If you've ever propagated a beautiful house plant like this selection of pothos
that I have right here,
only to transplant it into soil and have it die a gruesome and pathetic death,
then this video is for you. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening,
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb.
So I've got a bunch of these pothos cuttings here.
They've been rooting in water for quite some time now.
I've got a couple of varieties that I didn't really even know about until about
a month ago or so.
So it's gonna be exciting to kind of look through some of these varieties.
But we're going to discuss in today's video,
how to take a cutting like this one, look at all these roots. I mean,
it's pretty gnarly.
And successfully get it into the soil and have it thrive once that
happens. Because there's a lot of things that can go wrong.
So without further ado,
cultivate that Like button for Epic transplanting success,
and let's get into the video.
Before we get into the planting process let's just talk about these water-rooted
cuttings and why they grow a little bit differently than something that you
might root in soil. So I'll show you the underside here.
Here are all of the different root systems of the cuttings that we've created.
You can see every single one has them. Some of them didn't make it.
Those ones are not here anymore. Rest in peace. But let's take a look.
Let's just pull one out. So here's a satin style pothos variety.
This one has taken quite a while. There's almost no root growth.
We have this one tiny guy here and this even smaller one right here.
Is this still a candidate for putting in soil? It certainly is,
because remember you could have just rooted this in soil in the first place.
And some gardeners really think that this is about as much root growth as you
want from a water propagated cutting before you put it in.
And you'd want to avoid something like this,
which is a bit monstrous and actually has a stem piece right
here. Very, very odd. Nevertheless, you can actually plant both of those in.
Now here's a variety that again,
this is the one that I didn't really know about beforehand.
This is called global green. Again, nice root growth.
So the real question is how does a root develop differently in water than it
would in soil?
You can kind of think of a water-rooted cutting as like the trust fund baby of
the plant cutting world,
because it didn't really have to work to get these roots. They just develop.
It's being bathed in a perfect mixture of oxygen and water. And so these roots,
I mean, it really wouldn't look like this if it had grown in soil.
It wouldn't look like this if it had grown in soil.
You'll find that the water-rooted cuttings will have these longer,
more frail and slender roots that you do have to baby a bit when you get them
into the soil.
Let's pull a couple more of these and just take a look at what we're dealing
with here. So here's another satin style variety.
This one's got a great amount of root growth.
I'm pretty pleased with this amount. Nice, it's spreading out.
It's not too crazy, too overgrown. Good candidate.
Let's pull out this snow queen here.
This one has one extremely long and just sort of
unruly root. It looks like another one's coming out right here.
But this is the one where you kind of want to baby this a little bit when we put
it in the pot. So I'll show you how to do that. Let's pull this guy out.
Again this is, look, you've got some browning on here.
I'm going to see if we can get a little bit of that off, but it's still alive.
It just is a little bit less likely, at least in my opinion, to do well.
It has the tendency to rot quicker if you see this type of material on there.
Next up we got this guy here, another really long, thin slender one.
Next up.
Good amount of root growth here. Nothing too crazy. So look, these are two thin,
long roots.
They're going to need more time to establish in soil than something like this.
It's just a much more developed root system.
Here's another one of those global greens. Great root growth. I mean this is,
this is kind of ideally where I want to put it in.
They're just starting to fork and branch out. We've got five,
six different roots coming out and we're in a good spot.
Over here.
Is another one of our Hawaiian's. Another great one. That's looking good.
And then a couple more of these satin style varieties,
one huge root. Okay. Let's talk about how to get it in the soil. Okay.
We have our rooted cuttings. What kind of soil?
What kind of pot do we put them in? And then finally,
how do we actually put them in that pot? First of all, the pot size.
I prefer going larger rather than smaller early on, because first of all,
I want enough space for this root system right here to grow and expand.
I don't want to cram it into some small pot and kind of wind it around into the
pot. So I've chosen one that's roughly as tall as the root system here.
I might put a couple of cuttings in here and make one of those multi-planted
pothos pots that I really like to do. And then as far as the soil,
remember these all existed in just water and oxygen AND they're tropical.
Pothos are a tropical plant.
It's going to depend on the type of plant that you're growing, of course,
the soil mix that you will use.
In today's video we're going to be using the Organic Moisture Mix from Espoma
Organic, who are the sponsors of the video. What I like about it,
number one it's good for potted plants in general.
But number two it's going to retain more water than your average potting mix,
which is great for a water-rooted cutting that's used to living in pure water
and air. So that's what we're going to use.
Now I want to show you at least my method for getting them in successfully.
So I've selected a few different varieties here that I'm going to be
multi-planting in. So I've got a satin style variety.
You can actually see right here,
this is a little bit lighter than you would want it to be.
And that's because there's really no nutrition in the propagation machine.
So I assume once we put this Espoma Organic mix in,
it's going to actually establish itself and then will start drawing nutrients
and these will green up really nicely. But these are all roughly the same size.
We'll put them in something like that. But what I want to do first,
let's grab this little scoop here,
is put down a base layer of this soil.
