hi hope you're keeping safe and doing super well if we've not met before my name is james and i'm
from sydney australia today i wanted to talk to you about my favorite plant the monstera thai
constellation and give you a september 2021 update on how it's been growing i started to notice some
of my aerial roots fall out of my moss pole so i wanted to give you some simple tips and tricks on
how you can do some air layering with sphagnum moss remember if you liked today's video don't
forget to give it a thumbs up hit that subscribe button if you haven't already and tap that bell
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so if you're new here i first acquired the monstera thai constellation in february 2021
this year so it's been about seven months since then i'll give you a quick recap of how the past
couple months have been growing but as you can see at a high level each leaf that has grown has
become larger and larger i am snipping off the lower level leaves which are yellowing as it's
progressing however that is a natural part of the life cycle it is currently september meaning that
it is springtime here in sydney which i'm super super excited about because it's the growing
season so hopefully there'll be some amazing growth that i have to report to in the next couple
of months so since my last july 2021 update video i've observed the following things in the past
month i've got this brand new leaf emerge which is super exciting because it has been winter in
the past couple of months and hasn't stopped the growth however this new leaf has no marbling in
comparison to the previous leaf but i don't mind so much because the speckling on this is amazing
the speckling here is true to thai constellation form and i've really been admiring as of late
i was super concerned at the beginning when it was first growing out because it was growing up
very small and i was worrying over the stupidest things because you know when you sort of care for
something so much you tend to over complicate and worry now i'm not new to house plants or anything
but because i cared for this one so much i was literally talking to it every day saying why won't
you grow what am i doing wrong but i'm happy to report that it's grown out 37 centimeters in size
which is the same size as the previous leaf which hopefully this trend continues onwards and upwards
so this is the first time it's ever happened to me but two of the lower level leaves
yellowed off this time i normally only ever have one leaf yellow off at a time but it's leading
me to believe that the new growth is needing a lot more of energy and it's directing more of
that energy to those new leaves so anyway i kept the two leaves aside here just to show and tell
but it has been decomposing on my table for a while so i will bend this shortly after but yeah
it was quite weird because i normally only have one leaf and this time i saw two and finally what
i thought was really cool is that i saw aerial roots produce more aero roots which really goes
to show that these sphagnum poles really do work so i thought this was a great opportunity to show
you how to air layer using sphagnum moss using my monstera thai constellation as an example now
i've actually alerted this syngonium fantasy over here using perlite which has reaped some amazing
results when it comes to additional root growth so if you're looking to hair layer in general it's a
yes it's going to give you some amazing results and that will hopefully increase the foliage
that you have on your plants now what you're going to need is your sphagnum moss of course
i've got a bowl full of water which i'm going to use to moisten that sphagnum moss i've got
cling wrap twine scissors and optional you can use rooting hormone as well to speed up the process
okay so let's get started first of all grab your rooting hormone i've actually put this into
a bottle it comes in a packet which i had before and just lightly dab this with my paint brush
and then i've got a tray here just to catch the ends of that you want to lightly dust
the ends of your roots just a bit that should be enough and we're going to be air layering
three sections of this plant today so i'll just dust that across those three
and that should be enough cool i thought the great analogy that i heard about using rooting hormone
is why walk when you can drive true think about it anyway next i'm going to grab this cling wrap
and i'm going to rip apart three different sections and make them into quite large squares
cool so then put that to the side
next of all you're gonna grab your twine and then cut it into a couple centimeters or inches so
you're going to use that to wrap around that cling wrap later so i'm going to cut four of these now
so that length should be more than enough
once you're done put that all to the side
all right and we are going to work with this magnum mask now so
i've got a really massive packet because we had a shortage here in sydney
um this will last you for ages if you purchase the 500 grams bag but yeah purchase the 150
gram that will do for quite a long time so a lot of this sphagnum moss is very compact
so i'll this will go a long way so grab a bit of that and then put it into your bowl
and this will expand as you pull it out and then we're going to prepare our sphagnum moss
cool i'm going to tie this back up
again the side okay and now we're going to work with our sphagnum moss
so just work your hands through the sphagnum inside your bowl and then make that nice and wet
once that's wet you then actually want to wring it out
rough guide when you're wringing it out it should not be dripping when you're
starting to apply it to your plants cool so i'm going to grab half this
and then grab your cling wrap and the technique to have this the technique for
air layering here is usually that you put the cling wrap in your palm of your hands
and then you put the spaghetti moss on top and actually i'll go in my left hand so i
can show you on the camera then you want to wrap that around that root
and then encapsulate and encase that will root so
now grab your twine here and then tie the ends of that
this looks like a little money bag dumpling
if you know what that is oops that's falling out so i'll make that a little bit tighter but we want
to encase that root without sphagnum moss so then it encourages more roots to grow out from there
so i'm just going to tidy this one up and snip the ends of that just to make it look tidier
but yeah super easy that's basically air layering so i actually know this is already going to
outgrow this magnum moss bag already because basically these areal roots can go quite long
but i'm okay with that i just want to give it a little bit more of a kick
and eventually i can top up if i want later anyway i'll quickly do the other two now
so you probably just saw that this one fell off
so make sure that you're tying it quite tightly so then the ends don't fall off
one week later as i expected the aerial route has outgrown the moss wrap but i was still pretty
impressed that it managed to pierce through the other side i ended up just redoing it and made
the wrap much larger so that future roots had more room to grow in note you'll want to seal it
as tight as you can because the wrap is supposed to retain the moisture inside mine were too loose
so that the moss ended up drying out super quick and i had to redo them all also i was curious how
the other wrap was going so i unraveled it and found no growth i wasn't too surprised though
it was already quite a mature aerial route from a few months back it was only about a
week but i wrapped it back up after this anyway and that's pretty much it when it comes to air
layering super simple right hopefully this video was really really useful for you if you liked
today's video don't forget to give it a thumbs up hit that subscribe button if you haven't already
and tap that bell icon to get notifications so you don't miss any updates or new videos drop i'll see
you in plant baths and rants stay safe welcome to plant rants and bands where i showcase some cool
funny or interesting content that i find online i randomly saw this instagram reel created by from
sit to plant and thanks for letting me use this footage by the way sid but i had never seen this
before and thought it was super cool to share it's a propagation board where you just fill in your
pre-moistened sphagnum mossing place your cuttings inside and wait for it to grow awesome right