How to mount a Staghorn fern - tutorial / guide

hello everyone how are you doing today i'm doing good i'm actually sitting on the floor here with a bunch of orders that you lovely people had placed i'm blown away by all of you you're so awesome i have a lot of work to do to prepare all these packages that i will be shipping out next week as many of them as i can at least actually i think i'm going to be posting this video a little bit later in the week so at that point i will have already shipped them out as many as i can anyway and it's been a really long week preparing for the shop update so i decided after the shop has been opened to take a little bit of time and do something that i find quite relaxing and that actually brought me to where i am now so to speak and that is staghorn ferns my probably favorite plant one of them long time favorite plants and what i want to do today is take a little bit of time and mount a staghorn fern that i have been meaning to mount for a while and i thought i'd do a little tutorial on how to do that so that you guys can mount your stag reference at home also so let me clean up a little bit and get started so here is my prize stycorn fern actually i love this little baby or big baby you should call it this is not a normal so to speak normal variety this is a platusarium possibly super bomb but i'm pretty sure it's grand and this looks slightly different than the bifurcatum which i will be mounting today in the video but this is this is what i love about staghorn ferns are just really amazing out of this world and here i have some other ones that i mounted a little while ago they're doing pretty happy as well that one's a little bit dehydrated let's remove some of those but yeah staghorn ferns they are phenomenal plants you don't see these giant species around very often and we somehow found this at a place for way too cheap so i had to have it i love them i wish that i could have a room dedicated only to them because they're so magnificent so these plants i they look like dinosaur plants they're really old crazy and the first time i saw one was when i was living in seattle it was a really pathetic plant i wish i still had a photo of it it was like basically one tiny little frond on a piece of wood but either way i was like what is this this is really weird and after that point i kind of became obsessed with them and started mounting them on wood and i'm getting more and more to the point where i had way too many and then that's kind of where i started people at that point had expressed interest wondering where he got them and what they were and wanted to buy them so i was happy to make them it was my favorite pastime that was a lot of fun um but nowadays i i don't sell quite as many of them i focused a little bit more on other plants they are still my favorite and i would love to sell them to anyone who's interested but i noticed that nowadays people are really into the do-it-yourself type of thing and i myself am also so i figured i'll just show you guys how i do it instead so you can you can have a fun little project of your own okay so a little background on stycorn ferns so these plants are epiphytic which means they grow in nature on trees they are not parasitic meaning they do not harm the host plant the trees that they grow on but they can become quite heavily populated in some parts of the world these are plants that don't tolerate cold climates at least not very cold climate there are actually many different types but the one we most commonly see the platycerium bifurcatum is a plant that actually can live outside in warmer climates like where i came from in california people did grow them outside there on their trees which i found to be awesome so here is the beast that i will be mounting today i have it soaking in a little bit of water because i realized it was kind of high dehydrated sitting on the shelf so it's been soaking for a couple hours should be ready now to mount and here are the other supplies that i use so i have this piece of wood here and i already pre-attached on the back a little very basic hook just with a staple and bendy wire so that it can be hanging on the wall whenever complete now you may use pretty much whatever kind of wood that you would like to mount a staghorn fern i would suggest to use something that is not treated with chemicals that could harm the plant try to use a piece of wood that is not completely fresh when they haven't dried out a little bit they react a lot more heavily to moisture and end up cracking this one has a small crack in it but it has the potential to crack eventually all the way through but that's okay i'm gonna go with this piece of wood anyway i think it's very nice i have i have used several different kinds of wood i try to find scrap wood a lot barn wood things like that barn wooden and old old wood is what works very best of all because it's been aged already and can tolerate a lot of moisture and expanding and things like that so whatever you want to use i've actually also used pallets cutting up pallets because pallet wood is generally very hardy just make sure there's no harsh chemicals treated on the pallet and you can usually tell by markings on the pallet what what they've used on that and then i have some fishing line i use 0.3 millimeters and that's pretty heavy duty or heavy enough to hold in the plant and then i just have staples just regular staples so i've seen people