Rhipsalis care and propagation

[Music] hello and welcome to epiphytic cacti today i figured we would take a look at some things to do with rip salas the general idea of watering and then the general idea of propagation there are so many different types of rip salas repsalis is a really big genus we take a look at this guy you can see that he's got very very thin branches when you have really thin branched rip salis like that they generally are really good about telling you when they need water because their branches will actually start to look a little bit desiccated they generally bounce back very easily once they've been watered so i feel like the ones with the skinnier branches are the ones that seem to be very very easy to care for they also seem to be the ones that grow very quickly so if we kind of come this way there we go here we can see that this is um rib salis campos potoana portorana it's a little hard to say um this one is it grows very very fast it's very easy to just take care of because it will look a little desiccated when it needs water you water it it bounces right back the one next to it this is supposed to be capiliformis also same thing just looks a little bit desiccated grows very quickly very easy to care for in terms of propagating these guys propagating these guys is pretty easy the really big trick though is making sure that you are using the right media i have a video on it which is like the basic epiphytic cacti potting mix it's the same mix that i use for all my epiphytic cacti here we can see that this guy right here i first of all make sure that you put them in very small pots when they are very small or if you're like just starting a few from cutting and stuff keep them in very small pots at first because this really helps prevent over watering so you can see here that is my basic mix it's literally just one-third coarse perlite one-third orciata bark it's a i think it is small grade or giada bark and then one third regular potting soil you can see this guy has actually been in here kind of rooting for a while and here you'll see that some of these are rooted and then some of them are actually probably not going to take and you can tell because they're a little bit desiccated so you can tell when they're rooted just by the fact they've plumped up that they're absorbing water and this is you know it's fairly normal some cuttings might root some might not generally most of them written when we have these plastic pots that we find like at garden centers and stuff all of the plants that we grow are generally some sort of tropical plant and what we're doing is planting them in some kind of potting soil that's peat based inside of these plastic pots because we're trying to mimic that really wet humid environment that they come from now not all those plants are epithetic these are epithetic they are growing up in trees in the nooks of the falling debris so they're in kind of a rich media that is just really it's wet but it's not really retaining all of that moisture around the roots so that's why it is so detrimental to take and expect that you would be able to plant an epiphytic cacti or repsalis inside of that kind of regular potting soil in a plastic pot that is too big and expect it not to rot because you are giving it way more water than it should have and it's epithetic so it needs to have some kind of air around its roots which this kind of media definitely helps with because what happens is the size of the media it creates little air pockets all through the media and allows it to drain very freely and it does not hold excessive amounts of moisture so then we come to the other reason of why we keep them in very small pots versus trying to start them out in a large pot you know like a four inch pot for something like this is excessive a six six-inch pod is really excessive and it will probably just die so even if i had it in this media it's probably still gonna struggle because it's still just holding too much water so when you start them it's something that is very important to keep in mind this guy here his branches are thicker now here's the key the thicker the branches the less frequently you need to water it the thicker the branches the more moisture it's actually going to hold on to so this guy is generally going to need less water than the guy that you just saw they all kind of root the same like anywhere there is an ariel so anywhere that there is a little circular ariel on this you should be able to cut it maybe let it sit out and dry for a week or so and then just put it right in that kind of media to me just put it outside like if your climate is actually allowing it put it outside and just let nature take its course if you can't do that you can keep it inside and then maybe just give it a little bit of water like every two weeks rib salads are a tiny bit different from the other epiphytic cacti in the fact that they do need more frequent watering but they need more frequent watering because they don't have as thick of branches as a lot of the other epiphytic cactus so if we're talking about you know like our large showy daiso cactus hybrids they have very thick branches that hold a lot of water so these guys they don't have anywhere near the amount of surface area these types of rip salas so these guys have these big pads like this right so they have these big clades they're like ginormous easter cactus so they're ginormous rip saladops's type clades right so the thing about these guys is they're going to generally need considerably less water than the ones that we've already previously looked at because they're branches they have much thicker branches they retain much more water and these guys are a little bit interesting in terms of the rooting because it's the exact same thing really the principle never actually changes anywhere that there is an aerial so any of these little aerials as well as anywhere along this mid-rib they can produce roots so you just want to make sure that if i was going to let's say start this guy i would probably cut this and then i would probably put it up to here in the soil so i'm allowing it to rip from here i'm allowing it to root from both of these two aerials on the sides here and all along its mid-rib where it's actually buried and then all new growth will actually come directly out of any of the aerials including the aerials that are underneath the soil line these guys when you go to rip them just bear in mind that you do want to let them callous over maybe a tiny bit more than these these other guys with these thinner branches because they do retain more water so they need a little bit more of a little bit longer of a period to actually heal over so that they don't rot these guys are easier to