How To Prune And Straighten A Jade Plant (Crassula ovata)

So in this video I'd like to show you how to deal with a jade plant which has gotten too leggy and it's got a lot of slender growth and it's just looking a little So this is a fairly common problem with jade plants. They come from a very sunny hot location so what they like is lots of sunshine and if they don't get All that sunshine, what happens is they get really leggy, get really long thin, slender stems. The time people will grow jade plants in a shady location and jade plants are quite adaptable They will grow quite happily in an area without any sunshine for quite a long time but they just They get these very long, slender stems. curve over and they just won't look very nice and they'll just become like a raggly mess. Another problem this can cause is it can become top heavy. Unless they have it propped up against the wall this pot naturally keeps falling So I have to keep it propped up at the moment and the reason this happens is the plant It's looking for light so it's growing its stems as long and thin as possible. For example, here there is no branching. You just get long thin stems. You don't have any side branches. It grows tall stems to try and find the light but because the stems The leaves are very heavy and succulent on a jade plant when it starts growing. New leaves at the end what happens is it then pulls it down with gravity, gravity pulls it down And then you get these kind of curved stems so it doesn't get up to the light like it wants to So I'm going to show you in this Video how you can prune it and how you can strain some of the stems and return it to a nice looking Now the main thing you need to do once you've done all these treatments is to put it You have to deal with the root of the problem. Otherwise the issues will just kind of come back in a few months time or a few years time So make sure once you've done this treatment Put it in the sunniest place you can find it needs at least a few hours of sunshine every day If you can't give it enough daylight just give it as much daylight as you can. You can and ideally if it's not getting any sunlight at all try and get a grow lamp on it For a few hours a day that will help it grow much bushy growth much stockier growth and you will get This is an example of one of my plants that has been growing in a Nice sunny location you can see here it's got a lot of branches on it each branch comes up and Then splits into several other branches so it doesn't just grow a long leg of growth the growth It's all sticking up as well, holding its own weight and it's just generally a nice strong bushy growth and that's what you want and if you give it enough light that's what you will So before you carry out any pruning what I would do is try and put it in the sunnier brighter The plant can be pruned in this way for at least two or three weeks before you do any pruning. You can do it without this. The first two or three weeks of charging the plant's energy or putting it in a brighter location but it will just take a little longer to recover and you've got more chance So one of the first things you need to do is take off all this leg growth What you want to do is follow it back into an area where it branches what you want is a stem to Come up and every few inches or centimeters you just want it to have another branch coming off So you don't want this kind of long growth without any branches at all that just encourages It starts to flip over but when it branches it gives it a much sturdier stronger appearance So if you follow the branch back find an area where it's branching go up two or three sections So each section here there's a little node basically in the middle where the leaves originally This is where new growth can appear from so if I say you're on these larger sections These are the internodes which are the spaces between the nodes where the leaves come And the shoots will come from so when you cut it you want to cut it in between the reason for that is you're not going to damage any of the nodes and if it's quite a big space like this cut it towards the lower section because what will happen is this top section that doesn't have Anything above it will just die off and it will just regrow from this lower section here where So you want to cut it in the middle if it's a pretty small spacing if it's a big spacing like This just cuts it a little further down that way you get less die back and it looks a little nicer So what I'm going to do in this plant is follow about the long stems find where it's branching Go up one or two of the internodes and then just trim it off and it's going to look quite drastic But what this will do is it will get rid of a lot of the excess weight so this will no longer It's going to stop it. Yeah, because the top heavy growth has been taken off so it can support its own weight but also this will encourage many new side shoots to form and many new branches And if they're then grown in the high light environment they're going to be much bushy And even if you don't grow this in the high light environment afterwards if you keep pruning it It just stops the long leg growth encourages more branching and you won't have These long, cascading stems that cause problems, so that takes a lot of weight off. The plant as you can see is now supporting itself it doesn't need any help to support it But what I'm going to show you now is how you can straighten up a curved trunk even a more mature So if your stems are still nice and straight after the initial prune you can just skip this This is just to show you what to do if you do have any curved stems and your entire plant's A little deformed because of that so what you can do is you can get a bamboo cane