Two new house plants have made it into the Epic collection. What's up guys?
Kevin from Epic Gardening here, so we have the Monstera adansonii,
which very popular plant.
It's the Swiss Cheese Monstera it's got like little holes in it,
smaller growth habits, smaller leaves in general than a Monstera deliciosa.
Then you have what might be one of the more popular plants of 2020 already,
which is the Rhaphidophora tetrasperma or the mini Monstera,
so very much similar in looks to Monstera deliciosa but the leaves and the plant
itself are just smaller. Now, why are these so small? Well,
I really love personally growing my house plants.
I'd rather grow them from smaller points in their life than just buy them fully
grown or at the size that I would want them in my home.
That's just my preference. To me,
that's the fun of growing plants in general rather than just buying it as a
decoration, I guess you could say.
If you were to say buy like a five foot fiddle leaf, that's kind of just it.
It just sits there and you don't have to do a whole lot. So I like growing them.
And what we're going to do in this video is we're going to set these up for
success.
So I have these two awesome pots for them and these are both climbing vining
plants. So if we provide them something to climb up, they'll do it.
So what we're gonna do is we're taking, this is pretty heavy, this gopher wire,
and we're going to cut it with some tin snips and we're going to make moss poles
for both of these plants and pot them up in this video. Okay.
Our first step is to grab our material that the moss is going to be stuffed
into. So, you don't have to use gopher wire. In fact,
there's probably better things to use. This is what I found at my local nursery,
so it's what I'm going to use. I know some people,
there's this guy on Instagram, Craig Milran,
who uses like a plastic wired netting that can work perfectly fine and also it's
green. So it might have a little bit more of the look you're going for,
but I'm okay with this utilitarian style.
And so it looks like this comes slightly bent or slightly shorter right here.
So what I'm going to do is trim it to right here first. So we'll come down,
I recommend these tin snips if you are cutting something this hefty duty because
heavy duty, excuse me, because it just makes short work of it really quickly.
So we're going to do that and I think I want to have it be maybe,
I don't know, like two and a half,
two to three inches in diameter.
So that means we do a little math and you just calculate the circumference that
we need and that's what you'll end up cutting.
So I think it ends up being somewhere around seven or eight inches or so,
just off the top of my head.
But we will probably have to do some measuring as well.
Okay.
So we have our our skeleton here and now we just want to get it roughly into
that pole shape. Thing I like about the gopher wire is once it's bent,
it's very moldable so you can actually bend it more or less into the actual full
pole. But I'm going to just halfway bend it open or bend it closed, excuse me,
so we can actually stuff the moss in.
And I'm just using for this just a little bit of green moss. You can see here,
big old thing of moss and we're going to stuff it in here pretty tight I think.
Ooh, let's open that up. Ooh nice.
I love working with some of this moss. Okay,
let's go ahead and get this in here.
We'll pack it in pretty tight because it'll settle, it'll decompose,
it'll do all sorts of things.
So we're just going to slowly slowly pack in our moss. Yeah,
so when I'm putting in the moss here,
I'm just starting bottom to top and just putting a lit light layer in that I can
then pack in if I want to. Cause you can,
you can pack in a decent amount of this honestly and it, it'll stay.
You want to give the plant something to really grip into.
So if you just loosely pack like this and then wrap up the pole,
it won't be as effective,
at least in my opinion because if we think about how these plants really grow,
they're not climbing up some sort of loose airy structure.
They're climbing up the trunks of trees, you know,
things like that that are pretty solid.
So we don't need to be afraid to really pack the moss in.
And moss can actually be somewhat expensive.
So I understand the hesitation, but get aggressive with it.
Pack this bad boy up and you will be in a much better spot when it comes to
actually caring for these plants. And you don't have to do this.
Remember this is just totally optional.
You can grow your Monstera adansonii and any of your climbing trailing plants,
you can grow them as is in a pot. It's totally fine.
So don't worry about it. Let's go ahead and pack in.
And now we have the slightly trickier part and that's actually putting this all
together. So I'm going to compact it.
You can see what it starts to look like on the outside.
It looks really nice and looking on the outside is a good way to spot if you
have any loose areas, like right here for example is a little bit less packed.
