All you need to know about soil

hi guys my name is sean i'm a house plant enthusiast from jakarta indonesia i'd like to nerd out to the science behind how we can keep our houseplants happy and to multiply them in our homes so if you're into that kind of content do subscribe to my channel and send me likes so today i will share with you everything i know about soil what they're made of how we can mix them and how you can mix your own depending on your environment and as well as the plant species that you're caring for i actually started this plant journey not very long ago 10 months to be exact and i've learned so much over this course of time i i learned a lot from googling uh from youtubers as well as podcasts so shout out to plant daily podcast bloop and grow radio and uh on the ledge with jane perrone thank you guys so much for this information and and and now i'm sharing this with my audience and hopefully you guys can pass along this knowledge because it is truly fascinating and it is fun to to play with soil so to digress a little bit in my hand here i have the begonia michelada i got this as a tiny plant but it kept growing and i've taken cuttings and stuck it right back into the stone and it's grown so much and it's now flowering so i'm very very happy with this guy highly recommend for you to get one of these they're actually very easy to care for but they do rot if you over water it and they don't want to be dried out for too long and they do well both indoors and outdoors [Music] okay so back to our topic uh plants actually evolved over millions of years to get to where they are today and that means that they are used to the growing medium that they have evolved in for example you have a swampy soggy wetlands and then you have your rainforest and rainforest also covers a lot of different varieties of growing conditions you could have your rainforest floor and you could have way up top on the canopy you also have your caves uh plants that grow on rock surfaces on cliffsides it's quite fascinating where they are they grow under the in the in the sea underwater um and in the desert of course you have your cactus and succulents so this adapted to live there and many growers actually can grow them in any soil like the standard potting soil that you tend to buy them in depending on the region that you're in the the plants have been grown there and they have adapted to the nursery conditions for example like a cactus that's grown in a regular potting soil have adapted to live there but you just have to water very very infrequently however if you put the same cactus in the the like a sandy type very rocky type mix you can actually water it a little bit more and it will like that so here's here's the three key words for you so plants have evolved uh over time to get to where they are now to have that physical properties which means some of them have gripping roots some of them have uh they like a little bit more uh soggy or wet soil and number two is that plants um can adapt so they have adapted to the soil that they were grown in or propagated in or whatever the nursery had them in so they uh have adapted there but the third one is to thrive so in order to thrive the the plant actually do need a little bit of um adjustment that means that you will have to probably create whether it's a moth pole or your own aeroid mix you have to give them a little bit of that extra care and attention for them to thrive so again the three words are evolution adaptation and to thrive thriving i don't know yeah so keep that in mind uh and in this video i'll mostly cover the third part which is uh to have them thrive because whatever pot or media that the plant came in when you bought it it's gonna be okay there it's gonna be happy but it's not gonna be amazing and just having that extra knowledge on soil and soil mixes it's just going to make the the plant game so much more fun and interesting for you so i'm going to take you back to the classroom and show you a plenty diagram uh it's going to be a bit repetitive to my diagram on the watering video so if you've seen that go right ahead and skip this part but it's important to know like why aeration is important in the roots and why we shouldn't over water them so we want to have an airy mix where it's possible so i'll be right back so here is a drawing of a plant and i want to remind you what happens when the plant is growing which is that sunlight reacts with carbon dioxide and water within the leaves in a chlorophyll to in a process called photosynthesis and that produces sugar and sugar is actually the the physical being of the plant so when your plant is producing sugar is creating a bigger mass for itself this is what we want for our plants and we need to discuss here the function of the roots because that's important when we talk about soil so the number one function of the root would be to anchor the plant to make sure that it stays in place that it doesn't get knocked over by any means whether it's environmental factor or if it's just an animal walking walking over it or kicking it aside next up you have the moisture and nutrient that is absorbed by the roots up into the stem and to the leaves so the plant is efficiently taking moisture and nutrient from the soil