At the end of the video,
we're going to be giving away five of the money tree plants.
So let's go ahead and figure out how to care for this bad boy.
No matter who you are you've probably seen this plant
somewhere in your life. Whether you're a houseplant lover or not,
maybe at a Chinese restaurant, maybe at a dentist's office,
it's a really popular plant. And I think a lot of people just say, oh,
that's just another plant.
But there's actually quite a bit of interesting history and care behind this
plant.
The money tree plant also known as the Malabar chestnut or
the more precise name Pachira aquatica.
There are a lot of plants with the common name of money tree.
So Pachira aquatica is the more precise way to refer to this one. But you know,
how did it come to be? Why is it so popular and why does it look like this?
Well legend has it, and who knows if this is true,
that a penniless farmer once prayed to the gods for good fortune.
And then he went out into his fields and found a new strange plant growing in
his field. He took that plant into his home.
And from then on his fortune started to change. Now whether that's true or not,
this is certainly true.
The money tree plant really kind of exploded in popularity in the 1980s.
There was a Taiwanese truck driver who took the plant and decided to actually do
this, braiding the stems. And he did that in order to, as he called it,
lock-in the luck of the money tree plant. Which is kind of a fun,
creative little thing to do. Needless to say,
that is how it's commonly cultivated and grown to this very day.
So in today's video,
what we're going to do is talk about how to care for the money tree plant.
And stay tuned because of the end of the video,
we're going to be giving away five of the money tree plants.
So let's go ahead and figure out how to care for this bad boy.
Light and temperature.
This is a plant where most of the information you can diagnose it with is found
within its leaves. So it wants bright, indirect light.
Really close to a window like this one over here is going to be a really good
spot. Or supplemental lighting certainly will help it.
But what you have to look for is you look for the coloration of the leaves.
If they start to yellow, that's a good sign that it wants more light.
It's not quite getting enough. It can't photosynthesize enough.
It's not producing enough energy. And thus the plant does not look lush,
green and vibrant. So you want to move it closer towards the light.
If you find some sun scald of course then, you know, bring it back.
It can be a little sensitive to find the right exact place inside your house.
But that's what I found to work. Temperatures 50 to 90 degrees,
very wide range here. It just is not very cold sensitive.
So if you're in an area that gets like a frost and you're actually growing it
outside,
it might be a good time to bring it indoors once those temps drop below 50.
Another thing I like to do with this plant is because it likes to grow so tall,
especially when you've braided it like this,
what I like to do is every so often I give it a nice 45 degree rotation
so I get even growth.
I don't get any sort of stretching towards the sun on one side only.
Notice how most of the light is casting a shadow this way,
it's coming in from this direction. Well,
if I left this plant like this for like a year,
you're going to see the plant be tilting towards this direction.
It might even become top heavy. It won't look even.
So I like to come through maybe once a month, once every couple of weeks,
and just give it a quick turn. You just do it when you're watering it,
it's no big deal.
It will like a little more humidity than the average houseplant.
So one thing you can do there is you can group a lot of plants together,
kind of group all your humidity loving plants together.
Make sure that you give them ample water. You could even get a plant humidifier,
if you so choose.
Or you could use like a little gravel pot that's got some water in there and
then you're going to throw some humidity, some local humidity,
up around the plant.
But that's pretty much it as far as light and temperature goes.
When it comes to watering this plant,
we always want to look at the native growing conditions of a plant.
And then mimicking those as best we can indoors, of course we're never perfect,
is going to be a really good bet as far as how to make the plant thrive.
So naturally in its native environment,
it goes through intense periods of being watered via rain, et cetera.
And then intense periods of drought.
And so what you can do then is mimic that by giving it maybe two to four
extremely deep and heavy waters throughout the month,
and then after that you just let it completely dry out and then you go back.
And so what I like to do then is very similar to a lot of my other videos that
I've put out on houseplant care.
And I do have an entire video actually on caring and watering for your container
plant specifically, all about watering.
