Alright, I feel like the lighting is going to change a lot, probably, so if it does
I apologize it's just kind of cloudy today so super bright and super dark. Hello, how are you?
Welcome back if you've been here before or hello if you're new, My name is Rachel. Uh, today we're
chatting about plants so if you don't like plants very much this video is not for you.
There are lots of different topics on my channel. I've also expanded on this video and I've included
links and photos and all of those kinds of things in a blog post which I put together on my personal blog
which is www.rachelaust.me - that blog is hosted by Squarespace who is today's video sponsor. So I
did want to say a little thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video and I wanted to actually
put together a list of tips which I wish I knew sooner so this will be very beneficial for you
if you're someone who's just started collecting or you've got a few and you're not really fully
confident with what you're doing with them yet. You were the person that I made this video for.
Alright different types of plants are going to have different individual care tips as to what
they specifically need but what I wanted to cover is just general care things which would have made
my life easier if I knew them earlier. I don't even know how many plants I have anymore. We passed the
hundred mark and I stopped counting. In the last three months I've only bought one plant. My existing
ones are just taking over the whole house. When it comes to caring for them I tend to have a 'less is
more' sort of approach. I don't like to over care, I don't like to over water. You've got to remember that plants are
pretty self-sufficient - they grow in nature on their own with nobody's help. You just need to
make sure that they have the basic ingredients that they need and then let them take care of
themselves. Okay, firstly let's talk about cuttings because obviously taking cuttings is a great way
to end up with more plants in your house. More than you know what to do with. If you take a cutting you
can propagate the plants that you love. Now, when I used to take cuttings I would just take snip,
throw it in some water. I mean, you can but you risk rotting the plant itself. When you take a cutting
you need to make sure that firstly what you're using to take the cutting with is sterile so it
doesn't have other bacteria and debris and things on it and secondly before we place the cutting in
our preferred medium, so obviously you don't need to propagate just in water - you can use water, you
can use perlite, you can use fragment moss... whatever you like to do. I still like water, I find it's easy.
You want to let the cutting callus over so take something clean to make the cutting. Once you've
made the cutting leave it out on the bench. Let it callus over. I recently took a cutting of one of my
Thai Constellations so I can gift it to a friend. I took that cutting and I just left it to sit out
on the bench for about half a day. The plant will not die if it doesn't go into water straight away.
So I left it out to callus. Another thing that you could do is also place some ceylon cinnamon on the
end of the cutting so that way when you put it in water the stem of the plant won't rot. While we're
on the topic of cinnamon, if you've seen some of my other videos you know that I do this... I like to
take true cinnamon (ceylon cinnamon) and sprinkle it on the soil of my plants - this helps prevent gnats.
If you buy a plant from a big chain nursery sooner or later you're going to get a plant
that has a gnat infestation in the soil, it just happens. So many of these places have really like
thick potting mixes that don't breathe very well and gnats like a breed in them because they
hold a lot of water. So what I like to do is make sure that, you know, all the plants have like nice
breathable, chunky soil I definitely prefer like a more chunky mix (I'll talk about that later in
the video) but we want to make sure that the soil isn't consistently damp because we don't want gnats
to be able to breed in them. Now obviously there's heaps of different chemicals and products you can
buy for this but a very simple trick is just to get some ceylon cinnamon and sprinkle it on the
top layer of soil. You can even mix it through the top layer of soil if you want to. What this will do
is it will help dry out that top portion of soil particularly if it's a very large plant. You've
got to think like the more soil there is the longer it's going to take for that water to dry
and once you put that cinnamon on the soil it will help stop the fungus forming which will deter gnats
from breeding in it because while we might want a house full of plants we don't want a house full of
bugs.
Another thing that I wish I knew much sooner which would have changed how I like to position plants
in my house is there's no such thing as plants that love low light. It's a term that gets thrown
around a lot. I feel like I've probably used it myself. There's plants that can tolerate low
light absolutely but do they thrive in it? And while I know it's easy to be like oh but there's
plants that live in rainforests and it can be super dark at the bottom levels of the rainforest.
I feel like rainforest dark is a little bit different to your bathroom which has
a window this big... dark. It's not the same kind of light, it's not the same kind of environment.
Now if you order a plant, whether it's just like an online plant store or if you like buy
it off someone in a Facebook group or do a swap or whatever it might be or even ebay, a lot of times
to save on postage and help stop making a mess of the whole package a lot of places will send plants
bare rooted. Plant stores not so much but other places yes. If the plants in soil just leave it
don't repot it straight away. Um, if the plant has been sent to you bare rooted pop it in some water
and you can put like a tiny teeny tiny tiny bit of like seaweed solution or season in the water as
well but you don't have to. You can just put it in some water and leave it for like three four days.