You're kind of trying to get the roots in AS IF they grew in soil.
So you want to put a little bit of a layer down at first.
And then from here what I like to do, first of all,
we're going to have to remove these little collars because we want to make sure
we seat them correctly in the.
Soil. We'll get our little neoprene collars off.
Oh, this is interesting. Look at that! It grew right through the collar,
the power of roots. So I'm going to very gently,
I want to preserve that root if I can, very gently make a tear in this collar.
There we go. Surgeon, plant surgeon.
All right. Final one. Okay.
So what I want to do now is I'm going to suspend these in the air and sort of
float them at the level that I would want them to be. Just like that,
somewhere like that. And then see how these roots are just hanging?
They're going to hang and be back-filled around,
which is the method that I want to use. Because again,
I don't want to coil the roots up and just like smash them in there because then
that is just not even close to the normal pattern with which they would grow.
So we're going to try to mimic as close to that soil as possible.
So it's a little delicate, especially if you're planting three at the same time,
but I'm just going to hold them like this.
Let's grab a scoops-.
Worth of soil here. Can get a little messy here, but that's okay.
Just going to backfill.
Come in on this side.
This might be the least messy I've ever done this to be honest.
And then I just spilled. One more scoop should be good.
Okay. So now they're,
they're roughly in place so I can start kind of shifting them around and
mixing up the arrangement. So we'll get this satin guy over here.
Put this guy right about there. This guy right about there.
I actually have space for one more, but you know what?
If I have space for one more, I'm going to add one more.
But I'll do one with a smaller root. So here's one with a smaller root system.
What we'll do is we'll place this one right here and we'll backfill
just right there.
So that's kind of a good way to fill out the container without actually
having to redo it. What's nice too,
is if you miss, if you sink these a little too low,
you don't want to sink them super low, then you can just gently
firm the soil, just snug them up just a little bit. There we go.
That one's in. We'll snug this guy up just a little bit,
right about there. He's in. And this one right here is in.
We've left a little bit of a lip here too. So
now it's on to the next step. Our first batch of cuttings is in.
We've got four of them - focally planted, a little multi- plant action.
These actually aren't even the same type of satin pothos,
although the names are escaping me at the moment.
But what we have to do here is we have to actually water this soil in pretty
liberally, because again, they're used to growing in water only.
So we need to make sure that we moisten this up.
What this is also going to do is it's going to firm up the soil around the root
system that's now in there. And so that's just another little benefit.
So I like to be somewhat liberal,
throw a drainage hole in your pot if you don't have one already.
I would recommend just buying one with a drainage hole and then throw a saucer
down here so you can start to see as the water comes out.
You can soak this quite liberally.
And then what we'll want to do here is remember,
just because they have roots doesn't mean that these roots are used to being in
this medium.
They need some sort of acclimation time also known as sort of the transplant
shock time where they've been ripped out of their home and then put in a new
home. They need some time to plug in to that soil. In that time,
it's almost like, not quite,
but almost like they don't have a root system and so good moist soil.
And then in a second,
we'll throw some humidity domes up or a humidifier to increase the actual
ability of the leaves to take in water while the roots are getting established.
Okay, we've got water running into the saucer down below. So first of all,
I'm going to pot a few more of these up and I'll see you in a second.
We have.
All of our pothos cuttings in their forever homes,
or at least for now their homes. Because I'm probably going to let these grow,
take more cuttings and then I'll have as many pothos as I'll ever need in my
life. But what do we need to do now? Well,
there's really two steps and one of them is this little guy right here,
but we'll talk about that second.
The first thing you need to do is give it a little bit less light than you would
normally give an established plant of the variety that you're propagating.
So for these pothos,
I'm going to keep them in a slightly shaded area while they establish
themselves.
That's because you want them to actually focus on plugging that root system
into the soil, instead of just like growing more and more leaves.
You don't want them to do that. And so cut the light down a little bit,
that will decrease the amount of energy and water that they're going to need.
It gives them time to put those roots down into the soil.
But you also do have to keep that root system nice and moist.
And so there's two ways to do that.
We just already touched on making sure that that soil is nice and moist,
but the second way to do it is to increase the humidity in the air.
And that's where something like a humidifier would come into play.
Now I've done a whole video on how to use a humidifier featuring this one here
from Tao Tronics. So check that one out if you want.
It's not that expensive of a piece of equipment to get if you're doing a lot of
propagating, but you don't need one.
What you could do is you could take a Ziploc freezer bag,
some sort of humidity dome, some sort of plastic dome,
put that over the top of your cuttings.
That's going to lock in a little bit more moisture and the plants will be able
to take in some water from their leaves to supplement while the root system
is established.
That's more or less THE secret for successfully transitioning a
water-rooted cutting into the soil and having it not undergo a lot of shock and
not die a terrible death. So thank you so much for watching.
If you enjoyed this, share it with a friend. Like the video. Subscribe.
And until next time, good luck in the garden.
And keep on growing.