So I would highly recommend watching that. But you can see already,
it's starting to flow through really quickly because I haven't moved it out of
its nursery pot yet. And so you might say, oh,
I just dumped a bunch of water on that.
But not really because most of this just flowed right through,
which is really not good. It actually is time to repot this,
which we will do later on in the video. But I like to just moisten.
It looks to be a bit of a peat-heavy mix here.
So sometimes peat can be a little hard to rehydrate.
And then I just come through and make sure that I'm giving it an adequate soak.
So when I'm saying deep water, it's fine to have water run out.
You just want to make sure eventually that all that soil media is nice and
moistened.
And so what I like to do then is just come through and just keep on doing it and
make sure I get a nice soak. And on top of that, like I said,
it does love humidity.
So it's not the worst thing in the world that there's some water in the bottom
of this pot especially if there's a little bit of gravel,
you may just want to leave it there.
And that will slowly evaporate out and increase that humidity around the plant,
which is perfectly fine. Now that's pretty much it as far as watering goes.
It's just one of those that you almost treat in a succulent-esque
manner except for, of course, the soil mix is different,
which is what we're talking about next. Time to talk about soil.
So what it wants is a peaty loamy mix.
Loamy is kind of the perfect blend of sand, silt and clay,
at least in the outdoor world.
That's kind of the way you think about it is that perfect mixture of that really
nice loose friable rich and fertile soil. So it wants that.
So a good indoor potting mix that has good drainage will help.
You can add a little bit of peat or coconut coir to help retain a little bit
more as long as you don't get to that point where once you water,
it's just wet forever.
Because then you're going to get into that root rot overwatering issue.
But besides that,
I find that most indoor potting mixes will work for this provided you just add a
little bit of that peat mixture in. You can see with this soil here,
that is the case. It might be hard to see,
but you can see the fine grains of peat fibers or coco fibers in here that add a
little bit more of that water retention without just drowning it out.
Like I said, this money tree is still in its nursery pot.
I'm going to pot it up. So this is maybe a little bit aggressive of a pot up.
It's probably one and a half inches. You want to go one or two inches above.
But first of all,
let's take this out and just take a look at the root structure
of it. Seems to be pretty darn good.
What's interesting is you can see when I watered it,
you can see how the outsides of the soil mix are wet and how the inside,
right in the middle in the root zone, is not quite wet yet. That's why I mean,
watering super deep can be really important. Cause you saw me water it three,
four times and I still didn't crack all the way into that center.
Which first of all that could be a sign that there's just a lot of roots in
there, it's hard to get in there,
but also just could be a sign that you really need to make sure you pot it up
and water it well. So what we've got here is a little mix that I made myself.
This is just standard potting mix with a bit of coconut coir added in for a
little more moisture and water retention. So I'm going to take some,
it's going to get a little messy probably,
but of course you fill the bottom first.
I've got a whole video on why you shouldn't fill the bottom of your pots with
gravel. It's kind of just a pointless exercise.
It doesn't do what most people think it does.
So that's why I just go ahead and put it straight in.
I don't really worry about it.
You'll find that not a lot of soil will leak out of the bottom either.
Now what I need to do here is just kind of size it.
We want it to sit about an inch below and that's actually looking more or less
perfect. I'm not going to break up the roots too much here.
I'm just going to backfill around. And while we're doing this,
let's talk about fertilizer. So fertility for this plant, it's like many plants.
In spring and summer you can increase it because that's when it's growing a lot.
And then as you move into fall, you can kind of slow it down.
I like to use a higher nitrogen fertilizer
if I'm going to really boost the growth of this plant.
Let's say I just repotted it like I'm doing right now.
And I want to kind of juice it up.
I might use something like a 12-6-6 liquid houseplant fertilizer and then move
into a more balanced 6-6-6 or just,
all the numbers being the same nitrogen,
phosphorus and potassium liquid fertilizer as you move into fall.
And then really in winter, I wouldn't even fertilize it too much at all.
So as we do this, what we'll want to do is I like to make sure by the way,
when you're repotting that you actually water it before you remove it.