So what I'll do is I'll just scoop up some of this debris,
put it in and push it in. And there you go. We're, we're nice and packed up.
So what I have now is I got my tin snips again and I have some of this wire that
was left from the the gopher wire.
And so I can use this as my twine of sorts and I'll just cut off little sections
and we'll attach it to our moss pole.
So let's go ahead and make the bend. Once you've secured it,
you can actually kind of roll it around and really make it nice and aesthetic,
the overall shape, so you don't have to stress too much about that.
Let's go ahead and get this thing closed up.
Okay. We have the, we have the rough shape of
it and it took a little longer than I thought, but it's a little bit,
it's a little bit wonky as far as its shape. So I'm just gonna do it.
Give it a little gentle massage here.
We'll get it nice and cylindrical again.
That's the beauty I think of the gopher wire over something else is it really
does hold its shape.
So whatever you bend it to that's just how it's going to be.
And that's exactly how I like to live my life. Okay, so we've got it in,
moss pole number one is complete. Wow! That actually looks really nice.
I'm pretty stoked about this. Look at this thing guys. That is a beautiful pole.
Yeah, I think our plants are really going to like that. Okay, cool. Number two,
here we go. We got both of them. So they are pretty tall.
Maybe like two-ish feet tall.
Plenty of room for our Monstera adansonii and our Rhaphidophora tetrasperma to
grow.
So the next step is to take these bad boys and get them into their pots.
We're going to pop them up with some soil from Espoma Organic who are the
sponsors of the video. So thanks to them and let's go ahead and get to it. Okay.
We have a pot that has magically appeared.
It is a glazed stoneware medium egg, and it looks amazing.
It's kind of big.
And the reason why I chose one this big is not because I think that putting this
plant in here is in such a big pot it's gonna make it explode.
It's mostly just because we have a moss pole that we need to fit in and secure
somehow.
So I have this moss pole and what I think I'm going to do is sync it to about
there or so,
so there's a nice amount of support and then I'm going to fill around.
So that's our prescription. That's what we're going to do.
This is going to be for the adansonii and we're using Espoma Organic Potting
Mix. I hauled this big old bag up here, whew,
and my heart's actually beating. That's how out of shape I am.
I need some plant-based workouts, guys, comment down below. But it's a really,
really high quality mix.
It's one of my favorites in the indoor world and for our adansonii and for our
Rhaphidophora tetrasperma it's going to be completely fine cause they want that
rich and organic matter, all-around solid potting mix.
They don't have any crazy special requirements like an orchid or an African
violet or something like that. So let's fill it up and let's get the pole in.
So I've got it about maybe six inches down or so and I think that should be
fine.
I'm going to offset it from the center so we can put our adansonii right here
and now we just need to backfill.
Let's take our little guy out and align it before we fill the rest of the soil
in. And spill soil as we do it because that's what we do here at Epic Gardening.
A little messy always. Okay. That's exactly where I want it.
I want it budding more or less right up against the moss pole,
right about there, and now we can go ahead and fill the rest.
Well, would you look at that? It has got its new home,
quite these skyscraper to climb up.
You almost get vertigo looking at it from that angle.
Let's go ahead and get our Rhaphidophora tetrasperma all set up.
Our Rhaphidophora is in and it is set up for success.
Looking really good. Whew.
So our plants are now hanging out in the Epic backyard, the shady zen oasis,
and I'm going to grow them out here.
I might just leave them on this table for awhile because from here we're not
getting a whole lot of light like it's like pretty much a classic, bright,
indirect light. But it does get a little bit of evening sun,
maybe from like 4:00 to 5:30 PM. So not too bright,
but it's going to be better than growing them indoors because these pots are so
large that I don't really have a good light indoors to properly light these.
There's nothing to really place these on,
especially with the moss pole coming up. So it should grow really, really well.
What I'll do is I'll put updates up on my Instagram as I start to tie this and
attach it upwards cause I'm really excited to see how these perform.
If you've ever done this before, if you have any suggestions or comments,
drop them down below. Again, super excited about this.
Tag me on Instagram if you end up making your own moss poles and until next
time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.