and this is why it's important for our soil to be able to absorb and release the moisture appropriately some soil could be way too fast drying and some soil can be way too soggy and the third that is important here would be that the roots actually need to breathe oxygen this is something that not a lot of us know but while the leaves are breathing in carbon dioxide and this process called photosynthesis the roots need oxygen so if you keep dumping water on it or if you have soil that is just constantly wet you are essentially drowning the roots so roots actually take in water or moisture through a process called osmosis so roots don't really have a mouth or or any parts that it can move to to let it be able to absorb to eat water whenever it wants to um osmosis is a process in which water is going to move from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration it's just a physical property of water and the plant is just taking advantage of that property so the roots are adapted so that it's a low concentration so any water or moisture that's in the soil is always going to be taken up by the roots of the stem into the leaves the roots can't say oh i'm done i'm full i have enough water and then they would stop the osmosis they can't they can't stop the process so if you have water in there it will continually just keep pushing the water up uh towards the leaves and uh when water is transferred up to the leaves actually uh the water is used up by the chlorophyll uh in this photosynthesis and any excess water would be removed through a process called transpiration and mutation you don't need to know the details but it's basically how water is lost through the leaves by droplets or as a water vapor that's just a natural way for them to get rid of excess water what happens when you over water is that there's way too much water than that it can handle so it is very stressed out and it will some of the leaves are going to turn yellow and die off so some some of the classic signs of overwatering is a lot of yellow leaves that are dying off if it's way way over water their roots stems or leaves will rot and turn into mush and this is very easy to see visually and we don't want that to happen so to summarize soil actually need to dry out between watering usually except when you're talking about some moisture living plants that are maybe grown in very wet conditions such as ferns they're very thirsty so they constantly need water although i must say that they do appreciate being dried out a little bit in between water it's just they don't tolerate that long period of dryness and next is that you should have good airflow to the roots so you need to make sure that air is uh moving about in there whether you're using a terracotta pot or whether you have a sort of an airy mix or whether you add soil amendments such as perlite and vermiculite and other types that will allow air into the plant into the into the soil so one last thing i want to talk about is bacteria and fungus so when you have soil that is retaining a lot of moisture the bacteria and fungus is going to throw a party in there and it's going to invite pests to come to and these will decimate your plant they will eat they'll destroy the roots and and eat your plant and you don't want that to happen so this is why when you have a fast draining soil or soil that dries out in between watering it's less likely for bacteria and fungus to grow in the soil i'm going to go through with you about 20 plus ingredients that is available in my area that i use as a mixture in my soil mixes you may not have some of these available in your area but you can always substitute one another there's no hard rule as to yeah cut it out so i'm going to go through with you about 20 something of the ingredients that i have um that is available in my region uh do not panic if you don't have that it there's no formula in nature like this you can't say like oh you need like one part of this and two part no so everything is just eyeballing and it can easily substitute one media for another so here are three pepperoni in kana's and this is a very good example this one parent plan is living in terracotta pot and a very very fast draining soil so it's not as prone to over watering and this one is the cutting and i put him in a plastic pot with a very slow draining soil it's coco peat uh mix and this means that i will water him way less probably three times less than the parent plant and this one's also cutting and it's grown in a terracotta pot but a slow release moisture soil mix so this one is very very fast draining this is probably second fast draining and this is gonna be super slow so i'm gonna water these very differently but they will all be happy regardless of which pot and soil combination i give them as long as i'm watering them correctly and not over watering them the most important thing for you in this video is to understand the theory and you know apply that in in your living condition in your planet in whatever soil medium is available in your area again you just want to basically adjust your watering frequency based on um the the pot type and the soil that you have and as well as the sunlight so that's the most important thing uh so there is a lot of different so