using various types of thread and string for mounting but i like this because one you can't see it so it doesn't take away the effect of its natural look and two this does not disintegrate very quickly at all in comparison to like a twine which after watering it over and over will pretty easily disintegrate actually so that's why i definitely would suggest this material oh and of course we have moss so this is just moss from the forest at our home and you can buy moss as well in the u.s i used to buy moss in bags it was a green moss i can't remember the name of it but i can link it below and that moss was really great it was just sheet moss but here it's you can't really find that here and this works very well you can use any moss you want to pretty much it all is the same thing however be careful when buying the pre-packaged moss because sometimes that is dyed or sprayed green which shouldn't hurt the plant but can leave stains so just be aware of whether your moss is natural or if it's been painted all right so let's get started here so the first thing i do is take my plant and take it out of the pot and inspect the roots the roots are very thick on this and that's great i'd expected them to be that's yeah looking good so the first thing you gotta figure out is which way is up so what happens when these grow is it's gonna keep putting out fronds from the top the top side and eventually they're gonna grow in layers from the top like this and if i were to mount it upside down it's gonna it will straighten itself out it's just gonna look really goofy because the new growth is coming from down here and then trying to go up and it will just be strange so you want to find the top side and how can you find that so let me show you if you look in here you can see those tiny little green kind of nubs so those are the new fronds the new growth that's going to come out and you want those to be facing up those to be facing up so that's kind of how you can tell whether or not it's up or down a lot of the times they want to naturally hang down like this so it's kind of easy to tell sometimes it's not easy to tell because they're more erect and that's how why you need to go in there and look and see which which way are these facing i'm going to try to loosen these up a little bit of course it's going to end up damaging the roots a little bit but that's okay because it will recover the reason i'm doing that is because i want to mount it on this piece of wood as flat as possible and if i just wrapped all this big pot around this it's going to be protruding outwards this much and i don't find that to be aesthetically pleasing and i don't find that to be really super accurate with the way that the plant would grow in nature either because these roots essentially are the things that are attaching onto the host and here we have this piece of wood as the host so i want to try to loosen them and flatten them so that i can have the plant itself as close to the the piece of wood as possible okay i'm actually feeling pretty good about that that's pretty flat compared to how it was you'll notice that i'm a little bit rough on the plants and you you kind of have to be unfortunately it feels bad after it spent all this energy on creating these beautiful roots but but you you do have to be a little bit rough sometimes by cutting them and and kind of pulling things apart a little bit but these are very hardy plants so it's no worry it will recover just fine so anyway so what i'm gonna do is this will be facing the wood now going downwards like this but i always like to take a little bit of fresh soil and put it down here because to put these roots who are used to the soil straight onto the wood it may not go as as i wish so i like to give it a little soil buffer so the roots can kind of expand and heal a little bit and then hopefully attach themselves onto the wood if we're lucky so here i do a little bit of soil right in the center where i'm going to be placing it on [Music] okay so that is looking pretty good i think it's a good start a good beginning next step will be covering all the soil that i just unearthed with moss but i want to mention one other thing actually and i don't have any bananas today i wish i did but i don't one thing i often do when i'm doing this is i put banana peels in here as well and the potassium works as a great fertilizer for the plant kind of helps as as it disintegrates fertilize the plant and just give it a little extra nutrients and i actually do feed my stagger and burns bananas i know that sounds bananas but it's true and how i do that is obviously when they're mounted i'm not unmounting them to feed them but what i'm doing is when it's complete i kind of break the banana peels into pieces and shove it into the soil through the moss into the soil base and water it and eventually will disintegrate and it's just a nice light fertilizer for the plant and that's how i fertilize my staghorn ferns actually so so i can confirm that that rumor works well for me okay so here we have the moss and if you have a moss that's dry it's good kind of helpful to hydrate it a little bit first just because the moss tends to stick together a little bit better when you hydrate it versus when it's really dry it kind of comes in pieces easily mine is full of tons of pine needles which have fallen off the trees which is not a problem except for the fact that they're kind of pokey and then i break