Calathea Leaf Problems: Browning, Curling, Wilting

[Music] hi everyone this is just a quick note at the beginning of the video that this probably won't be the prettiest video I've ever made a lot of the footage isn't optimal but it does show some of the collegially problems in progress so while it isn't the most stunning footage it's pretty accurate and also what I'm sharing in the video is my own experience and my own from my own research so please take that as you will and with that said let's get started so we're gonna start with brown leaf tips and edges the first thing that I want to mention here is about water stress first off this can happen before you even get your plant home if the plant was you know water stress meeting it it got I had too much water or even if it didn't have enough you might not see the results after getting your plant until it's been in your home for even a few weeks so the best way to avoid water stress is to be diligent about testing the moisture levels in your potting soil so for me when the first two to three inches of potting soil are dry I water my clay theus thoroughly the second thing that we should talk about is tap water now Khalifa's are in a set of plants that are sensitive to a lot of the minerals and salts additives that you find in common tap water what's best to use on a clean would be rain water or if you don't collect your own rain water it would be distilled water and the thing is that clay the--is do live on the forest floor they get rainwater that's filtered and when we use tap water it ends up damaging the roots the roots are what are really sensitive and we see the damage actually move up into the leaves and that's when it usually becomes visible to us now some people might tell you that you can leave your tap water out overnight and that things like chlorine or chloramines that are the water will evaporate over that period of time however the thing is that fluorides assaults other things are not going to evaporate and I'm not even convinced that enough chlorine would evaporate in that time to actually make it safe to use on your clavia so just keep in mind that if you're using tap water you are going to more than likely see brown leaf tips and edges and it's going to continue the next thing that you might think about is fertilizer burn now often this shows that not just in the tips of your clay Thea but on the edges of your leaves all over the plant not just the tip but just around the full edge of the leaf and the thing is that clay Thea is just as they're sensitive to tap water they're also quite sensitive to a synthetic fertilizer and so you definitely want to make sure that you dilute any synthetic fertilizers that you plan to use and start out with a really weak solution and build your way up I personally no longer use synthetic fertilizers on likely Thea's just because I really got tired of worrying about which plants could take which strength before being burned and so instead I began top dressing all of them this spring with worm castings and that way something like an organic fertilizer like worm castings I don't have to worry if I'm using too much it's not going to burn the leaves or rather the roots and then have the damage show up on the leaves the last thing that I wanted to talk about around brown leaf tips and edges would be humidity this is the number one culprit in my house for a brown leaf tips and I struggled with him on and off since bringing my first Colegio home and the best solution that I found is a humidifier but I don't like to have more than one humidifier going in my house and I have Cola Theo's all over my house so what do I do I've tried pebble trays I've tried misting pebble trays just didn't elevate humidity enough to actually be useful and misting is a little bit controversial in the plant world there are studies or literature that claim that it is Berlin but it's closely related to an increase in things like fungal infections and plants potentially there's other literature that says that that relationship just really doesn't exist however because I don't like to risk my clean Thea's I tend not to miss them and what I do instead now is as you can see I've been showing the footage here I use what are essential they're essential oil diffusers and and I don't put essential oil into the diffuser I just put in distilled water and then I let that go and I don't mind having a few of these going because unlike humidifiers in my house they don't tend to end up with mold inside of them so that's something to keep in mind and that's why I don't like having more than one humidifier going they need to be cleaned every few days or you're really risking growing mold in them so the next thing that I wanted to talk about was curling leaves and so let's start with light and heat letting your clay Thea get to close to a window to direct light or letting it get too hot you'll often you'll see as a result as the leaves beginning to curl just like you see here now let's talk about this plant and why the leaves are curling this is my picture otta Argentia I had taken it outside and sprayed it with neem oil in the shade and even though it was in the shade being outdoors the light is much much brighter and combined with a warm summer day the leaves curled within 15 minutes so keep that in mind if you notice your leaves are curling on your clay Thea move it away from the window and see if they open back up because if they don't it could also be route damage so let's talk about that the damage you see here is the result of