for the same plant you can actually put them in different soil conditions and they will actually do well [Music] so i'm gonna go from the wettest medium to the driest starting the first with the first one obviously it's water so plants can live in water as you can see this is a marante luconoria and it's got roots coming out of it so a lot of your potholes can also live in water for a very long time even though i'm not sure if they should live there permanently but they can live for a long time and can grow and thrive so i guess next we have the peat moss and i guess this is what a lot of the nurseries have plants grown in and this is also what is commonly known as house plant soil especially in the u.s market however peat moss is not well there's a question uh whether it's sustainable or not i personally don't think they are because they're taken from the bogs in canada or elsewhere in the world uh swampy lands where the soil is actually organic and rich in nutrient and it's got really good absorbance it's basically i mean it's what people think of as common soil however when you take soil from the environment put and to put that in your living space and when you're done with them you just kind of throw them in the garbage you just know that it's not really that sustainable because yeah some of the soil is taken from their natural habitat along with this organic material so this is a very high quality potting type but i don't personally use this but to each of his own right so next we have um what we call cocopeat so this is a little bit replicating what we discussed before the peat moss it's also very pd type soil this is actually made from ground up coconut husk and as you can see it also absorbs water and retains water pretty much similarly to the peat moss however it contains zero nutritional value and organic material as it's just made of ground coconut husk however i use this almost extensively in everything because it's highly sustainable and it also helps create an industry where people use waste product from coconuts and coconuts are used in so many things right we use the fats from the coconut and we drink the water from it so this is a very good way to use their waste and highly highly recommend it here we have worm casting and this is actually worm poop so it's organic compost that is quite stable it's actually quite clean and it smells uh pretty like soil it doesn't smell disgusting or anything and i don't mind it so this is my fertilizer that i go to i always make some of these into my soil mix just to give it some organic material especially when i'm working with coco peat where in perlite where it has zero nutrient value or close to zero i don't know but yeah i'd like to add these guys in there sometimes i also add them on the top of the soil as fertilizer yeah here's the beautiful coleus that i got as a gift and i want to show you oh that's not good sorry get out of the way here we have it growing in rice house and that's very common here in indonesia and rice halls are used widely in nurseries because one they're sustainable they're very very inexpensive they're just basically left over from the rice that we eat just the covering of the individual rice it has very little nutritional value and personally for me i find that they retain water too much in there as you can see it's very wet in there but the surface will dry out way too fast so it so it's going to have a very quick drying surface and a very soggy bottom that's what i noticed but i might be wrong that's why i avoid this at all cost even though i do like the fact that it is very sustainable and it's very good source um that we're helping out the industry to recycle something that would have otherwise been thrown away so the next medium is this uh we call it on dom here it's basically twigs as you can see so it does retain a bit of moisture and it contains a lot of organic material but at the same time you can see that it allows a lot of air movement within the soil so this is pretty good for your jungle floor type plants like ladies so here we have some sphagnum moss and i'm bringing you here to the sink because i want to show you that they do absorb water very easily and they release them fairly quickly because there's a lot of air that actually moves around in there so this is actually very good for propagations or for plants that are very prone to rot and here we have some coconut husks and they actually they're again they're coconuts so they're bigger than the coconut chips and uh so if you ground this up you'll get your cocoa pea basically and this is very good for your hoyas and disciplias and maybe other epiphanies so what happens in a lot of the thai nurseries that it would take a cutting and then they would um kind of stick the cutting right in the middle of it and just jam this in and let me get you a pot and then just jam this into a pot really tight or they'll wrap a rubber band around the rubber band around this really tight and then and just propagate it so that cutting will just root into a beautiful plant and they will love this condition because um it dries you have to soak it in though however that's how you water because it doesn't really allow water to get in there in the middle this is a the roots will actually