Begonia Maculata care and propagation in water and soil (with updates!)

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 please do subscribe to my channel and send me likes in this episode i'm going to talk about the begonia immaculata or the polka dot begonia this is actually super popular and it's also a challenge for a lot of you guys to grow and i've actually had my set of challenges before as well and i must say that i've gotten the con the care uh down and i'm quite confident to share with you guys how to keep them alive first of all disclaimer uh i live in the tropics it's about 80 to 90 humidity outside and about 50 to 60 humidity indoors and if it's air conditioned so uh just that disclaimer in mind everywhere you go the care is going to be a little bit different this plan actually does well both outdoors and indoors first of all this plant came from brazil again all the cool plants are from brazil and they actually like medium to bright indirect light and they also prefer somewhere with good airflow i think they're actually very prone to bacteria and fungus this is also why you should not mist it especially if you're indoors because misting will encourage fungus spores and also bacteria to grow on it so the red color underside which is really fascinating uh suggests that it actually can take a little bit of lower light and a lot of plants that have uh this red back is actually lower light tolerant because they've evolved to be able to magnify the little bit of light that they have that they can get in their natural habitat and in order to photosynthesize so some of the theory goes that when the light hits the leaf the red back prevents the light from going through the leaf it in fact get refracted back up and back into the green chlorophyll so that's pretty cool and it's got this really beautiful silver polka dots that i it's just amazing to see and this plants can can these plants and these plants can get really huge they can get probably human sized as long as you give them a trellis so i've given this one a trellis to climb on as you can see and i do tie them in various places to let it uh secure and i got this as a tiny plant and i've propagated a lot of it and it will just continue to grow upwards if i stop propagating it and watering is a bit tricky with this guy you do want to let it dry out completely between watering but not too long so i give it a terracotta pot which uh lets it dry out a little bit fast and it promotes some airiness in the soil they do appreciate that kind of airiness and humidity around the soil but they do not do not do not want to be soggy wet they don't want to be sitting in water and it will rot and you'll see that it's quite common for these plants to get crispy brown edges i know that it's happens in about i would say 20 percent of this plant and the cost is either uh it's usually a watering issue like underwatering or over watering uh in my case usually because of overwatering so because i'm a heavy-handed waterer so to get the perfect leaves actually if in the past what i did was that i actually moisture probe this every day with my moisture meter and water it immediately when the meter reads dry and that's how i can prevent any crisping on the edge however i i have too many plants and i don't have the time to run around and moisture program so i plan i water this plant every day it gets anywhere between medium to indirect light every day and i just water it and it's actually growing and thriving it's just not going to give you that perfect um leaves which is fine in nature that's what they look like they're not that perfect all the time and they do come up with these sheets and it's pretty interesting how their growth points work and then they will have this a lot of these uh i don't know dried sheep that you kind of uh should not should but it's nicer if you remove them because they look pretty ugly on the plant and they put out these really cool um spikes that are unknowns that are the growth points so that's really quite beautiful for them to see and their growth point is that they would actually vomit out these leaves from the from that point uh and i say i literally meant vomiting when i say it like uh the leaves will um come out pale green and you would wonder oh is it dying or don't worry about it it's gonna expand in size it's gonna turn into green color so yeah just give it time this is a very fast grower in terms of pests i haven't really had any pests on this plant however i do spray it down with uh very very rarely every three months or so with like a neem oil soapy solution which i've showed you guys before and i've been using this bacteria and fungicide solution so i'm trying it out to see how it works it's technically speaking it should remove any incidence of bacteria and fungus on the plants and just as with any plants if you see spots in the middle that are you know brown or yellowing or damaged that's sometimes it's just maybe some insects getting it on being rough with your plants chewing it up but at the same time it could also be a sign of bacteria and fungal infection which a lot of begonias are prone to so i do spray down my begonia with that bacteria and fungicide solution so i'm gonna try it out for a few months and i'll let you know how that works out for me uh yeah other than that this is one of the easier begonias to take care of and it's the king side begonia not to be confused with the rex type begonias and this will indeed grow pretty tall and take over space yeah i'm going to show you how i propagate these both in water and in the soil so i'll see you at the propagation table so let's say there's this crisping edge and it really bothers you you can actually cut it off but be careful here's what i want to show you you don't want to cut it above this line because the edge where you cut it is prone to infection and that crisping will keep going upwards towards the leaf and this applies to every plant by the way so what you can do is you can just cut it uh right below the crisping area and leaving a little bit of that crisp there so this is not going to keep spreading and there's a few more here again this is uh caused by improper watering so yeah just go ahead and cut them off uh carefully there you have it as good as new all right so i found uh this vine here and it's not tied to the main uh pole so i decided to just cut this off uh and actually did because sorry i filmed it i filmed myself cutting this off but it didn't take so yeah i'm going to show you where i make the cut right here as you can see it already has these sharp points from this node and a node below so what happens uh after you cut it it's right here um yeah so after you cut it that is going to focus all this energy on these uh nodes and activate them and make sure that they push out new leaves and branches so from where we cut it actually um it's so pretty uh this one actually i will turn into two cuttings because there's actually too many leaves for this um let me see i'm to cut it i think right here perfect so what happens this is the epical bud which means that it's apical dominance as you can see this is the the sharp point here is the apical bud that's where the new leaves are coming from so um begonias it will root anywhere along the stem so that's how they would they will root so the root on the bottom part here and as for this one i can actually turn this into two cuttings i can cut it right here and then it will root you know what i'm gonna do that i'm very greedy today