it up into pieces and my goal is just to cover all of the soil base with moss so i'm gonna get underneath of here like that so if you lift this you'll see i need to get some moss in there like that and you just want to cover it all up it's okay if you have a bit extra it doesn't need to be right now it looks like enormous but when i tighten all this down with the string it will really shrink in size so just most importantly make sure that you're covering all of the roots and soil with moss and tucking it up into and underneath these brown shield fronds as much as possible so like on the top side here i really want to tuck it in underneath all the way to the base of the plant so that there's no gaps all right it's how we're looking so far loosely placed in like this underneath and now comes the hard part fighting the staple gun so we had a little bit of a stapler issue so my tip is don't buy the cheapest stapler because it's really frustrating when it jams but now we're ready to go again so what i do is i take the moss ball and i just try to squeeze it as much as i can around that root base to get it really tight and to get access to the wood here and i take the beginning or the end of the string and i try to maneuver it by holding it down like this so i kind of have a nice firm grip because i'm going to take this stapler and push it on the string it's a little bit hard to see but you can see i have a little tension here i'm going to try to cross over that with this staple as far in as possible and sometimes i miss so let's see if i aimed correctly this time we have a winner so here we go this is the beginnings so what i do is i tie that and this a couple of times and then we have the beginning of our string and i just let it stay on the spool so that i can have as much as i need because it's frustrating when you pre-cut the string and then you need more so let's get going so this is how it will be facing and i started in the top right corner and i'm gonna first begin by going diagonally across underneath here like this just like that as close to the base as possible and then i'm gonna do the same thing in the bottom corner here i'm going to push it down against the base of the moss and get my stapler and push it in as far as possible there got it this time so i know this is a little bit frustrating when the staples miss but this is of all the techniques i've tried still the easiest of them so then i'm going to keep going around pull it tight a little bit and then go this way and this time i'm going to kind of skim closely underneath all these fronds along the base here to try to butt butt up against it so that it's kind of attaching onto the root ball not just the moss so here i have a pretty good firm grip i'll swing it around so that my string does not get tangled and then i'm gonna pull it tight and i'm going to staple it down it doesn't really matter how many staples you use because they're all going to be hidden and that's why i try pushing it in as far as i can when i go to staple it down [Music] so then i'm just gonna keep going around and around and around and doing that until i feel like it's pretty pretty tight onto there i'm gonna go through this and i do suggest doing this sometimes i'm gonna go through these two frowned shields shield bronze that way i really know that it's secure here underneath and it's completely hidden then it shouldn't damage these leaves [Music] [Music] all right so then i start at some point saying how's it looking how's it feeling etc and i kind of take it and try to remove it basically it's like a shake test and see how it's feeling and it's feeling pretty secure actually except i can feel that down here there's a couple of gaps that i'd like to kind of cover with the string so i'm going to kind of do a little like round around the outside instead of focusing around the base this time [Music] it's actually feeling pretty good so i think i'm going to call it good so then i take the string and pull it tight and then i find the string that i begin with which i just so luckily actually ended right next to and i will cut it and tie them together and then i cut it again after cut tying it about three times and then just tuck those into the moss and you won't see them again okay so here we have the little guy and i'm just gonna go through and hide all of the extra strings and stuff here i have a couple of those pieces i'm just gonna cut them down and then you do see a couple of the staple marks so i'm just going to take a little bit of loose moss and hide them so there you go like i said that's why i like the fishing line so much because it just becomes invisible and i like that quite a lot so this plant itself had does have several pups in it so i decided to focus on this one which i faced upwards so that this one will continue to be the one upright i mentioned previously that you need to make sure you have it facing upright and that is true however many of the plants that are a little bit bigger do have multiple plants in the plant such as this one you can see there's also a little puff down here that's okay i could have removed that but i decided to keep it so this one down here will be able to do its thing and kind of sort itself out while this one here will be the main one growing and the next thing i will do is soak it in water the easiest way i find to water these is by using either your shower faucet or a hose alternatively if you have a