grow into this into these um grooves in the wood which is really interesting and it'll be impossible to get the roots out later but they love this kind of quality and a medium dishcloth and hoyas because that's how they grow in nature so the next one is this coconut chip and it's actually the same thing it's coconut husk that is cut into cubes so as you can see this actually allows a lot of air into the soil and it allows water to just go right through the the soil media this is very good for your aerodynamic mixes and for your hoyas because the this resembles that that kind of tree bark or that that sort of environment that they are used to live in and epiphytic sorry that's what i was going to say epiphanic uh characteristics so over here we have coco coir coconut core so that's just shredded coconut and i do use this sometimes once in a while especially on my disciples diskidias as they don't want to have any moisture retained in them at all this will also make a good uh topsoil to to decorate your plants uh imagine you have a pot and you put this on the take this example so you have the pot and then you have this on the top so it just looks a little bit uh this is too much but yeah you get my point uh it's just a decorative element to that but yeah i do use this as medium sometimes oh and also this is also very good for the bottom of the pot let me show you i'll shred a little bit off and then when you have uh an empty pot here i can just stick a little bit down there so this will prevent uh and i'll put my soil and everything in the plant on it so this prevents the water from from the soil from from seeping through the bottom when you water it so it's like a net kind of so the next media would be your moss pole and they come in at various shapes and sizes and they're made of different materials some of them are made of coconut coir some of them are actually made of real moths they also come in different lengths and heights so this will resemble like a tree where a plant can climb up the tree and usually this helps them grow bigger leaves because it folds them into thinking they're growing taller and taller into the canopy you do need to mist your moss pole once in a while because this will encourage the aerial root to find it and grip it because aerial roots are drawn to moisture and sometimes you do have to train your plant in the beginning you have to tie it to the moss pole and kind of have the aerial root touch the moss pole so that it will attach itself to it and here you have your pine bark or it's commonly known as orchid bark so it's usually made of a bark of pine tree as you can tell from the name some of them are actually bigger and chunkier this is actually the finely ground ones and i like to use this as amendments into my aeroid mixes and my hoya mix however this is a little bit expensive so i only use them for my expensive plants and over here we have some dried bamboo and this is very airy it um doesn't retain much moisture at all allows water to go right through and as you can see it's a little bit of organic material too as this breaks down it will give a little bit of nutrients to the to the plants and this is also good for your understory jungle rainforest understory plants like your calatheas and over here we have one of my favorite mediums that i use soil amendments is the burnt rice hulls it's actually rice hulls that are burned and charred so it's full of carbonized material and a carbonized material is actually good to prevent root rot at the same time it's also rich in nutrients so it's high in phosphorus and potassium and other micronutrients so i really like to use that also it doesn't retain water at all as you can see this is actually very light and airy so it allows water to drain right through this is going to be very good for your cactus succulents as an abandoned but i do use this almost in all my soil mixes over here we have your pumice and it's a volcanic rock that uh actually resource water but releases it very quickly so it's good for soil amendments i know that a lot of the people in europe actually just use this as the main soil so i don't really know how that works but uh yeah here's the footage for you of that i don't really use this much at all it's very pricey here all right so next uh this is a vermiculite and it's a very good soul amendment it usually comes hand-in-hand with pearlite people talk about but pearl is completely different from it so i i do know that this retains a little bit more moisture than perlite and it's very sparkly i don't know if the camera can pick it up it's beautiful i like to put that extra sparkle in some of my soil mixes and there don't have a lot of nutrients in it so it's literally just to give it some air aeration in the soil so over here is the most popular soil amendments out there it's the pearlite so it's made of puffed volcanic rock and it's mostly air so it does not retain any moisture at all however it does help you wick up a little bit of moisture because there's a lot of pores in here that allows moisture to travel through it very very quickly and this is a very popular soil amendment because one it is inexpensive it's cheap and also it's very very light the problem with this is that it's very crunchy so like if