Calathea white fusion plant care and propagation

hi guys my name is sean i'm a house plant enthusiast from jakarta indonesia i'd like to note 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 today's video we're going to discuss the very dramatic uh houseplant the impossible to keep alive calathea uh white fusion it's also known as the caladia white tissue here so it's 7 a.m in the morning i literally just got out of the bed and jump straight to this video so please pardon my appearance i haven't washed my face or brushed my teeth but yeah if you have any experience with kalikia especially this white fusion you would know that it is super impossible to keep alive they do crisp up very often they give you brown tips and yellow leaves um this is because they can get over water easily yellowing leaves is a sign of over watering and brown tips is a sign of underwatering they will also burn pretty easily for you if you put it in too much of direct sunlight so you'll notice that it will get dry crispy spots not on the edges of the leaves but in the middle of the leaves and for in in my experience when you get these plants they actually do die back this is i'm going to get into these plants later but what happens is that when they uh are not healthy it will die off completely and it will start pushing out new leaves and they're usually completely green this is probably because the kalita white fusion is actually a cultivar so it's a hybrid of something or it's man-made rather so it's very unstable and the only way it can survive and be happy is if it give you green leaves because the white parts are not really photosynthesizing and also if you put this plant in an area that is not so bright just the same rule with any variegated plants if you put them in a lower life situation they will grow new leaves that are more green until it's completely green such as this plant over here so i'm going to go through with you the care and also how we can get back the white fusion here so do stay tuned so i've actually killed quite a few of these and i'm just now getting the confidence to make this video for you and my formula is this again it's going to be very different depending on your environment i have them outdoors uh and i give them a very very uh light and airy soil mix so i have here uh dry twigs bamboo cocoa husk i'll burn rice holes i even put a lot of pearlite in there so it's very very fast draining at the same time they don't want to dry out at all so i water them like once or twice a day every time i walk by i literally just spray it down and they love it another thing about them is that they seem to like being grouped with other plants they don't like to be alone i think and when they agree with other plants they seem to put up more healthier growth so as you can see in here like some of the the brown leaves the these are the older leaves but if you look at the new growth area that's where i i've had them in the past i would say two to three months i've been paying attention to them i've been caring for them this way and the leaves have continually been beautiful they've been showing me more whites and very very few die backs since then so i would say that this plant is actually doing quite well it's because it's on the way it's not amazing yet but on the way to recovering so i also put them in the brightest indirect light location as i can because they do need that to push out the variation as like as i mentioned before they lose their variation if you put them if you don't have enough light for them now what happens when you uh get these uh all greenlee all green leaves you can actually propagate them let me show you how actually i got this trick off of a seller he was kind enough to share with me this trick and i i challenged sanger kamuning actually where i interviewed with her to try out this method um this is so cute so this is coming in a very dense potting medium ah so i bought this plant as it is i did not pop this up and i always knew that it was kind of living in compacted soil and as you can see here the new growth are largely all green it's lost all its variegation completely and from here i can see that the roots are actually very fine this means that they cannot be left to dry out at all because the roots will die back if you let it dry out you know what this is not cooperating with me i'm gonna have to soak this in water for a few minutes so let it um to let the roots uh loosen up so i can separate them easily i'll be right back okay so i hope i've loosened that up enough i'm going to break this apart because they're very tangled up in here this is a pretty old plant uh at all these roots it's so rude down i should have done this earlier all right so i've got all these separated uh clubs and let's see i can actually separate them and i will show you the biology in a little bit so you know what i'm talking about i'll show you up close ah it's a real struggle okay i'm not going to separate this hang on i'm actually going to rinse off some of the soil a bit more so you guys can see what i'm talking about okay so i've actually cleaned off the roots and we can look at the inside a little bit better i'm going to pick out let's see what's a good example maybe this one over here uh as you can see uh you have the the plant material up here the leaves and then you have an area below that where it's got like a i don't know what you call it like a tiny little nub with a lot of roots coming out of it and further down below that you will see the rhizomes and this particular one has a huge rhizome over