large enough bucket it works really well to submerge this whole board down into the water and let the moss absorb as much water as it wants and then drip dry but for today i'm just going to be watering it with my hose since the plant was pretty wet when i plotted it up it doesn't actually need that much water but i did just kind of give it a once over make sure it's looking nice and good and staghorn ferns do not need a whole lot of water especially those who are in the northern hemisphere and have winter time i go watering mine very sparingly like less than once a month i would say and they pretty happy that way and i am pretty happy with this so i will add it to the collection now so there's the new baby hanging out with the rest looking pretty good and that's the thing i like about them as well is they go on the wall so they're not competing for floor space with anything else or shop space so here we are me and my new best friend platycerium um i hope you guys enjoyed this video i hope that i was made things somewhat clear i know it was a bit all over the place my mind's a little bit all over the place right now but i tried to explain things but i'm sure when editing i'll find things that i missed and i'm happy to answer any questions for you guys this is a really fun project that i think pretty much anyone can do however it can be a little bit frustrating sometimes with with the stapler jamming or missing the staples or you know just maneuvering through it it's not really the easiest task but it's very rewarding in the end and i think it looks really cool and i think the plants will also benefit because this is how they kind of are intended to grow in nature so that's really awesome so i'm really happy about that wait it turned out and yeah so care on them is really easy i water them maybe like i said in the winter very sparingly maybe a little bit less than once a month in the summer quite frequently because it's growing season they're active and they dry up a little bit faster on the plaque with just the moss there's no plastic pot keeping the moisture in or anything and i just base that on feel like when i can feel that the plaque itself is very dry light the moss is crispy then i just give it a little water through and it seems happy and you can also tell if you go way too long without watering you can see the dehydration on the plants and it's pretty obvious it's kind of like a shriveling look on the leaves and usually you can revive them if you haven't let it go too far gone so that's another thing to try to avoid but a sign of knowing when you've gone too far without watering them but it is also a little bit hard in the summer to over water them because the moss dries pretty quickly however if you have them in a slightly darker location like inside the home in the winter when they're a bit more dormant just be very careful with how much you water them because they they don't really want to be drowning in water during their dormant period and then um yeah they don't really require a whole lot of care they just sit there and look beautiful all the time um it's not that uncommon to get some yellowing leaves on the underside where the older fronds are once the older fronds have gone through their cycle they are going to release all the energy they have and let go and fall off of the plant and that is the cycle of the plant it's completely normal so don't freak out if you have yellowing especially on the underside it will turn yellow and then orange and brown and crispy and it will fall off and that's totally normal and another thing i can mention are these how do you guys like the way i'm sitting by the way this is totally comfortable but so these these fronds here these are the the shield fronds and these also are fronds that are most of the time brown they will be green when they come out they will cover and spread quickly across the plant and then they will slowly fade to brown and that is completely normal and don't remove them leave them on there they are a great contraption for catching nutrients so to speak that's kind of the purpose of them in nature is they get huge and there are big wavy pieces of frond like this against the tree with different layers and in between those layers fall bugs fall particles and old leaves and the plant will decompose and break that down and use that as nutrients so there is no reason to remove that that's totally normal leave it on there and that's what i have to say about static horn ferns and i hope you guys enjoyed this and learned how to do it yourself and i hope i was thorough enough i'm so nervous that i was a little too sporadic but that's just how it goes i'm a bit sporadic on these videos but i try to be very very thorough so there you have it thank you for hanging out with me again and i hope you have a great day and i'll see you guys again soon for something new good night

Channel: inquisitivegreens

Views: 145,392

Keywords: platycerium bifurcatum, staghorn fern mounting, DIY mount staghorn fern, air plants, epiphyte plants, ferns, indoor hanging plants, how to care for staghorn fern, staghorn fern care information, diy garden projects, garden projects for spring, how to care for indoor ferns, houseplants for the wall, houseplant projects, moss projects, plant art, plant art forms, platycerium, greenhouse projects, shipping plants, plants for sale

Id: Ic3bsOIPcJo

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020