you step on it you've got this powder all over your floor and at the same time if you uh water it too hard or you plant too hard the pearl is going to rise up to the top above all the other soils because they're very light and fluffy so that's just annoying to have around sometimes but i do use perlite heavily because i find them to be very useful in adding aeration to your soil alright so next we have the akadama and this is used most commonly as a bonsai soil medium however i do use this as my cactus and succulents medium i like to mix this pearlite and other assaults um in there so just because it's very decorative in its appearance and it also doesn't retain moisture for too long so it's good for fast draining so here is uh lecka it stands for lightweight expanded clay aggregate and a lot of you have asked for some lekka videos but here's a sort of an example of a lecca so it's basically expanded clay that is very airy but it allows water to be wicked up evenly to the top of the soil so when you have a plant in there the plant is getting only the amount of moisture it needs so it doesn't really get over water and another another benefit of using like a ball is that you can use sort of a chemical fertilizer since it's semi-hydroponic this means that you don't have a lot of organic material around the soil and this prevents pests from being in there though i'm not sure if uh like growing plants in lecca prevents pests entirely i'm not sure but theoretically yeah pests don't like to live in this kind of conditions so yeah and then you don't have to water the plant as often because all you need to do is make sure that there's a little bit of water down below and the water will be wicked up and it's very easy for uh for some parent that don't want a lot of fuss with watering so next year we have the charcoal and this is used mostly for orchids although some aeroid people do use this in their mix as well this will encourage less root rot because there's a lot of carbonized material but at the same time it'll encourage the roots to grow strong and thick so the roots can really grip onto this uh saw and aerobics do love to grip onto something this allows them to flourish and get bigger leaves and grow taller and faster so the driest media that i can think of is air so here are my tilansias or airplanes and here's what it looks like under the hood so they don't require any medium to grow in and yeah so they take in uh moisture and nutrient from the air so i guess this covers all of my available growing medium okay so in my hand it's a philodendron lynette i adore this guy in case you haven't seen my other videos before and very easy to care for but i digress so next i'm going to go through with you some of the common soil mixes that i use and show you how i mix them there is no ratio that i use i use whatever i have on hand i use my hands to eyeball it and um i kind of break down to like maybe four different uh categories one would be your your heavier pd mix that really retains uh moisture a lot longer and the next one you probably have your calathea uh type mix where it's a little it's a little bit airy but they don't want to dry out too fast and then next i would have probably the aero it makes which is very airoid or hoya mix which is very airy full of bark or coconut chips and finally i will show you a little bit about lekka because leki or semi hydro is something that a lot of you have requested i may do a separate episode on that on its own but i will cover some of the basic here all right so the first mix is one that i use very commonly and it's also what nursery is probably used most often so you can use a peat and you can either use the peat moss or in my case i use the cocoa pea because again i mentioned that it's more sustainable so this will retain a bit of the moisture but it's devoid of nutrients so this will be my base i'll use more i don't have a recipe i just eyeball everything so in nature plants don't live off of a recipe either they just grow in whatever medium that they're given in so yeah this is some pearlite to give it aeration and then next i'm gonna do use my favorite medium which is the burnt rice house in indonesia we call this sakambakar this will uh give it aeration and give it some nutrients phosphorus and potassium as well as give it some as well as prevent root rot i'm going to start mixing that and as i mix it this is why i like to mix my own soil i like to pretend i am the roots put my hand there and just like feel feel it like how like the consistency and feel it to see how it can absorb and release the moisture and then next thing since this is not really this does not contain any nutrients i'm going to add some worm casting i'm going to add a little bit more you want to be careful if you are propagating a plant you don't want to add worm casting at this dish you just want to keep it very devoid of nutrient because you don't want to rot out the cuttings so you only want to use worm casting for established plants okay so there you go i actually need a little bit more of that burnt rice holsters and maybe it looks like it needs a little bit more perlite so there's a mixture of different elements in this mix that i use and i use this for almost anything can basically survive