How To Propagate Pilea Peperomioides ( Chinese Money Plant )

what's up guys and welcome back to tech plan today I'm gonna teach you exactly how I acquired so many Peele a pepper Roma's peperomia PLA pepper something like that anyways stay tuned and let's check it out alright guys so here's my pili and as you can see it is doing well it's got very green good color and a lot of bushy growth here you can see the difference between two types of leaves they're the very large leaves that are round and those are on the central stalk but as you can notice on the bottom part near the pot there's a lot of smaller leaves now these leaves are all babies that have sprouted up over time I made a past video about how to pick out a pili appropriately so that way you can also have results like this it's very important when you buy one of these that you can find one with a lot of babies that way you can multiply your plants really quickly and share with your friends and family if you want to see that video I'll put a link in the description by the way the audio might sound a little different it's because I'm not recording this from my house where I usually do my videos but I'm actually kind of on vacation in South Korea so the recording area is much different so it's a little more echoey so I apologize in advance but I think this will still be good enough anyways let's get back to the video and this one is about propagating this beautiful plant so as you can see in this footage here there's a ton of stuff near the base of the pot lots of smaller growth and it's a lot more bushy er than towards the top and that's because these plants spread by producing smaller babies that kind of offshoot from the main plant so if you look carefully you'll see like the red stalks all around the base of the plant and those are all the babies and so those are how we're gonna create more plants by taking the babies and harvesting them from the mother plant and potting them are propagating them in other containers now don't worry about this in the whole sound of like harvesting from the mother plant and also don't worry about your number of babies right now because even once we cut all these babies away the mother plant will continue to produce more and more babies so this isn't like a one-time thing like this will continue to happen throughout the life of your PLA so have no fear when you first try this out even if you completely fail with every baby the mother plant is going to produce more and harvesting these babies will not harm the mother plant so again you can kind of do this with no fear of killing the mother plant as long as you don't sever the mother plant somehow in the process all right so the method that I'm gonna propagate these with is with dishwater I'm also gonna end up doing one with soil just to see the difference and how it works most of the time whether you decide to do it with water or soil depends on kind of how far along the babies are but we'll talk about that later for now we need to talk about what we need first to start and that's containers for our babies I went to my local science and surplus store just to get some kind of unique looking glass containers for this because a lot of people like to use cool glass containers that way if they're sitting on your shelf it also kind of looks nice in your house or whatever people on Instagram seem to really like these too so that's kind of why I chose it but you can choose really anything I specifically though did get some Erlenmeyer flasks just because I like that they have a large capacity for water but also kind of a narrow top so that way the plants don't fall in so easily this will work well with some of the larger babies that I have I also picked up a few these pentagonal shape jars they were only like 50 cents apiece which is really cool and they're very space efficient I mean you can stack them right next to each other and you get your maximum amount of water without like having any empty space between the jars so it's pretty cool and I think the the tip or the the opening will be narrow enough to prevent plants from falling through but even if they do the water is gonna be a little more shallow so I think they'll be okay so I'm gonna be experimenting with kind of two container sizes to see if it really makes a difference or not alright so now that we have our containers picked out the next thing we're gonna have to do is start harvesting the actual babies so take a look at your mother plant and make sure you identify the main stock which should be about the center of the pot and look around again for those little pinkish red stocks that are poking up with the smaller versions of the mother plant these are the babies and so in order to cut these things out you're going to kind of try and follow the stalk where heads under the soil because we're gonna cut a chunk off kind of underneath the soil so we have like an inch or so of the main stalk that's already beneath the soil level because that's kind of where the roots are gonna want to come out when you do this they'll be very careful with the knife because you can slip and cut further down which then you could damage the root system of the mother plant but again I don't think you'll ever be able to do enough damage to really kill the mother plant only slow down its growth and like nutrients intake so yeah now you can just go around the plant and you can kind of move away a little bit of soil and just cut the babies off about an inch underneath the soil you kind of have to ah I ball it and feel around with your finger just so you can actually hit the proper root but you should be able to do it with a pretty decent