'll put a list in the description below so you can see the names of all these plants moving on we have the silver queen here which has this really nice pattern on the leaves and next to it we have one called just called stripes now they are very very similar but the pattern is a little bit different and then we have another favorite of mine that is the that is the silver bay and it has even more of this grayish pattern on them than the silver queen and the stripe does so i think that's all of the different varieties we have now the alveol aglonema is a fairly cheap plant at least here in sweden i don't know of the rest of the world but here in sweden it's not an expensive plant the reason for that is that it grows quite quickly in the greenhouse but you need to know that when it comes to your house when it it's not going to get a perfect environment it's actually going to be a plant that grows quite slowly but it's a big advantage that it grows quickly in the greenhouse because it's fairly cheap now when you buy a plant and you have if you if you've put your eye on this ivory jade here then take a look at the different plants you have on the table in your shop and make sure to pick the plant that has the most amount of starters what i mean by that is the most amount of stems that has leaves on them that is coming out from the soil here usually they have planted the exact same amount of starters in the greenhouse but some plants just grow a little bit faster and gets a little bit thicker and has more new stems coming out of the pot choose that plant because then you have a plant that is more likely to become fuller and nicer than the one that doesn't have those starches i recommend you concerning aglonemas to actually take a look at the roots now usually when you have an aglonema it's fairly simple to do that because you can just grab a hold of the leaves and the stems like this you can just push a little bit on the sides of this plastic pot here and you can feel that it's actually starting to loosen from the pot and then you can just try and pull a little bit and there you go you have the roots it should look something like this you have quite thick a really nice root system and the roots are white or creamy white if the roots here are dark then i would not buy that plant i would buy choose another plant there because then it could have root rot or something else it should look something like this so then just put it back into the pot next up we take a look at the leaves and what are we looking for well actually on this one we actually have a flower here that's not common when you are buying a small plant like this usually they become quite larger before they shoot out a flower but take a look at the leaves we are looking for pests and we are looking for something on the leaves that shouldn't be there now that can be brown tips it can be black spots on the leaves anything that just looks out of the normal out of the ordinary and pests now take a look at the underside of the leaves and make sure that you can't see anything you can't see anything moving or anything just if you have small spots underneath the leaves something that is out of the ordinary don't pick that plant look at another one and try to find one that doesn't have anything okay and if you see that a lot of plants actually have something that you well something that shouldn't be there then maybe go somewhere else because then it could be an infestation that is on all of them but if the leaves look like this you have nothing on them they look perfect then okay roots are fine leaves are fine i even have a flower that's showing us that this is feeling great this one is the one i pick and then we go but the agloneemas actually don't like cold temperatures they need to have a temperature that is somewhere in between 15 and 27 degrees celsius or 60 to 80 degrees fahrenheit so if you know that you're buying this plant let's say in wintertime and you know that it's freezing cold outside make sure that the shop wraps this in paper or plastic so you can take it home and it has its own little cocoon and that cold cannot get to the leaves because if you get cold on these leaves it will show you two three or four days later it's because the cells has actually been damaged they've burst and you'll see it by having large large dark spots on the leaves and if you have that well you need to take away those leaves completely they will never be fine again because those cells are dead and then you have a plant that just maybe has one or two leaves left so make sure if you know it's cold that they wrap it in something and you maybe take it home in a heated car or if you have to walk or bicycle or something put it in another bag or a backpack or something so it's protected as you saw it is a flowering plot and the flower actually looks something like this now it hasn't really opened up yet but i think we have something here that is open we'll see on this massive silver bay here and this is huge we actually have a lot of flowers here but no they are not opening up yet but the flower itself is not that pretty it's actually you have to look to twice uh before you even see it so we buy this plant because of the foliage and because of the all-around aesthetics of the leaves but know that it does flower it can flower twice a year usually flowers once a year in spring or summer time when it's active but we've seen varieties that can flower twice or even three times a year so you've bought your aglonema and you get home with it now planting i know a lot of you want to repot your