in this whether you're a fern or if you're a philodendron an aerobic you can live in this if you want to add some sparkle go ahead and use some vermiculite too you absolutely can it's just uh vermiculite costs a bit more money that's all but you can add a little bit of more aeration in there so yeah so that's uh that's the first one that i highly recommend if you're a beginner next mix that i'm going to use is going to resemble the forest floor um so it's going to be very airy it's going to have a lot of organic material and a lot of the plants like your calafias and begonias are going to like this soil medium because it drains really really quickly and then i'm going to add this is the bamboo dried bamboo and twig sorry for definition and i'm going to add a little bit of that uh burnt rice house again this is again to prevent root rot not prevents or it it cuts down the incidence of root rot so yeah there you have it now you have something that is very uh similar to a forest floor where you have charred burnt material because forest actually is covered in organic material and also charred material as you know a lot of the things do burn up once in a while and if i wanted to add extra aeration i can also go ahead and add some more perlite in here so as you can see this is super airy it does take a little bit of moisture it keeps it keeps the plant uh damp but not soggy moist it's never sitting in water but you do need to water this pretty frequently i would even go as far as say every day if you live in the outdoors and this allows air to be circulating in the in the soil the next setup is actually the most requested and that's my aeroid mix so with airoid i'm going to go i have two that i use one is with coconut husk so this allows water to drain through really fast it really it really it's like it's good for epiphytes because it resembles like chunks of wood where these plants actually grow in in nature i either use this or i can also use um this is fine pine bark i usually use this for my more expensive plants like the my variegated monsteras my philadelphia torton i feel like in my mind i feel like they enjoy this a little bit more than the uh than this coconut husk but uh they're intel i guess someone's calling me uh yeah ignore that phone call so um yeah i i'm in this video i'm gonna add both because why not you could choose either one depending on where what you can get in your area and then next i would even go as far as add some more pearlite so it's a very very airy mix and some burnt rice hulls and in here i would add a little bit of worm casting let's give this a good mix oh and of course and by the way this is also very good for your hoyas that this mix and i can also add a little bit of vermiculite so this is again it's very similar to pearlite it's going to give you a little bit of aeration in there and at this point like you have a very chunky airy mix that really dries up within i would say a few hours if you you say you think to yourself like oh i can't possibly water my plants every so often you can go ahead and add i guess i'm gonna go ahead and add some cocoa beet in here so this will absorb a lot of the moisture and and hold on to them a bit longer so you still have your airy uh chunky uh mix in there but you also don't have to water as often so yeah let need quickly i'm just actually going to add a little bit more of the of this sorry so yeah so that is my aerobic mix for you guys and again another thing that you want to consider be mindful of is whether you want to use plastic pots or terracotta terracotta will dry up two to three times faster than a plastic pot would so i have three rooted pepperoni vessels here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to pot them up using different soil medium because i know that in my experience all all of these soil medium will allow the plant to thrive but i'm just going to have to adjust my watering frequency based on the medium that i have used or chosen rather i'm going to pot up these cuttings for you live and into the different mixes that i have done so the first one i'm gonna choose terracotta pot and i'm gonna use this uh this this soil that is a little bit slow to drain so this will allow it to the terracotta will allow it to dry out a bit faster because if you know anything about pepperoni hope is that they want to dry out a bit fast they don't want to be sitting in water and they can be they're very prone to over watering so just a disclaimer i may not be able to pop this as nicely as i would because i have i have performance anxiety um but this will oops okay and in the beginning i'm gonna have to keep this uh very moist and never let this dry out because the cutting is used to living in uh in a very wet situation in water so you know in a very moist environment so i cannot let it dry out but in the future as it becomes mature i will have to let it dry out between watering and with pepper i may hope you want to squeeze the leaves like right now you can't really even squeeze it because it's so hard but when it's thirsty it will be soft and limp and that's when you know to water them so here's one actually that was pretty fast yeah and i've made so many of these uh successful cuttings before that i know that this will do