rot of course because again they hold more water so same mix you just plant them and then instead of watering it like every two weeks with a little bit of water try something like every three weeks if you're doing it inside again if you're doing it outside let nature do its thing somehow nature just does its thing out here in a different way than if you were to try to do it in the house like i could rid this guy and this guy out here same pot same media same amount of rain just fine because they have excellent air flow other types of roof salis like this crazy guy we don't really know what this guy is um i think it's beautiful though which is why i bought it i actually bought it not knowing what it is because i think it's gorgeous i bought it as a full plant like this it's grown a lot because that's what rip salads do they grow a lot it is it has these thicker sort of square triangular type branches here again we end up with the same principle if you were trying to enrich this you just need to make sure that you know you cut it here and then you put at least a few of the aerials underneath the media and then same kind of thing you know it obviously doesn't have quite as much moisture retention as something like this guy so maybe this guy you would water every three weeks i do not change the watering schedule of any of my rip salas indoors they all get watered whenever they look like they need water i am just careful that when i water this guy it's less water than something like this the same thing is true for something like this guy i just make sure that i'm not giving him quite as much water and as these plants get bigger and bigger and more and more established it becomes very difficult to just rot them out it is much harder to rot out a very well established plant this guy right here repsalis paradoxa this is the one that i hear about people rotting the most often he has very very thick branches and because of that he does need considerably less water now in relation when we look at something like pacheco leonis here you can see the size difference right so you can see just how thick this is versus this guy's a little bit thinner so obviously he's gonna need more water than this guy and you'll notice that i pretty much wrote all the rip salas in these little tiny pots i think these are like three inch pots they're three inch ceramic pots i get them on amazon they're basically little succulent pots this is i'm not exactly sure how to say it vacificara this guy is gonna be really easy care just because of how he grows i'm not actually going to touch on the lipism and the fifra in this particular video you can see some of these guys down here too you have like these guys are much thinner and you can see it looks desiccated right now a little bit and that is a sign that this guy really needs some water so probably give him some water after this but once he gets the water he will just perk right back up usually here's a guy that was started sometime back there you go you can see that he is rooted he is doing well he is well established he could probably use a little bit of water you can tell because it starts to shrink back a little bit so the thing that you want to be a little bit careful of is not to let them get too desiccated you want to make sure that you water them when they start to look desiccated not when they've been desiccated for two weeks because if you water them when they have are severely desiccated you are probably going to end up rotting them especially if you give them too much water so if you've been desiccated for a really long time it is very detrimental to just dump a bunch of water in the pot give it a little bit of water and then check on it in a few days here is this guy which was also rooted i believe last this one was started i think it was last fall this is rip salas oh no this one was started more recently than that repsalis clavata but you can see i just kind of cut them stick them in there then i just let nature do its thing and it does sometimes you can find these guys in nurseries where they've been mass-produced where they are in some kind of a peat-based mix i'm going to give you a fair warning about this while you might buy it in a peat-based mix does not mean that you should leave it in a pea-based mix like that because when you are getting them they have been mass-produced and where they are growing they set things so it is very ideal which is a very hard thing to reproduce in a home here is another guy that i started not too long ago this is repsalis pentapaterra really cool i wasn't really all that big on this guy for a while but he kind of grew on me i think i've said that before you can see his little light berry a little white berry there we go really cute um again you can see they're just stems are just stuck down in there stuck it outside let nature do its thing it's another one that's going to need a little bit less water because it does have thicker branches much like repsalis paradoxa so these guys here are much more recent acquisitions these i got from captain hage earlier this year so these guys are all started from cutting these guys you know basically all the same thing you can see that they're just put in these pots they're all put in that same mix they were all just kind of stuck in here put outside and i let the outside do its thing and you can see that they are plump because they have a rooted so you can see all different kinds in here right so there's all different kinds of beautiful repsalis in here and again you get the same kind of thing you know like these kind of skinnier branched ones you need a little bit less water this one here which i think is just really cool um you know he is going to need a little bit less water because he's so thick this guy obviously has those big clays he's going to need even less water this guy here even less water than that and that is the rule when they come inside or when they are protected from getting water outdoors naturally when they don't have the right air flow etc etc these are some of my favorites actually ones like this are really cool so this is supposed to be rip salas hollery i don't know if i'm saying that right but you can see you know it's putting on this new growth same thing just jammed in a pot there uh same thing with these guys you can see just jammed in a pot there and boom and it's growing um you know the same thing here we've got a little clavada in there stuck in a pot stuck in the same media it's growing here we have another um pacheco leonis i have so many which check out this fact because i'm so totally enamored with it it's really funny um here we get some really crazy guys like this guy what is this guy i don't know what this guy is you can see it's unknown