plants immediately now we recommend you to always wait a bit let that plant settle in your house now if you did what i told you to do you had you have looked at the roots and seen that they look nice there are a lot of them but there could actually be a little bit more before i repot this so i would just wait a couple of months before doing anything to this plant and when you have repotted a plant wait two to three years before repotting it again that is usually a good time for the aglonema it is a plant that actually likes it when it's a little bit root bound so it's not something you want to push a repot you can just wait until you see that there are roots coming out of the drainage holes or if you see that the pot is actually starting to bulge then it's time to repot and when we repot we always with an agloneem i use a pot that has drainage holes in the bottom because one of the worst things you can do with an aglonema is that it's standing in water we need all of that excess water to go out of the pot so always use drainage holes and when we repot we can actually repot in one or two sizes larger this is a plant that actually likes it to be placed in a large container and what will happen if it is in a very large proto container is that it will start to be wider it will grow outwards it will send out new stems all the time and it will be huge like the silver bay we have here next to us however if you don't have that place for a huge aglonema our recommendation is that you start to prune it quite often just start and to cut off some stems on a regular basis once or twice a year maybe three times a year it doesn't doesn't matter when you do it because then it will focus all of its energy on creating new buds and start to grow from that cut and it will not grow like this and become extremely wide and large but if you want it to become large you put it in a large pot and you just leave it alone you never prune it and it will grow like this it will become huge now this is a plant that likes to be planted in a soil that has a lot of peat in it a lot of organic materials and has a high amount of peat now usually that is what you have in a standard planting soil so that usually works perfectly however we recommend you to take that standard planting soil and mix it up with let's say perlite or pumice and you can mix that up in a eighty percent soil twenty percent pearlite or promise because then you get better drainage like i said before it doesn't want to stand in water and if the soil is too wet for a very long period of time it can also be a problem but by adding perliter pumice you're adding drainage to that soil and it will just grow a little bit faster and the roots will love it you can also plant your iglonema in what we call pure pumice which is actually a mixture of pumice and clay if you want to know more about thomas we have a video you can go and watch so you know everything on how to use pumice instead of soil it also works perfectly in a self-watering pot or container it thrives in one of those type of pots what you need to know is that in wintertime if you have it in a self-watering container in winter time you might want to make sure that the water reservoir in the bottom of that self-watering container actually dries out in between your waterings because otherwise it could get a little bit too moist in wintertime when it's a little bit dormant now a lot of things here self-watering system if you want to know more we have a video on that also dormancy if you don't know what that is we have a video you can go and watch as well moving on to placement so where should i put my aglo nemo in my house well to know that we usually need to go to where does this plant live in nature and it this is native to eastern asia mostly thailand indonesia malaysia and it grows on the floor of the rainforest so it's actually covered by the trees so this is a plant that doesn't need and doesn't want direct sunlight so up here in the northern hemisphere i would recommend you to place your aglonema if it's going to be in a window then you should place it in a eastern western or northern facing window because if you put it in a southern facing window it will get too much sunlight which will burn the leaves of the plant you could also place this a little bit into the room because it is a plant that can handle darker placements so you could actually put it one two or three meters into the room and it will also be fine however and this was is very very important the more variegated and the more colors or lack of colors you have on your aglonema the more light it needs so this here this ivory jade here actually wants to be placed quite close to a window to get a lot of indirect sunlight but we have this one here which is called the maria i think we actually forgot this plant uh in the beginning this is the toughest aglonema there is this can handle really really dark placements and grow and thrive so these two are actually quite different in placement this one needs to be placed close to a window and this can be placed almost anywhere in your house another thing you need to know is that the more light you give your aglonemas the quicker they will grow now they are not quick growers at least not when you're not in a greenhouse but they will grow quicker in a light spot and really really slow if you put it in a dark spot it's not a problem but if you want it to become large and big and this really really massive thing it needs quite a lot of light to be able to be like this humidity is not usually a problem with aglonimus which is really