hi everyone hope you're keeping safe and doing super well if it's your first time here my name
is james and i'm from sydney australia today i'll be showing you how to get rid of root rot
hey hey do you want a roof excuse me i beg your pardon that was four no no this fruit
no thanks okay unfortunately my marble queen pothos over here is suffering from
root rot i concluded that the other day when i pulled open the pot and i saw some mushy stems
so i'm gonna give you a step-by-step guide on how to get rid of it if you liked today's video
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so the marble queen pothos is one of my top favourite house plants and here's a photo that i
snapped back in june 2021 now in comparison i took one this morning and it is now august 2021 and as
you can see back in june 2021 it was looking a lot more fuller and voluptuous as compared to today
i was observing constant yellowing leaves and leaf drop and at first i thought it was
just general leaf turnover where your plant would direct its energy to brand new growth as opposed
to maintaining older leaves now it was happening for a really prolonged period and i thought this
isn't right and when i pulled the plant out of the decorative pot the other morning i noticed black
mushy roots coming outside of the drainage holes and bingo root rot so stupidly i know exactly how
i got this root rot when i was doing my routine maintenance the other month instead of wiping
the leaves down i brought it to the shower to hose off i usually have well aerated soil but
then i totally forgot that this plant hadn't been repotted yet and it was sitting in the original
soil that the plant came in which resulted in over watering which is one of the main causes
of how you can get root rot in the first place so a few ways to identify if your plant has root rot
includes yellowing or dropping leaves mushy roots in my case wilting slow growth if you dip your
finger into the soil and you notice that it's quite wet after some time an odour root rot will
generally smell quite bad in today's video i'll be documenting the whole process from start to finish
and hopefully this helps you treat your root rot if you ever encounter it now what you're going to
need is the plant you intend to treat of course a couple of trays so you can catch any of that
mess a pair of chopsticks a pair of gloves a pair of scissors the mvp of the show which is hydrogen
peroxide three percent i purchased this at woolies for four dollars new soil a new pot a empty bowl
water a watering can and i've got some disinfectant wipes and some wet paper towel now
the following items are optional and you don't need them i'm actually going to pre-mix and
prepare my soil in front of you before i repot my plant so that's why i've got charcoal perlite
and a shovel here okay so first up we're going to prepare the hydrogen peroxide solution this is why
i've got an empty bowl here so basically you need some water and your hydrogen peroxide solution
so i've used about half of this bottle which is a 200 ml bottle i've got 100 mils left i mix it
to a ratio of one to three you can do one to two or if you're feeling adventurous one
to one but i'm going to er on the safe side and use 100 mils and do a one to three ratio
so just pour that into your empty bowl and i use a protein shaker because it has
the measurements on the side but i put 300 mils in here so that's a one to three ratio
so just going to pour that into the bowl and that's your hydrogen peroxide solution
which you're going to use to dip your roots in later to remove the bacteria and the disease
so this is why i've got chopsticks i'm just going use one and swirl that solution around
and then you can just leave it in there and i'm gonna put this to the side
okay so now i'm gonna put on my gloves and start pre-mixing and preparing my soil
so i've got some premium potting mix in here and i previously boiled some water and poured
it all over and left it out to get rid of fungus gnats i found this was a great trick
to remove fungus gnats and i want to aerate my soil a little bit more so i'm going to
add some perlite and charcoal into the mix before i actually embark on my rot removal
so this is about half full in this pot or premium potting mix it's looking good no nuts
and i've shaked it out and i have some leftover perlite here which i'm going to add into the mix
and usually i go for maybe 50 60 premium potting mix to 30 perlite so it's gonna be
a little bit dusty there normally recommend that you use a dust mask because obviously
these can be a little bit toxic in terms of fumes but i've got a small quantity here and
should be okay
put that aside just show that to the camera and then this will be great for as a substrate
the charcoal because basically it sweetens the soil
and removes odor and bacteria so i'm just going to grab a handful of that and add that to my mix
this is a great one especially for treating root rot so put that to the side
and i'm just going to mix that in with my gloves
this one get a little bit more of a homogeneous mix
so here i'm improving the aeration of the soil before i replant this
i'm using this as a golden opportunity to change up that soil
because this soil is actually in the original soil that the plant came in so it was long overdue
so i've now mixed that through you can see it's a little bit more chunky now
hopefully you can see that but yeah that's going to improve aeration
and i've used a premium potting mix which will retain moisture as well cool now we're going to
get into the rot removal pulling my plant out of the decorative pot i'm just going to place it here
okay so gently massage the bottom of the pot
and then hopefully hold it by the base and yeah that came out pretty easily
okay so hopefully you can see this so luckily i still have some healthy roots in here
as you can see from white and yellow but
i'm going to now remove and massage the roots of this planet and then get
some of that old soil that oh look at all this white mildew or mold
but yeah you can already see some of that mushy root already fall off as i'm pulling this out
i'm gonna grab my other chopstick that's why i have a pear and
thread all that i poke gently all that old soil out
so the reason why i'm using gloves is that root rot is essentially a disease or bacteria
you kind of don't want to be playing around with that with your hands so make sure you use gloves
oh see okay this is where you can
show you the rot but that root there it's all black and mushy and it smells so i'm
trying to be very careful as well because i don't want to damage and stress out of the roots
i mean pothos are generally very hardy plants so i'm very confident you'll bounce back
all right so your next step after you've removed that soil is grab a pair of scissors
um so i should have disinfected this earlier but basically this is why
i've got some wet wipes some disinfectant detail wet wipes and i'm quickly wiped down
these scissors and some wet paper towel to disinfect that
to the side and let's start chopping off that root rot
okay so tip is if only half of that root
is rotten don't cut the whole root off just cut off from where you see that rot
okay so the most tragic thing just happened i filmed the rest of this video
with the camera off because the batteries ran out anyway luckily i have some backup iphone footage
so i apologise in advance i'm going to switch the view up because i want to make sure that
i walk you through the whole entire process here we're going to grab our hydrogen peroxide solution
one two three and give it a quick dab to the water
now it's time to repot
and i want to make sure that the nodes are also sticking into the soil at the same time so then
it has more potential for growth and new roots to form in there so by that i mean the node
and i want to plant that in
and trick you can use a bobby pin to plant that in i've actually got bobby pins here you can
clip it from the top so then your plant has more opportunity to grow new roots from those nodes
cool
but the next step here is i'm just going to cut off some of those yellow leaves that i saw
this one already fell off which is great
one less stem i have to cut this one's yellowing so i'm just going to cut that off
what you could also do and another tip um for when you're treating root rot
is take a clipping or cutting of your plant just as an insurance policy
cool so now that we've treated that i'm gonna put a tray underneath it and water it sparingly
and do not fertilise
now it's the waiting game i do think this is going to be successful because i did see a
lot of healthy roots i stopped it quite early but remember if you do see root rot treat it asap if
you made it to the end of this video i just want to say thank you so much for watching i hope you
learned something new remember to give this video a thumbs up if you liked today's video hit that
subscribe button if you haven't already and hit that bell icon to get notifications so you don't
miss any updates when new videos drop onto plant rants welcome to plant rants ransom bands where i
showcase some cool funny or interesting plant content that i find online all right who else
relates to this one i basically have to cover both of my eyes and run when i'm passing the
nursery at bunnings when i'm out there trying to buy random hardware items this is me especially
on a saturday or sunday when i'm hung over as hell i want to make sure that my plants are watered in
the morning the struggle is real now this meme has been making the rounds but let's be honest
here this is probably what you're feeling after watching my video if you've made it to the end