amount of ease do be careful when you are cutting at the root because the long knife that I used sometimes the actual blade edge would catch healthy leaves on the mother plant severing them off again it's not gonna kill the mother plant unless you were to cut every leaf off but it just looks unsightly when you chop a leaf off and now it's missing another really important thing to notice when I'm doing this is as you saw earlier one of these babies was severed from the mother and it did not have a lot of like roots around it did not have a big root cluster with dirt and this is important because you'll see that some of the future ones are gonna have a big root cluster already on the baby so that means a lot of these babies are already pretty well established inside the pot so you could argue that I might have waited a little too long to harvest these well I guess it doesn't really matter I you can't really wait too long but they're already established so you'll see when I put these in water what happens this will kind of be an experiment between a baby with no root cluster and leaving the root cluster on the baby because I believe that these are pretty far along I'm actually gonna try just sticking one with a solid root cluster right into some soil just to see if there's any real difference between water and soil at this point if the babies were more young I would say that they almost all would need water but you can see that most of these have a root structure but we have them all in water for the most part so let's just see what time does and let's see how our experiments play out all right guys so eight days has gone by and you can see that they are still alive and doing well but we do have an issue and it has confirmed our experiment the issue were experiencing is all of the POA pups or plants that we is harvested that still had a root ball intact are now not doing so well after being submerged in the water this is something I figure what happened just because most roots are either when they kind of form they form whether they're under water or above water and you can't just switch them vice versa well at least you can't take roots that were formed outside of water and then plonk them under water because they're just not ready for it and they usually start to rounding and that's exactly what's happening in this case all of the PLA babies that I put in the water with an intact root ball are kind of starting to rot and die because their roots are not able to handle this new environment if you look at our one test subject which did not have a root ball that one is actually doing great it's forming a bunch of new roots and everything is very healthy about it luckily when you're kind of rooting plants and water it's pretty easy to fix this sort of thing so what I'm gonna do is just scrape off all the roots all the bad like dirt roots and then the plant should bounce back and just start producing its own water roots so it all should be well on this one here though we can see that some of the stalk that was surrounded by the roots is actually kind of started to rot so I'm just gonna cut that off too if you want further proof of our experiment you can see that the one plant that had intact root ball that I planted directly in soil is doing well and thriving so moral of the story is if you have babies coming out of your pili and they are old enough and already have a small established root ball you can skip the water step and just plant them right in the soil however if the babies are kind of small and they don't have a dedicated root ball or you accidentally rip the root ball off when you're harvesting it you can then put those in the water and do exactly what you saw in this video one of the main reasons I actually make these videos is because I like to experiment and learn a lot of things about plants and this is a great way to kind of document everything so when things are successful I can relay and show you that same information to help you guys out so you don't make the same mistakes I did it's been about four more days and I wanted to show you the mother plant just so you can see how fast these things produce babies and if you look carefully you can't quite see it from far away but if you look in at the soil you can already see small little babies popping up I think it's pretty crazy how fast these things actually produce plants and you know we think all great gonna have like another like six six plans from this recent harvest and propagation but those six plans are gonna start producing babies as fast as this one and soon your entire house is gonna be taken over by these PLA plants but that's the cool thing because then you can quickly share them with your other friends and family all right guys about two months has passed since the very first footage you saw when we actually harvested the babies admittedly it's probably been a little too long I would have ideally probably tried to plant these two weeks earlier the plants at this point have one heck of a like root ball around them and they're all healthy and none of them are rotting so that's good we managed to eliminate all of the root rot off of the few that we're kind of suffering from it when you saw that I ended up putting kind of more err style roots into the water which damaged them so they recovered really nicely from that and you can see all the plants are alive and well however because I've had them in water for so long and they haven't gotten any like nutrients or anything they are kind of yellowing ever so slightly but I don't think this is gonna damage the plant permanently in any way so I'm really not too worried about it if you look