So water it, let it sit in its normal pot,
then remove it because that way you're not going to get the soil just breaking
apart and falling all over the place.
But we just want to make sure we cover it completely.
That's why it's nice to kind of set it in a little bit.
When I repotted stuff in the past,
like when I was first starting on houseplants,
I would kind of cram it right on the top, which is not a good look.
Also not good for the functioning of the plant.
When you're watering it in you're just spilling water all over the place,
et cetera. So when I do this, I like to just give it a nice little tap.
See if I've gotten all the air pockets out,
we don't want to leave empty air pockets in our repot.
And now we do have to hit it with even a little bit more water, remember?
Cause we didn't moisten the mix before we put it in there.
So just hit it with a nice water and we're good to go.
So now what we want to talk about is any pruning and training techniques as well
as the limited problems that you'll run into when you grow this plant.
Not too many, but there are a couple to watch out for. Pruning and training.
So we already know that the plant kind of comes trained,
most of the time you buy it at least.
And what you can see here is you've got some pruned off stems here,
as well as the braid.
And so typically they braid anywhere from three to five together.
It looks like we have one, two, three, four, five here.
And if you want to keep that going, you certainly can.
What you just have to do is you have to do it when these new stems are nice and
pliable. Otherwise it's not really going to work out for you.
And you can see what they've done here is they've taken, let me grab these,
they've taken off all the offshoots, right?
All of the leaf nodes that are coming off.
So if you were to go ahead and continue the braid,
you would want to do the same thing if you want a bare braid type of look.
So what you would do is you'd come through and you'd take a leaf off like that.
I'm not going to keep going. cause I actually want to bush it out a little bit.
But that's what you would do.
And you can see they've used basically a little tie here to keep it all together
while it's being trained.
Because as soon as you get towards this more woody growth down here at the
bottom right here, then it's really hard to train.
And so you might as well have gotten the job done before that.
As far as pruning goes, pruning is really only necessary to shape the plant.
You don't have to prune it for any like specific reason at all. It's just,
if you want to particularly shape the plant in any way. Now,
one thing I will say is now that I just repotted, it,
it's probably not a good idea to then also start pruning it.
I'm going to kind of let it set itself up for success.
It might even drop a couple of leaves just because it's not used to the new
situation. Then it'll get established. But from there, we're good to go.
I could prune it as aggressively as I want. And remember,
this is a plant that becomes an actual tree. So you don't have to, you know,
think you're going to kill it by pruning it back.
It's something that can respond very well to pruning as we can see right here.
Finally, pests, diseases and problems. Most of the problems again,
will be apparent in the leaves.
So yellowing leaves equals too much water or maybe not enough light.
Although there are some other things that that can be caused by.
You've got browning leaves, is usually too little water or too much sun.
You've got potential for fungus gnats and aphids,
which I have guides on epicgardening.com as far as how to take care of those.
But it is relatively low maintenance. I mean,
it kind of grows itself provided that you just make sure you nail that watering.
Because if you don't nail the watering it's going to remain really, really wet.
And you've got that overwatering issue.
But also fungus gnats really like that moist upper layer of the soil,
which is probably the most annoying indoor pest. I don't know about you guys,
but I freaking hate fungus gnats.
So I try to really nail my watering, you know,
keep it super moist and then let it dry and then rinse and repeat.
So that's pretty much it guys.
This particular money tree plant came from Plants By Post.
So we're going to give away five copies,
five of these to anyone who's watching this YouTube video.
All you have to do is just follow plantsbypost on Instagram,
follow me on Instagram and then just leave a Comment here on the YouTube
channel. And we will pick five.
I'm going to post it on the community page so you guys will know. And that's it.
I mean, I hope you enjoyed the video. This is kind of a, you know,
a basic B of a plant. I think a lot of people kind of look over it,
but it is a fascinating plant. There's a lot of history behind it.
And there's even some edible use cases for the chestnut,
the Malabar chestnut that comes out of it.
So plenty more to come on the channel.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.