well this will completely take root so the next one i will grow in a plastic pot like this here and this i will give it the airaid mix for this i will have to water it very often i would even go as far as say every day so that's so much work i might end up giving this to someone yeah because i do want my my plans to be less fussy and i've got so many i've got like i don't know how many pepperoni hope i have in my care right now too much too many they are slow growers but they are very reliable like they it's not easy to kill them and they don't need a lot of light they don't need a lot of attention and if you underwater it they will forgive you they're not going to um give you any troubles and they're also relatively uh pest free they're not going to invite any pests to your collection so kind of pack it in nice and you see some space here just keep it tuck it in a little bit okay i'm talking to myself at this point i just broke off a new growth point sorry oh but it'll grow back so they will grow from the um so they will grow from the notes here like new stems will come out from there so sorry little guy yeah this one and the last one i'm going to give it that understory oh my god where's my other part okay here so this i will also have the water pretty frequently i've seen a lot of pepperonis grown in this medium out in the nurseries and i'm sure they do appreciate that too because this one dries out really fast so guys you can actually grow your plants in many different soil types depending on your conditions although some plants do prefer certain qualities in the soil for example like i mentioned aerobics do like something chunkier that they can grow roots that really grip onto the media and peperomia i noticed they do like to be they do like to dry out very fast so you they will survive in in uh pots and media that is like that retains moisture a bit longer and you just kind of cut down on watering but they will really thrive for you when you give them in a scary uh soil that and you water them frequently they would really appreciate that more yep and i am done so again um i'm going to go back to this this is the the soil that is most commonly used that i use because it holds onto moisture longer and i don't have to water it as much it's also something that i think a lot of nurseries or growers would use because this soil is versatile any plant whether you're an aeroid or an epiphany can live whether your fern you can live in here so i highly recommend this formula for a beginner here is my lekka setup and just a preview for you guys i'll do a video for you to give you the details but here is a cutting that's lived here for about a month and it's doing well it hasn't given me brown edges and it's got a new growth point so i rooted him in water first and then i stuck it into these like a balls and in there i put a little bit of water i can see so i'll just lift this plant in here it's it's actually better for you to have a clear vessel so you can see the water level because this is a little bit scary like i never know if this plant is drying out or not oh these the roots are coming out i need to plant this back inside soon hopefully i don't forget after the video so yeah that's that's my lekka uh set up so here's a bit of bonus material for you guys i was a little stressed out by that philadelphum that's growing in laca because i didn't have a clear vessel for it to check on the soil and i decided it's just so much easier for me to put it in my aerodynamics which i already have anyways so i'm going to go ahead and pot it up in the air i'm going to add a bit of bark too because this plant is a little bit extra oops there's an october propagation vessel so yeah i want to give this plant a little bit of extra loving so give it a bit more chunkier mix i bought this toward them when it was not expensive yet and now this prices have skyrocketed and it's a good thing that i've propagated him into three separate cuttings so as you can see here that's the that's the growth point that's happening here so i don't want to bear oh two growth points this is freaking amazing it's gonna have two stems coming off this probably so i don't want to bury that too deep uh into the soil and if uh experience has taught me that philodendrons they can um they acclimatize really well to being potted up from let go from water they will adapt very quickly so i don't want to bury that too deep this is totally just falling over it's not cooperating with me i may have to like support it like down here with like something so it doesn't fall off the pot so yeah that's my torden uh in my new aeroid mix for you okay so i hope that was uh useful and i didn't confuse you even more but and next i'm going to talk to you about some of the mistakes i've made i'm going to walk you around the house and show you some of the soil mediums that i use that i'm going to repot soon i don't know if i have time soon i have a few meetings like for the next few days to come but yeah i'll work on those but they are not doing so well in their current soil medium so i'll and i'll tell you why here we have an immediate medium silver and it's keeping keep giving me uh dry tips and some over here and i cut these off because they were so dry and this plant has