root rot and I'm still not sure how it happened I've never had this happen in the colosseo before but the leaves curled and no matter what I did they wouldn't uncurl and so once I knew it wasn't a light or a heat issue I took the plant out of the pot and began to inspect its roots and I found a few unhealthy mushy roots some tangled roots and things some nodules that didn't look good and I've never like I said had this happened before so what I ended up doing was I cleaned the roots up as much as I could keeping as many healthy remaining roots as possible but getting rid of what obviously was beginning to rot and then I amended its new potting soil even more than I usually do for a clay Thea it's very fast draining and I would say within about a month the new growth started coming through and it looks good so it it looks like that solved that issue there the other thing though that I've noticed when leaves curl this is the last one it's as a result of cold damage and cold damage looks like a lot of other issues and the only way for you to know that it's cold damage is because you would know that the plant has been in the cold so this is a clay Thea it's a contain of Freddie and I ended up picking it up it was gosh it was either in late winter or early spring and I had a video on it wondering if I could save it here's what I learned from this and and a few other plants a few other clay Thea's Hawaii Thea's do not bounce back from cold damage and when I found I found the plant it had been outdoors even though it was late late winter early spring here and so it was in temperatures well below what is recommended for ecclesia they are not Hardy in temperatures below 65 degrees and from what I understand it had been outside overnight and so I thought well maybe if I take it home I can find a way to salvage it as it turns out I am yet to save a plan from cold damage sometimes if you know that your plant has been exposed to the cold and its leaves are curling like this and it's been maybe overnight in 60 degrees or cooler Fahrenheit I should mention chances are the curled leaves are the result of cold damage and if anybody has any tips on how to help ecclesia survive who's been exposed to the cold I would love if you would leave comments links whatever you have because I think that for a lot of people that's something that we really struggle with and I do have friends with kallithea is who their heater maybe goes out in the winter and they've lost pretty much all of their coal a the--is if they weren't at home to act quickly and so again I'd love any further information from you the last thing that I wanted to talk about is wilting leaves and so what you're seeing here is a fusion white and this is definitely a fusion if you look at it it's not the best fusion white you see a lot of what appear to be Maui clean leaves mixed in with fusion white leaves still don't understand this plant actually was the sort of ground zero for a spider mite infection that happened to my house a few years ago now and one of the things that happened with it was what you're seeing its leaves suddenly began to wilt and drastically this happened within probably about oh I would say five hours and so when this happened to this plant it wasn't the first time I had seen it and so I knew what to do I knew what this was this is what often happens when your potting soil the soil isn't aerated and so maybe it's not draining quickly enough the roots are able to get oxygen so one of the ways that you know this is happening is that your plant looks like this but the potting soil when you dig your fingers down is wet around the roots what you want to do then or what I did and what I've done that has successfully as you can see this is 12 hours these photos apart is I went and I repotted it and I amended the soil with a lot of perlite making sure that it was fast draining and so what happens is that when the soil becomes compacted around the roots and it can't drain it's just holding water now and it's almost kind of drowning the roots the roots need to be able to take in oxygen and when they stay wet with that compacted soil holding the moisture there they're not able to take in oxygen so they begin to sort of suffocate and that's what you're seeing in the leaves and when you see it in the clay that looks very dramatic like this and so that is the one good thing with a lot of what we're talking about today the clay Thea is a very dramatic plant it will when it experiences something usually have an adverse sort of visual signal almost immediately and so I was able to save this plant from suffocating and I didn't save it from spider mites unfortunately that's another story so this is my video about Callay Thea leaf problems I get a lot of comments and questions and DMS on Instagram about what to do with brown tips or with curling leaves and so I thought I would just make a video and put it all out there for you I do hope it was helpful if you have any tips any experience anything that you'd like to share please be sure to leave it in a comment and until next time be well and take care [Music] you

Channel: Addy Beez

Views: 277,831

Rating: 4.8845549 out of 5

Keywords: calathea, calthea leaf, leaves, leaf, leaves curling, leaves browning, curling up, curling, browning, brown tips, calathea plant care, drooping, wilting, calathea leaves drooping, calathea leaves curling, calathea leaves browning, leaf tips turning brown, calathea leaf tips turning brown

Id: hX3cyy-zUl0

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 11 2019