because i've done this so many times and usually i'm conservative so today i'm gonna be a little bit risky so don't laugh at me if i fail so i can cut it right here okay uh let me tell you a little bit about the propagation anatomy the roots will always come out here in the bottom of the leaf and since this one doesn't have an apical dominance optical they are bud this point here will be the next leaf and it will be the next branch in fact so um yeah it may actually push out more of these spikes along this node as well so this is actually their node and they can be propagated directly into soil or into water first so for this cutting i'm actually going to pop it right into water actually this vessel is way too big for it okay so for uh these cuttings i'm actually going to pop them right into water and this is actually an appropriate size vessel for this don't get anything that's too big so i'm going to leave it like that and i'm going to put two cuttings in one in one propagation vessel so that they can share all that good hormone and it's okay if it's submerged by the way um the new growth because they can grow in water somehow so i'm gonna leave it at that yeah so let's see how they do in a few months i've got a cutting here that i'm just gonna put directly into my uh jungle floor substrate just like that make sure that it's uh buried in there nice and this is actually very airy it creates humidity and there's a little bit of moisture but then it doesn't overly hold onto moisture it doesn't rot the plant if you use a potting mix that is very very soggy wet that retains water too much it will rot off they're very very prone to rot so make sure that you give them that humidity around the soil around the roots but not something that's too wet let me get a little bit more it's hard to film with one hand while propagating and i've got just one more so this one i'm going to stick right into here as well get a little bit more soap yeah and i'm going to spray this out when you spray this and this is just going to clean uh trickle off and then i just want to keep this uh moist uh throughout and it's really hard to over water them in this substrate because they are it's very very porous as you can see yeah so i'm going to water these and i will see you guys in a few weeks i guess they propagate very quickly actually so it's 25 days from the propagation and this thing is dead i think it left the pot at some point because a lot of animals tend to knock a lot of leaves and pot over i'm not sure if anything will lift from there i'm just going to leave it alone probably not yeah i see that the main stem here is also came off if the stem had been inside and it's rooted it may put out some babies yeah now this is how we're going that worked and there's one over here the friend died off dried off completely probably again because it probably got knocked off from from where i put it and it just dried off with when it's not in contact with the potting mix however one of the cuttings actually survived and it's putting out a new leaf i'm going to show you some that are in the bedroom they're doing much better so i guess these begonias they cannot be left outside and also they tend to be a little bit over watered when they're outside as well because it's always raining these days and it's always wet the ones indoors actually monitor it more carefully and no animals are knocking them over so yeah oh hang on before this one the leaf did came off uh however the babies uh are have four so cute i'm trying to put a new baby here too oh my god look at that this is so cute oh my god i can't get over it it's so tiny it looks really big in camera but in real life it's so tiny so we're indoors in my propagation station and i'm sorry i have to do a voiceover from the future because i recorded this with my mic off as usual and my cuttings are given artificial light and they're also getting some bright indirect light from outside they do need the light to push out new growth and as you can see this cutting is doing really well the two leaves are better but but they're busy pushing out roots and pushing out this new shoot so i would say this is a very very happy cutting that is about to take off and next to it here we have the water propagated cuttings and these are actually the cuttings that prompted today's video i'm in today's update because i have to pop these up as you can see they've grown tiny babies in the in the vessel that's so cute uh i struggled to take this out of the bottle it's hard to film with one hand and look at those white roots they're so ready for transfer into soil and this is another one with also with baby leaves very very cute so yeah these are 100 successful i would say that these begonias do better propagated indoors than outdoors so yeah i'm going to go ahead and pop them up for you so i potted these two up and my forest floor potting mix which they love it's fast draining it's airy and yeah i'm going to leave these leaves on because they're still photosynthesizing for the plant look how cute the baby leaves are yeah i'm going to actually give you guys a few more weeks update to show you how they're doing because i think it'll be cute to see them take off a little bit before i release this video so i'll see you guys in a few more weeks so here's another two-week update from the last update which brings a total propagation time of around uh six yeah six weeks uh so this one has the baby is growing very cute the leaf has died off apparent the apparent leaf and this one hasn't given me any new leaves yet but i see that it's rooted in there it's catching on to something so i'm gonna leave it there to see what happens this one is doing quite well as well it's put out this new leaf it's probably rooted really well inside and there's a new leaf coming along the way as you can see the sharp point there and these two i separated these because they were both grown in my bedroom as you can see they can do well in both low humid lower humidity and i mean above 50 percent uh or they do also do well outdoors with higher humidity now this one cutting hasn't given me a new leaf yet but i know that it's rooted that one leaf is about to unfurl i think so yeah they're gonna grow from these spikes basically but it's probably well rooted because after six weeks if the cutting hasn't rod rotten off or died off that means that it's alive so i'm just counting on the new leaves to give me beautiful and a beautiful new plant and here's the ones that we transferred into potting mix two weeks ago from water and as you can see the baby leaves are growing and each of them have put out a new growth point very nice and i'm happy to report that the parent plan is also happy pushing out new growth it will probably branch out even more so go ahead and prune and propagate your begonias because this is how you can get many plants this is how you can also get them to be more bushy imagine if i planted all these in one pot and let it just take over they can get huge they can get as tall as human size so thank you so much for watching this video i hope that you had a great time and you learned something i'm at botanist on instagram if you want to ask me about plant care and propagation i will get back to you meanwhile do take care and stay safe i will see you in the next video [Music] bye

Channel: onlyplants

Views: 144,340

Rating: 4.9623489 out of 5

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Id: ofLu1nqSPc4

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020