here um and what you want to do is my pruning shears so what you want to do is you want to actually cut it uh where it still has some of the roots attached uh you want to sever it from the rhizome basically uh so i would make the cut right around me see right around here okay now uh this cutting you can stick them back in the soil and then it will grow into an oil all green white fusion i don't know what the name of this new plant is but it's going to be all green and this is the proof of that this is uh about i would say two months ago and it's continuously putting out a new growth here and it's going to be all green so this is going to be a new plant for you so i can i can just do a bunch of these and just stick them in a pot and it will just again give me that all green look however what we want to look out for is these rhizomes so when we have these rhizomes and we plant it uh back into soil it's going to push out completely new growth and that is going to be a white white fusion all over again so the important thing here is the rhizomes and what you want to do is you want to plant this back into soil a fast draining soil and it will push out new growth and the new baby growth is going to be your white fusion again so here's an example of my white fusion that i cut back from this guy actually so it's given me all green leaves so after that the rice i'm just kept putting out one leaf after another and it's got some white variegation again as you can see here and this one has a tiny little stripe of white variegation i may have to stick these in a very bright location because i've actually had them in a corner where i wasn't getting a lot of light because i just wasn't sure this was going to take off but yeah this experiment totally works so i'm going to go ahead and cut up the rest of these and uh yeah i'm going to show you right here some of them the rhizomes are actually super tiny like this one i don't see any ryzen so i may actually just plant this back because it's happy and it's got a new leaf so i'm just going to plant this back without severing it from the rhizomes and in this one let me see yeah this is the same case where it's not attached to the rhizome so i want to do that and this is this main area is the is what we want okay so let me see if i can twist this plant out of the way oh yeah it came right off it twists right off so this is the rhizome and this is the the plant that we're gonna plant back this one has a tiny uh rhizome and but it will work so let me do let's cut it yeah so this tiny rhizome will also give you the white fusion cute [Music] oh yeah these are there's more over here and you want to leave a little bit of a healthy route again for your parent plan and in my experience with this one i didn't have any die back so all of them actually survived they propagated itself wow so that's one example of a cool rhizome here yeah and that will give you the white fusion from here all right beautiful i've got so many cool little plants it's gonna give me so many baby plants i'm excited about it okay so i'm going to quickly put up the plants for you for these ones actually i did notice that they do like to be a bit more fast draining so i'm going to give it a terracotta pot [Music] [Music] and in this mix i actually have it very airy it's got bamboo shoots it's got dry twigs perlite for rice hulls worm casting what else do i have yeah i think that's pretty much it uh so with this plant i know that i can safely water it every day because it's gonna live outdoors without having it be over water nice there you go with the remaining features i'm just going to uh put it in a in the same slot for the tiny ones i'm going to put a few in one pot it's got so many viable roots it's going to uh root up pretty well for me i'm gonna put uh i would say two in here because i know that the roots are gonna be fighting for space pretty soon and one of the benefits about using the mix that i use here which is which i use for my colleagues but the one is that it drinks fast it doesn't really over water it allows a lot of air movement in the pot um but at the same time it will allow the new growth to push out easily from the shoes because it's not compact it's not heavy so then you shoot can find its way out with ease all right so now i have uh six pots of baby plants that will take about somewhere between six to eight weeks to develop to start putting out new uh baby leaves like this one and the mama plant will continue to live on so from one plant i now have potentially seven plants and one more thing that i want to add about collective care is that they're actually sensitive to minerals in tap water so you where possible use rain water or distilled water i don't want to be advocating for distilled water because i think that water is such a precious limited resource that we should be using them on our plants uh i i totally accept brown edges on my leaves which is fine and in indonesia where i i live in my area and my home here because we're so away from the city our water is actually ground water so we're a little bit more free from the minerals um yeah so if you've enjoyed contents like this please do subscribe to my channel send me likes comment down below i'm at baltimore's on instagram do dm me and i will try to get back to you regarding your tech care propagation questions meanwhile do take care and stay safe i'll see you in the next video

Channel: onlyplants

Views: 36,812

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Id: TM514R-ddzg

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020