I just posted a short article about my 'delicate' potting up of some cuttings outdoors, on my seed blog.
https://cohanseeds.blogspot.com/2019/09/fall-work-yard-clean-up-and-linnaea.html That came about as a side effect of some yard work I was doing. Today, I was intending to water some houseplants, and again got pulled down a (modest) rabbit hole of potting and cuttings!
First I noticed a pot that had a mostly dead Gasteria, with one little piece living ( and a couple of bits of Aloe that got stuck in there at some point)- so that needed repotting into much smaller pots. Then, since I was thinking plant maintenance, I thought I might as well deal with a Ceropegia woodii / String of Hearts which I had moved a while ago, and was sitting draped over and clambering around some other plants. It was already rooting into at least one other pot, and I figured if I left it much longer it would be inextricable!
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| Ceropegia woodii on Sansevieria |
Well, it was tangled indeed. I snipped off the branch that had rooted in with a small Ornithogalum, and found the remaining stems caught up in the leaves of a Sansevieria, as well as growing under that pot and a neighbour! The stems are rather fragile, and some broke-- but I wasn't worried, they root easily. By the time I got it all detangled I had the original pot with a couple of long stems, one long section that had broken off, the small plant with a small tuber but not much root that was in with the Ornithogalum, and several short bits that broke and/or were separated by dried bits of stem (during dry spells, the plant will shed some or eventually all of its stems, growing back from the tubers once it gets moisture again).
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| Ceropegia woodii -- all separated and ready for potting/repotting! |
I don't find these super fussy about soil, so I used a bit of leftover gritty stuff I'd mixed for something else, dumped in a bit of native humusy soil, and native clay soil, cuz they were there already, and a good bunch of coir (coconut fibre) which holds some moisture but also allows aeration.. (I'm an underwaterer, if you are heavy handed with the watering can, or will have your plant subject to rain, you may need a more purely mineral mix). I cleaned off most of the old soil-- since it was a clay based soil with crushed brick (the crushed brick and Lake Ontario beach glass top dressing remind me that it was last potted in Toronto- I moved back here in 2007...), it was not broken down or clingy like old peat soil can be, but I brushed most of it off, and placed the tuber a bit higher than it was before-- what's the point of a great tuber if you can't see it? Well, in theory, at least-- the plant has to be hung fairly high because of the long trailing stems, so I can't see it from the floor anyway-- I'll make a point of dragging out the stepladder once in a while!
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| Shaking off the old soil.. |
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| A piece of window screen to block the drainage hole- since it is a large hole, I used stiff screen-- the soft, fabric sort might wash right out.. stones or crocks are less desirable, as a shorter volume of soil drains less well, and is just less soil! ( that's a whole story....) |
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| Positioned on top of fresh soil in the new pot, tuber raised just a little.. |
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| New soil added around the plant and tamped in lightly |
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| A large broken section wrapped up to shorten and give more rooting points, laid across the soil, centre covered |
Then I took the largest /longest broken piece, wrapped it around to half length (1/4?) and draped it across the pot, pushing it down into the soil in the middle, and anchoring it with rocks. (you can also use a bobby pin/ hair grip to anchor the stem to the soil, without burying it, also more of an issue if you are an overwaterer; I didn't have any pins handy, and was too lazy to hunt for any old ones of mom's or from my hairdressing days that might be around, rocks I have by the pound, all over the place ..). I snipped the looped ends of the cutting, so they could form individual stems, and that was it! Repeat the process with smaller pots for the other cuttings. You can drape cuttings like this across the pot, in which case they should root in the middle and grow at each end, or you can spiral the cuttings around on the surface of the pot, making sure they are in good contact with the soil here and there, anchoring with rocks, soil or pins, and being sure some stem bits are protruding or at least not all buried.This should give you more points of rooting, and more growing points in more directions. If your ultimate goal was lots of separate plants, you could snip that long coiled stem at each point it roots, and separate the new plants. I did one pot each way, just for the heck of it.
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| Soil top dressed with rocks, cuz I like them, and they will help watering without splashing out soil, and of course hold down the new cuttings till they root |
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| Cuttings can drape across with the centre weighed down, or curl around the surface for more contact points |
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| Rocks to hold down the cuttings and make watering easier.. The plant on the right had rooted into another pot and has a tuber, but didn't come out of that pot with many roots, so after I moved it back in the pot, and weighed down the stem with a rock, also. |
I used some of the leftover soil plus pots from a couple of failed seed attempts to pot up the Gasteria and two Aloe pups, gave everything a good spraying (I don't water freshly repotted succulents, usually- giving them a day or several for damaged roots to heal; cuttings could be watered, but apart from a bit of surface dampness to stimulate rooting, soil moisture doesn't matter much until they have roots) and that was it!
Tangent taken care of, I never did get the watering done-- so I sprayed the plants I was supposed to water, got some cucumber with yogurt dressing ready to go with Samosas, went out to check mail, have a walkabout (which included picking up some more -particular- small rocks from the road, to help fill in the top dressing on the largest Ceropegia) feed the cats and come home to eat!
Update 2024- I'm not sure what happened- maybe the soil I used was even faster draining than I thought, or it was just the ongoing problem of me paying more attention to outdoor plants, but sometime months after this I lost *all* of my Ceropegias! This makes me sad, I'll have to watch for replacements, but those are pretty scarce in these parts!
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