Just don't even touch it. If it looks fine and looks healthy just put it in the water and just
leave it alone because we want to let it like prop back up, settle in a little bit and then plant it
up. When plants are posted they can go through a bit of transit shock - this can help minimize that.
And while we're talking about getting new plants I cannot stress this one enough.
When you get a new plant - quarantine it. Don't just put it in with all your other stuff
or bad things can happen. I'm not saying they will I'm just saying they can. So a while ago now, this
was not any time recently, I bought a plant from a nursery that I had been to a whole bunch of times
and you know their stuff had never worked out badly for me before and I got a new
plant and brought it home and a couple of weeks later I noticed some fine webbing
and I noticed that the plant obviously, you know, it wasn't there when I got it because when I got home
all the leaves looked totally fine, um, there was nothing odd about it but then after a couple weeks
they had hatched from their egg, they had started messing the plant up. There was spider mites and of
course they spread to other plants as well so, you know, for the longest time now if I do get
something new I put it in an area where there's no other plants close to it so that if something
does emerge from the soil because you got to remember these bugs have different life cycles
so something hatches from the soil you don't want it spreading to the rest of your plants
because imagine trying to treat all of them at once especially if you have a lot, uh, it's just
a nightmare really. Learn from my mistake and when you get something new just put it in a spot where
if something does hatch from it - it can't get to anyone else.
Now when we're talking about actually planting things up I personally have found that creating
a soil blend is the key to a happy plant life so I have a few little containers
of different types of soil which i'm sure you guys have seen me like pull out before when I'm
repotting and vlogs and things like that. I have an aroid soil mix which I bought from It Plantae.
I have some standard potting soil, I have moss, I have orchid bark, I have perlite. I think I have a
few other little bits and pieces in the outdoor cabinet like some charcoal and things like that.
I don't use them as frequently, it's more just the ones that I listed before which I use quite
often. Your plant needs to be able to drain. That's a really big factor for it being happy
in your home environment is having soil where it doesn't get waterlogged. I tend to get a fair
few dms from people sending me photos of their plants and asking like what's wrong with them.
I'm no expert, like this is just a fun hobby for me and it's something that I've enjoyed for a long time.
In all honesty, I'm not the best person to be messaging for that kind of advice but something
that i do see a lot is a lot of people's plans have root rot and the easiest way to make sure
that doesn't happen is to have a chunkier soil mix. Obviously this is going to depend on the type
of plant that you're having. I have a lot of monsteras and philodendrons and epipremnum
and that sort of thing. If you're someone who loves just owning heaps of cacti this advice won't apply to
you because they need a more sandy, even drier soil mix. Sorry, this light is annoying me so
much, it's changing a lot and I keep having to change the aperture on my camera
but what I was going to say is if you don't want to get all those different kinds of soils you
don't have to. Honestly, just start with with two. Please? Please for me? Um, an organic potting mix and
perlite. You can pick up a big bag of perlite for really really cheap and then just mix that through
the soil. That will help aerate it and it will also help the plant grow bigger and stronger roots. Which is what
you want because if you've got a really good solid root system you're going to get an awesome plant.
Next I want to show you the hairpin trick. I have shown this in another video and it's a great way
to take what is otherwise like a thin and small plant and turn it into something that looks a lot
better. So things like your pothos, your adensonii, heartly philodendron, all of those this will work
great for. What we can do is actually encourage those nodes to dive through in the soil and grow
us a more thicker looking plant. So rather than just having like one vine hanging out of a pot
what we can actually do is circle the plant around itself. Use a hair pin, which we want to make sure
you pull it apart - you don't want it too tight. If it's too tight it's going to essentially strangle
the plant and you're going to lose that vine so just make sure you pull it apart with your fingers
a little bit to give it some space particularly at that top loop section and then just drive that
into the soil over the plant to encourage the node to dive down. Now I want you to consider
all the greenery around your home as little solar panels and what happens to solar panels if they
get super dusty and dirty? They're not going to be as effective so I really encourage you to clean
your plants leaves. I like to alternate between just using a cloth with some water and then other times
I'll use a white oil and a cloth because I find the white oil gives the plant leaves a really
beautiful sheen and everything looks super glossy and healthy. Another one you could use is neem oil.