and you want to Put it pretty close to the stem but you have to be careful not to break any roots if you can And then all you have to do is tie a lot of strings around what this does is it will pull the stem Straighter you won't straighten it right away but what you want to do is keep the pressure on There and over time as this plant starts to grow back it will actually naturally form a straighter And you just need to keep tightening the strings as the stem straightening and eventually stem you'll be left with a nice straight stem again so you can see from that the stem is already This won't fix it right away. If I were to cut these, this would. Spring back quite quickly also with this if it's a very curved stem you can't do it all in one Otherwise it will actually snap the stem if it's too curved so what you need to do is tie You can normally feel it when you're bending back the Give point you just don't want to go past that otherwise it will crack they are quite brittle These stems so don't force them too much you'll need to have quite a bit of pressure on the Strings though just to make sure that it does pull back enough and you do get a fast enough Movement otherwise it will take a long time if you don't have enough tension on it it's just a trade-off between the speed of straightening the stem and actually damaging and breaking the stem So once it's been on for about two or three weeks what you can do then is remove all the Original strings and then put on some new strings even tighter and then just keep tightening it every three or four weeks maybe once a month depending on how fast the plant is growing and how The thicker the stem the longer it will take if it's a thin stem you can probably Just do it in a month or two a thick stem will take maybe a year to fully straighten up and You'll need to adjust it once a month a thin stem you can probably adjust it once a week and you I'll probably get it completely straight in a month so just keep straightening it up as you can and Then eventually what you can do is cut off the stem completely it will be nice and straight and You won't need this support anymore so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to come back to you at the end of the video which will be several weeks later maybe a couple of months later You'll see what happens with this plant. It should put on a lot of new growth at the top. There should be a lot of new branches starting to form up above from where I cut it that will Give a nice branch structure also this this stem should start to look a little bit straighter What I might do next time is to see when I rotate it around it is slightly bent this way I might move the stake to this side and straighten it up or have two stakes straightening it and I'll Just keep straightening and keep it in a nice sunny location I'll also feed it once The it's got strong growth coming on it just to make sure it's going to put on some good growth And that'll just give you an idea of how much will regrow and what to expect when it's regrowing. So it's now three months later and as you can see the whole plant's looking a lot better The trunk itself is much straighter as well as you see as I rotate it here you will see that it's Mostly straight now there's not much more adjustments need to be made to straighten it So what I'm going to do now is remove these ties and also take out the bamboo cane Because it's not really necessary anymore if I wanted to get it absolutely perfectly straight I could leave it on for a little longer and you still see there's a slight angle here and there So I could maybe move this around to the side but generally the trunk is now straight enough I'm quite happy with it so as it's been training for several months now three months in total You can see that the trunk now can keep itself supported quite nicely without the need That stake with the slight exception of a slight curve there it's generally quite nice And straight so this is what you should be expecting if you put it in a bright location And you prune it hard you can probably see up here everywhere I cut it has put out at least One shot some places two shots that's quite common when you cut it you normally get two The number of shoots coming out but what can also happen is if you put it in a much brighter Location and it's a lot happier you'll get loads of new shoots coming from all over the trunk so You can see here basically every node has started to grow on here there are lots of new growth coming I'm not sure what you're talking about. Choose which branches you want to keep which ones you want to get rid of but I'd quite like to Get rid of these and when it comes to very young growth the best thing is actually just break it It's kind of too small and hard to get with second tiers and you're The same with these new shoots if they're Very young shoots I would just snap them off by hand they won't be thick at all and they will be easy to remove with your bare hands so that's cleared up the stem now giving it more the I would like to see what you can find out about the other shoots. So this one over here for example you can see it's already getting a Shoot already so it's starting to naturally branch and if it's got plenty of light it should branch every two or three leaves quite happily by itself if it doesn't just get the Second layers and just cut it as I showed you previously and it should re-sprout and have More branches but this is generally what you should expect and if you have any questions about the process or anything please leave a comment below and I wish you good luck with your jade plant and hopefully you'll have similar results where you cut back all the long Leggy growth and then should get nice short healthy growth in return