really good because here in sweden we have really low humidity in wintertime indoors so this is a plant that actually is perfect for a swedish indoor environment it likes humid spots so it can actually work almost anywhere but if that humidity goes below 30 percent or 25 humidity then you could get problems and you will see that on the leaves because they will start to droop and they can also get injures they can get the tips of the leaves here actually start to get brown and they get really really dry brown so that when you touch that tip it just crumbles and falls apart that could be an indication that you have too low humidity now an easy way to remedy that is just to put a tray with some pebbles on it and some water on it next to the plant that water will start to evaporate and it will help the plant to get a little bit higher humidity just around that spot another thing is drafts which can also be a problem up here in sweden when we have cold winters and drafts are usually not a problem if they are not really really cold so in winter time if you know that you have a window that you have open a lot you should never put your agloneymas there however it could be placed there in the summertime when that draft is warm and not cold because that will actually help to raise the humidity around the plant so if you have cold drafts make sure that they are not harmed but otherwise it's not a problem and you can also place this plant on a windowsill directly above a radiator some plant actually reacts negatively to that placement but usually you don't get a problem with that with aglonemus moving on to the care of the plant now this is a plant that in summertime wants to live in a quite moist environment so it likes it when the soil around the roots is a little bit moist but it never wants to stand in water so what we do is that in summertime we make sure that when we water this plant we make sure that the excess water goes out of the pot and then we wait until the top soil of the plant here you can even feel a little bit down so maybe one centimeter half an inch down into the soil when you feel that that is dry you can water it again but make sure the excess water goes out of the pot again in wintertime this plant goes a little bit dormant which means that it it doesn't drink as much water and it doesn't like it to be too wet around the roost for a long period of time so in winter time we actually make sure that it dries out in the soil a little bit further down so then maybe we feel one inch or one and a half inch which is about two and a half to three four centimeters down into the pot when that is completely dry then we water it again because if it's too moist in wintertime when it's dormant the roots could get harmed if you've watered your aglanema too much it will show you and what happens is usually that the tips of the leaves here or the edges of the leaves start to become brown and it is a dark type of brown that is a little bit soft and almost a little bit wet as i said before if that tip is dry and crunchy it could be humidity it could be that you haven't watered your plant enough but if that brown is darker and soft and doesn't crumble when you touch it you've probably watered it too much and if it gets too much water and it's standing in water you could get root rot that means that the roots will no longer be white and creamy like this they will be darker and almost brown sometimes they will have a bad smell as well and you will see it on the leaves that you start to get those brown edges that were soft and mushy actually start to become spots inside of the leaves as well then you probably have root rot if you have an over watered plant like that we have a video you can go and watch to make sure that you dry it out as fast as you can but what happens if you are not watering your plant enough well the first thing are the tips as i said before the tips of the leaves turn crunchy brown and just crumble and fall off another thing that happens and this is really really common we can actually see here on this massive silver bay here because i haven't watered this plant for almost two months now it's standing in pumice so it should be watered around once a month but i've purposely not watered this to make to be able to show you what happens now underneath all of this here we actually have the oldest leaves and the oldest leaves are turning yellow bright yellow like this as you can see it there's nothing on the newer leaves nothing on top here it's the oldest leaves down by the promise here and it's all around in on every stem i think every stem has at least one yellow leaves like this this is an indication that you have not watered it enough so if you see this increase the frequency of how often you water and it shouldn't be a problem but it's not a big problem for this plant it can dry out like this quite often it will not die from it what will happen is that it will you will lose some of the leaves in the bottom here um and to be to take you can just take these away by just pulling on them if they're still attached quite hard you can pull some leverage on the stem and just pull it a little bit harder and the entire leaf comes off like this now when i give this plant water again it will be happy it will probably start to unfold those flowers that are not open yet uh so that is a very very common thing if you've underwatered your ionema it could show yellow leaves if you're given too much water as well but as i said it's more likely that you get these spots on the leaves if you water too much too little leaves will become