TAMMY: Hands up if your house plant collection
looks a bit like this.
Leaves are yellowing, browning,
and they just look a little bit sickly.
There are things like overwatering, fungal problems,
pests crawling everywhere.
So let's start by mending this relationship.
Now, these calatheas are in desperate need of some love.
This one here has been sitting in way too much direct light,
so the leaves are a bit bleached.
This one is suffering from a little bit of a lack of humidity.
It's caused the leaf edges to brown and become crispy.
They can both do with a really good trim.
Make sure you use a sharp pair of scissors or secateurs
so you don't end up with raggedy edges.
And cut at the base.
Once you have finished, your plant will look a little bit thin,
but that's OK.
There are still a few blemishes,
but they're nothing really to worry about.
And as the plant grows, you can cut them off.
This calathea, there's not too many leaves to remove.
You can remove the worst-affected ones,
but the ones that have a little bit of blemish,
they don't need to be cut off.
Calatheas love a warm, humid and moist environment,
and being in our homes,
it's not exactly the best environment for them.
It's OK, though.
A good way to help increase the humidity
is to group plants together - they love that.
You can also invest in a humidifier too.
So that's looking pretty good now.
For these two, I'm giving them a little drink of seaweed solution
to help with the shock of losing leaves.
When growing calatheas indoors,
they need that sweet spot,
somewhere that's not too bright and not too dark -
just right.
I'm gonna take these back inside.
This Alexandra palm
I picked up from the clearance rack at the nursery.
It was a bargain buy.
But there are a few things I need to address.
First, I'm removing this leaf.
And then this reveals all the scale on the stems.
Scale is a really common pest on palms.
They're sap-suckers,
and they literally just find themselves a spot
and then they suck the sap away.
You can often find them congregated at the base of the stems,
but they can also be found along the stems and even on the leaves.
To tackle the scale,
I would normally use a horticultural oil
to really smother them.
However, palms can be a little bit sensitive
to oil-based sprays,
so it's a good idea to test on a small, inconspicuous spot first
to see if there are any adverse reactions.
In this case, the infestation is quite small,
so I'm just gonna wipe the scale away.
It's a good idea to wipe down your plants quite regularly.
It helps remove dust build-up
and helps you check for any pests too.
Looks like it's well rooted into its current pot.
To help it get out,
I'm gonna snip these large roots off.
This one needs a bit more force.
It is pot-bound,
as the roots are really quite hard to pull away.
The secateurs are going to help me loosen the roots.
And while it looks like I'm being quite rough with this,
I am, but the plant's OK.
They're quite resilient.
Now they've got some room to breathe.
They were suffocating in their spot.
But the roots are nice and firm,
which is a good sign that they're fairly healthy.
I'm giving this palm a new home
and using really good quality potting mix.
So, this mix is really well draining.
It's looking so much better already.
To grow a palm indoors,
give it a brightly lit spot out of direct sunlight.
Monsteras are one of my favourite indoor plants.
But I'm totally devastated
that they're suffering from some fungal leaf spots
and also some rust.
Rust is a very common disease
on monsteras.
It often presents itself as these little round circles
and they're often speckled with this rusty powder.
This fungal leaf spot, usually part of the plant has died,
and then you can see that it's surrounded by a yellow halo.
The best thing to do is to remove the leaves.
I know it sounds drastic, but it will help stop the spread.
I'm not putting these diseased leaves into the compost bin or green waste.
As they're disease-affected,
it's best that I let them die down completely,
and you can do that by tying them in a plastic bag.
Now, this leaf, it does look a little sad,
but new buds will form soon and it will have friends again.
This poor neglected plant
is a mini watermelon peperomia.
It was given as a gift to a friend
and it's really not far from death's door.
It's usually really cute,
with fleshy leaves and upright stems.
I'm not entirely sure I can save it,
but I'm gonna give it a good try.
My thinking is that it's been overwatered,
and the best way to know is to remove it from its pot,
but before I do that,
I'm going to remove all these droopy leaves.
It's actually looking a lot better.
You can even see there's some new growth poking through.
Now I want to see what's happening underneath.
Ooh. It is quite wet.
But the roots do look pretty healthy.
They're very fine, but they're not rotting.
We're just gonna pot it into some fresh mix.
And I was gonna give up on you.
So this mix is really well draining.
To help the plant settle into its new home,
I'm watering in with a liquid seaweed.
Now, the trick with mini watermelon peperomias
is to not overdo the watering.
Also, give it a warm spot with good airflow.
This Epipremnum 'Marble Queen'
isn't so much sick, but it is quite sad.
The stems are really bare, as you can see here.
We've got one little leaf just hanging on there.
This happens when there's inconsistent watering
or, sometimes, not enough light.
There's an easy fix, though.
To encourage the plant to become nice and bushy again,
I'm cutting it back to just above a node.
I'm cutting this one off as well.
I'm not throwing away these, though.
They're going to be used as cuttings
to help make this plant a little bushier.
When taking a cutting, always cut below a node,
and this is where the roots are going to grow from.
Now I'm gonna pot up my cuttings.
So I've got a couple here.
And when I pot up,
I'm gonna make sure I bury one of the nodes.
It doesn't matter whether the leaf is up or down.
As long as a node is buried, the plant will find its way.
While this stem is quite full down below,
up top it's a little bare.
To fix this,
we can pin the nodes down into the top of the pot
and new shoots will grow from there.
These pins are just bits of flexible wire
that have been into this U-shape.
Once the roots do form, they won't need the pins anymore,
so you can remove them, or just leave them there.
And now it doesn't look so sad anymore.
With a little TLC,
these plants are on their way to being happy house plants again.
Good luck with yours.