at the leaves and you can see how the veins are kind of darker but the actual leaf is a little lighter this is a sign of kind of either too much water or some sort of like mineral deficiency so we do need to get these in soil pretty pretty soon now just so they can start to grow naturally and get the resources that they need from the soil so what you're going to need is some pots I'm just gonna use some cheap plastic pots because it will not be the permanent home of this plant these are gonna do a lot of growing over the next probably two to four weeks so don't pick out your favorite pot at the store that cost like 10 bucks weight use something cheap now because the plant has got a lot of growth to do before you can really put it in its kind of permanent home alright guys the next thing is gonna be our soil I use kind of an outdoor mix but just a little bit because it has kind of like a compost in it so it has a lot of nutrients for the plant when it's starting out without me having to dump a bunch of fertilizer and I feel it's a little more natural and then I also add in some vermiculite just so it has some kind of water attention maybe about 1/4 of my total soil I add that that much vermiculite to it maybe less I'm not quite sure I've just kind of always been winging it and then on top of that I also add a bunch of cactus mix just because I like the training properties of it and it sounds weird to have vermiculite added with cactus mix just because I'm adding water retention to water drainage but for whatever reason this mix works really well for me indoors so that's just what I've been doing and then I guess for the last step is just to take your pots I'm not going to add anything in the bottom of these pots just because they're temporary and its really kind of unneeded there's a lot of debates about why they're putting rocks in the bottom of your pot helps with drainage but I think most of the studies say that it actually doesn't it just raises the water level but I don't know I'll do experiments on that in the future but anyways I'm just going to dump some soil in there into the pots and then I create a pocket for each plant and I make sure that I get the roots nice and down inside the soil and then I continue to put the build the soil up around the plant just so it has a nice sturdy base and hold in the tiny pots then obviously once you have it in there you're gonna want to water it really good that way you don't kind of shock the roots I like to think that when taking water roots and put putting them in soil you should really water it a lot just because you want to kind of almost wean the roots off of there their current environment similar to why when we put those dry dirt roots right into the water it died really quickly and started rotting that we saw in the previous video so I like to think that we should put a lot of water in our soil for the first week maybe just to help these water roots adjust to a more terrestrial life in the dirt so after that first week then you can kind of start watering normally and I think your plant will adjust quite well to its new environment because we don't want to shock it by taking it out of the water and then kind of sticking it in dry soil right away because I I feel again this is an empirical evidence but I feel like it won't adjust so well and I'll have a harder time kind of riru ting in the dirt in the future I'll try and do some experiments on this but for now it seems to be working for me so this is what I would recommend well yeah I guess that pretty much sums up the whole process it's actually pretty easy and again you don't have to worry if you kill any of the babies because the mother plant will keep producing these plants that I have now are getting pretty but again I'm in Korea right now so I can't really show you an update but I can promise you that they're getting huge and when I do return back to the USA I'll do a big update on these plans so make sure you subscribe so you can see him and I I it's actually gonna be a pretty big surprise for me too because I'll have been in Korea for three months by the time I get back to the US so there's gonna be a lot of growth time and I really hope that my family doesn't kill them that cuz that'd be very sad well as long as one lives I can keep on like spreading them by their babies they produce but anyways stay tuned because they got a lot of other videos for you and when I come back from vacation it's gonna be pretty cool to see where everything is at just because of such a long period of time so alright guys that pretty much sums up this video I hope everything was helpful and you guys are gonna try this with your PLA peperomia because it's a really cool way to get a lot of plants quickly as you can see they've already matured very fast and the mother plant is already spitting out tons of new baby plants this is a great plant if you want to share with your friends and family and it's really easy to give up some of them and you don't have to feel greedy because you're gonna have a lot of them they're just gonna overwhelm your house over time so I guys guys I hope you enjoyed this if you liked it hit the like button if you want to see more hit subscribe as always I hope your plants go strong and healthy see you next time [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Techplant

Views: 91,893

Rating: 4.9166665 out of 5

Keywords: pilea peperomioides, pilea, peperomioides, propagation, baby pilea, pilea propagation, pilea peperomioides propagation, chinese money tree propagation, how to propagate, chinese money plant, cats

Id: gq88FdaCf_k

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2018