been with me for a while but i water him every day now and it just keeps giving me brown tips which means that i need to change its uh pot and soil medium it needs more moisture in there that's a location silver dragon i can't neglect him he's in a terracotta pot and he's very pot brown and i think he's drying out too fast because the tips are crisping up and this one is just very very crispy and yeah i need to put him in a bigger pot and maybe a plastic pot too so that it can retain moisture a little bit longer all right so here is an aetherium clarinervium that i got about three weeks ago and i put it i repotted him uh into this very very airy uh arrow it mixed and in terra cotta pot which means that it's dried almost uh instantly like very quickly and i water him every day however i don't think it's happy here because it's showing signs of dry tips in that one too so i'm gonna have to repot him into something that would be that would retain a lot more moisture or i can do what i do with my mix antherium over here next pot over i can cover the top soil with sphagnum moss so the sphagnum moss will actually retain a lot of the moisture and seal that moisture deep in the soil a lot longer and this guy has been putting out so much root and growth since i added this spectrum moss here so i may actually do that with here just to add a top layer of spectrum moss here is a very happy philadelphia gloriosum that's a propagate and i put it in a terra cotta pot and a very well draining aeroid mix this means that i can water him every day without even checking uh to see if the soil is dry or not because i know that within a few hours the soil will be dry completely so in their natural habitat they actually live in a very humid tropical rainforest that rains very very frequently or mist very very often but then they would also be allowed to dry out almost completely very quickly so they are happy with this condition and as you can see this is growing like gangbusters all right so the last thing i need to cover is the nutrient factor of your soil and in my hand here we have a caladium and this is another one that came back from dormancy and i think this is a flower i don't know what this looks it's oh it's heavy it's funky it's kind of gross yeah but he's he's coming back with so much vigor i'm really happy for him and he's bigger this leaf is like as big as my face i think so anyways wait what was i going to talk about hang on oh yeah nutrient and fertilizing so for nutrient fertilizer actually use um three types i'm going to cover fertilizing in a separate video in details but just generally in soil because soil do does need some kind of organic material to help the plant give it the extra boost so i do use a deca star which is like a slow release fertilizer and then i use a growmore brand which is a chemical fertilizer this i mix in with my water and i water it whenever i remember and then i also use worm castings so that's a natural fertilizer it's actually worm poop so again i'll go through the fertilizing video with you but in case you guys feel like you need to fertilize your plant plants now remember to just do it lightly and not over fertilize your plants but they do require that nutrient in the soil so as you can see soil science can be a little bit confusing but give just give it a try and just buy a few bags of different mediums and mix it yourself you'll know it when you put your hand in the pot in in the soil you will know that you know you will know how the root field and you have an understanding of how to control the moisture in your pot because that will help your plants thrive and again um what we covered before with sunlight water and now soil these three components are actually the most important they are like a triangle i may do a video to recap i promise you guys so many videos i'm gonna do a video to recap this triangle and how you can actually adjust the variables from each of these to suit to your needs like for example if you are you cannot water your plants very often you can give them a sort of a potting soil that is retaining moisture a lot longer you can put it in a less bright spot and you can put it in a plastic pot so all these factors will allow the plant to be happy there without having you want to water it every single day [Music] all right so i guess this is all the time i have for you today if you haven't seen my sunlight and water video do check those out i find that they're very useful and relatable to what we are discussing here today and um thank you so much for subscribing to my channel this channel has exploded and it's i'm now actually adjusting some of my business responsibilities so i can spend a little bit more time on this channel and it's my passion and it's my joy to bring you these contents so for those of you who haven't subscribed yet please do that and leave a comment down below uh send me likes and i'm advatanis on instagram so do dm me there if you have any questions i'll try to get to you meanwhile take care and stay safe everybody and bye [Music]

Channel: onlyplants

Views: 40,875

Rating: 4.961165 out of 5

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Id: Zhxe23YMizQ

Length: 46min 20sec (2780 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020