Both white oil and neem oil are pesticides and neem oil is also a fungicide as well so if you
do clean the plant leaves with them you're being preventative. By cleaning the leaves you're giving
the plant more opportunity to use more sunlight and therefore it will grow more efficiently. So
this is going to be really important especially if you live somewhere that doesn't have lots of big
window space. You want to make sure that you're maximizing all of the light that you do get.
And finally, I don't know why I didn't know this one sooner but I only learned this like a year
and a half ago. I don't know, do I live under a rock? Perhaps... but when a plant is developing a new leaf
make sure it gets more water. They use more water when they're actually putting out new growth
so if you see a plant putting out a bunch of leaves check the soil. The soil will probably
be dryer much faster than usual. I used to have a set watering day where like every Saturday or
every Sunday I would just go around and water everything but what I do now is every second day because
there's a lot of plants, so every second day I go around and check the soil of every plant. I
have my watering can with me obviously as well if it's dry I water it if the soil is still damp I
just leave it but if you can start to get in that kind of pattern where every couple of days you're
just checking the soil of your plants and use a moisture meter or just use your finger and put
that in the soil... you'll start to notice patterns between which plants are super thirsty and which
plants are not and their water requirements will of course change between Winter and Summer. I feel
like the plant that is most important for is alocasias. I used to always kill alocasias
but we've not had any casualties in a long time because I just give them extra water when they're
putting out a new leaf that's it, that's the only thing I changed with them. Let's keep the mood
on today's video light, shall we? I don't know about you guys but I always love having a bit of a laugh
in the comments section. What is the worst like funniest mistake you have made with one of your
plants? I'll tell you mine, I'm so embarrassed by this by the way. It would have been like five years ago
I think and I don't, I don't think back then I had ever used sphagnum moss before but I ordered a
plant online and they sent it bare rooted but when they sent it bare rooted they wrapped it
in sphagmum moss because that's how you keep some moisture around the root system of the plant
while it's in the post. What I did, I got the plant and I straight away planted it in soil with the
moss still wrapped around the root system. If you know, you know. Like that was dumb - that was so dumb.
I just thought like, this moss, I was like 'oh does it have to stay on the roots?' like I didn't know
and i just planted it straight away. It died, are we surprised? Maybe not because the the moss just
retained too much moisture around the roots and it was like in a ball of moss and then in just plain
soil. We're past those days thankfully but please tell me I'd love to know the funny things that you
guys have done as well because I feel like a lot of plant care stuff is really just trial and error
and you can make a lot of errors. I hope there was at least one of these that you didn't know before
but this is honestly, this is stuff that I learnt over time and by spending time in
like Facebook groups and things and I just wish I knew them all at the start
because it would have made things a lot easier. Um if you want some more advice and things I do have
other videos as well so feel free to check them out. I also put together a blog post for this
video so if you wanted to jump over to rachelaust.me you can find it over there. I do have a
few other plant things on there too and again I wanted to say thank you to Squarespace for
sponsoring today's video. I use Squarespace to host not only my personal journal which is the one that
I've linked today but also my health and fitness blog which is eatrunlift.me so I've been using
them for a long time now and the reason is because it is so simple. I like to take the fuss out of the
things that I do so that I can focus on what's really important and actually get the work done
rather than being bogged down in all the behind the scenes. You can choose from gorgeous templates
or you can take their templates, customize your own... they've also got amazing built-in integrations so
that the back end of your business or your blog or whatever it is you're putting on your Squarespace
site can run seamlessly. They also have a fantastic set of blogging tools which is why I decided to
set up with them in the first place because I hated how complicated my old platform was
and I love that when I want to put together a new post on Squarespace I can drag and drop elements. I
can put them wherever I want them. It's got great built-in SEO features or even if you want to
you can just duplicate a previous post. If you're someone who likes keeping things in similar format
like I do. If you've been thinking about setting something up I'm gonna give you the advice that
I give all my friends and say just do it just get started and you can head to squarespace.com
and sign up for a free trial and then when you're ready to set your website live head to the url
that I've put on the screen and in the description box and you can get 10% off your first purchase but
thank you guys for hanging out with me and letting me rant at you about plants for however long it's
been. I feel like I've been talking for a while now but as you know they're something I enjoy. They
bring a lot of calmness into my space, into my life. They've helped me learn to like switch off more
because when your hands are covered in soil you can't really be doing anything else but I
hope you're well. Um, if you haven't already let's be friends on Instagram. My username is just
@rachelaust same as it is on here and I'll catch you guys either over there or on my next upload. Bye!