yellow and it's the oldest leaves underneath now an easy way of just keeping your aglonemas looking healthy and keeping them free from pests as well is just by using a wet cloth we usually use a wet microfiber cloth used for cleaning and just wiping off the leaves like this with that with wet towel you can also wipe underneath the leaves as well this will make sure that the leaves have this really glossy and vibrant look to them so once a month wipe the leaves with a wet cloth or a microfiber cloth this will help you to get get rid of all those dust particles and it will also look more healthy another thing like i said is that if you have pests on it it's one way of making sure to get rid of those pests but if you see that you have pests then of course of course that cloth you cannot use that on anything else throw it away after doing that because otherwise you will have pests on all your plants it's very unlikely that you get pests on these it's very uncommon but if you get pests usually it's scale mealy bugs or spider mites at least here in sweden that's usually the big three that attacks this plant if you get scale or mealybugs i highly recommend you to go out and buy a pesticide follow the instructions and make sure that it is four scale or mealybugs and just use that pesticide on the plant because when you start to see that there is so much surface area in these big leaves here on these plants that when you see that you have plants usually they are everywhere so it's quite hard to just start by removing them yourself so i highly recommend a pesticide to remove that but if you get spider mites now spider mites you cannot see with the naked eye so when you see that you have these small web-like um things on your leaves it actually looks like a spider was there it's usually spider mites when you see that there are millions on your plant already but smythe spider mites on his plants like this it's quite easy to get rid of because what you do is that you take this into your if you have a bathtub you can place it in the bathtub or you can take it outside if you have a garden and then you take a hose and you rinse off the leaves all of the leaves just rinse them off make sure that you protect the soil so that it doesn't get too wet but rinse it off and do that every day for two weeks if you do that then you will get rid of those spider mites it's a very simple easy and environmentally friendly way of handling those spider mites now the last thing you need to know about the aglonema is that it is mildly poisonous it has something inside that is called calcium oxalate and calcium oxalate is a form of salt that has extremely sharp crystals and those crystals irritate and can give you problems if you ingest a part of this plant you could get swelling you could also become sick from that calcium oxalate crystals it also means that if you should if you get some of the sap of this plant on your skin it could also get irritated especially if you have allergies it could get quite severe so make but usually it's not a problem just be aware of it and handle it carefully and make sure that when you've had when you've repotted or done anything you pruned it or something then you wash your hands completely and make sure to throw away so no child or no pet eats from the leaves or any part of the plant now pruning is another thing that we recommend you to do with this plant if you want to keep it a little bit smaller we prune as soon as we see that the stems we have large stems on this one here when they become really really long and a little bit leggy you can go in and prune it just prune in between two leaves here in between two nodes a node is where a leaf is coming out from the stem now on the aglonema that is really really close together so just make sure to try and hit in between with a sharp scissor that is cleaned so that you're not transferring any bacteria or anything else to the plant just make that cut and what will happen is that you will get new buds forming just below that spot and hopefully you can get two three or maybe four new stems from that one stem when you've pruned it this is usually depending on what period of the year you are performing that pruning if you prune when the plant is active it's usually active in spring and it's usually active in autumn it's dormant during winter and the highest temperature of summer so if you prune in spring or autumn you have a higher likelihood of getting more buds to form and giving you that really really full thick nice effect but you can prune all year round but know that if you prune in wintertime you will probably only get one bud activated and one new stem growing out from that point if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up that really helps our channel a lot if you haven't subscribed yet please do hit the bell as well so you get a notification every time we put up something new follow us on facebook and instagram where you can sneak previews on upcoming videos and sometimes a little bit more now until next time i don't

Channel: Swedish Plantguys

Views: 73,211

Keywords: Aglaonema Stripes, Aglaonema Ivory Jade, Aglaonema Ivy Green, Aglaonema Crete, Agalonema Silver Queen, Aglaonema Silver Bay, Aglaonema Maria, care of, all you need to know, Swedish Plant guys, chinese evergreen, tips and tricks, houseplants, indoor plants, easy to take care of, easiest plant, over watered, under watered, drafts, placemnt of, buying, what to expect, is it a good plant

Id: UOQhMtCjsPs

Length: 35min 19sec (2119 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022