but you know he's got these kind of weird branches like this it um the way that it's growing it looks like it's some kind of terrace um but you know same thing you can see it's just cut just plopped in there you know he's a fairly new addition just starting to put on growth be patient about them starting to put on growth because you know here's one especially these kind you'll have to excuse my oxalis once it starts it is impossible to get rid of it's horrible if anybody has any pointers on how to just get rid of the oxalis let me know please so you can see this guy is nice and rooted and i know that it's rooted because it's nice and firm but this is not new growth this is old growth so be patient you know because this guy has been he's been out here rooting like this for probably a couple of months now and he still hasn't grown when they decide to grow they just take off but it takes some time for some of them other ones they're just maniacs but i do notice that the ones with the larger clades like that they're a little bit slower you know here we have another basicara you can see it's got like these little buds coming out and like new little growths and stuff here we have this guy which i think is really cool i was really confused about that guy at first because i thought that it was actually pacheco leonis um subspecies pacheco leonis so because this one over here is actually catanolata so that's what i thought when i saw it and i was looking at pictures of it inside of the new cactus lexicon but as it turns out no it was it was correct in the labeling that i got it as so it is actually repsalis paradoxa i do not know how to say it structure structure i will actually just write it in there because i'm gonna butcher that but i thought it was so fun because it was growing these little loops out here these like really cool little loops before they unfurl so really neat really interesting little guy and that guy has bloomed and so the reason why i'm positive now that it is alice paradoxa streptino something or other um is because the bloom was yellow so it when it comes down to it the uh pacheco leonis the blooms are actually purple or brown so that was kind of an interesting confirmation there there we go so there's a few that are in here we're gonna have to ignore these front ones here because those are lipismium but some of these back ones here same kind of thing right so you can see here they're just jammed in there and they are just starting to grow with this really really pretty very fluorescent looking new growth this really pretty new girl i'm not entirely sure what this is it says that it is repsalis uh pittery but i don't really know if that's true um so there's a whole bunch of guys in here that were just sort of started from these cuttings so you can see here you know they just sort of start and then you can see this new growth because it's much much like lighter green and greenish yellow so you can see all this new growth and it's just taking off here's kind of a fun one well let's see if i can get that guy out of there without damaging it you can see same thing he's just cut put in there you know they're all planted in there an inch or two deep and then you can see it just boom you can see all this new growth that's coming out of here very very easy even some of these odd duck ones here like this is another terrace you can see how funny that is with its new growth this new growth right here just about killed me i thought it was so cool when i saw it i was like look at that weird little growth so really neat just very easy to start so here you can see this guy again these are pretty long branches that i just sort of jammed in here um you know again you can see that they were just kind of put in there and i like this one because he's got new growth coming from [Music] the base it's new little growths coming out of the base there and you can see just the two little snaps we put in there so really cool there's another thing so here you have like a really tiny little pot and then you just have a couple of i think this is probably some cuttings of uh hollery here that are just kind of jammed in here and you can see you can do it just like that too so you don't have to get these exact three-inch pots they you can actually use even little tiny pots like this and just sort of start little cuttings like that same thing with the media though you just want to make sure that it is really coarse and well draining you can sort of customize that to your area so if it's very wet where you are you know you want to add like more chunky materials if it's very dry where you are you want to add less chunky materials maybe more bark maybe more potting media potting soil that kind of thing so here's another little guy you know same thing put in there you can see the new little growths coming out this guy's not been here for very long a couple of months and there's quite a few that are over there you know doing their thing that is not a rift salas this is not a rip stylus either but there's kind of an idea of one that really isn't going to root you know you can see it's just sort of not really taking where all of the other ones have so there's an idea of that here's some little guy he's rooted he's got new little growths coming out aren't these guys something these guys are so cool don't totally remember i think that i got these as grandiflora i'm not exactly sure though i would have to go check some records and stuff but it doesn't really matter to me what they are because i just think they're really cool um they're so thick and so weird so again something like this guy is gonna need less water and there was something about these guys even when they were shipped like when i got them in their original media and stuff it looked like they were greenhouse started and they were in the most well draining media i think i've ever seen so when i see stuff like that i know hands down the sky is going to be a little bit more challenging because i think that he's going to be more prone to root rot he's going to be way more prone to over watering so something just to kind of note you know stuff like this where it's very thick and woody and stuff you know it's just a little more challenging because of needing to make sure that you don't over water it too much especially when it's young starting from cutting like this so i hope that you've enjoyed kind of this general rip stylus care and propagation video thank you for watching and happy cacti growing

Channel: Epiphytic Cacti

Views: 15,825

Keywords: Rhipsalis, Epiphytic, Cacti, Cactus, Orchid, Epiphyllum, Disocactus, Care, Watering, Lepismium, Pfeiffera, Propagation, Cuttings

Id: kouFtfpqbrQ

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021