Tips And Tricks For Pilea Peperomiodes 🌱 CHINESE MONEY PLANT Propagation Guide

Hello everyone, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, hi, my name's Claire and this is Yoli. I make videos all about houseplant care, sharing tips and tricks I've learned over the years to help keep your plants happy and healthy. And in today's video, I'm going to take you through everything you need to know about Pilea peperomioides, how to resolve any issues you might currently have going on with them and how to propagate them to make new little baby plants. So let's get into it. So Pilea peperomioides, commonly known as the pancake plant or Chinese money plant, are really, really gorgeous, easy, low-maintenance houseplants. I was sent this one from the lovely team at Sutton's a few months ago and honestly, in the time that I've had it, it's grown so much. Like I don't know if you can see at the top there, all the new little baby growth coming in. So yeah, if you're looking for something really fast growing and really easy to care for, then this one is a very good shout. To keep these plants happy, it's best to keep them in bright, indirect light. Bright and direct light basically just means an area that receives lots of natural bright daylight, but not too much direct sun. They're really adaptable plants and can absolutely survive in lower light conditions as well. But chances are, if you do keep them in lower light conditions, you're going to start to notice their growth slow right down. The color of their leaves will probably become quite a lot darker and over time, they'll start to look more stretched and leggy as opposed to full and bushy. So yeah, bright and direct light is best. You do just have to be quite careful that they're not receiving too much direct sun just because it can actually scorch and burn their leaves quite easily. If you have only got a really, really highlight spot, then I would recommend using like a sheer curtain or something like that to create a little filter, or you could just group lots of highlight plants around this one to kind of create a natural shade canopy. As with all plants, it's really, really important to make sure that you're keeping its leaves clean and dust-free. A layer of dirt and dust essentially prevents your plant from being able to absorb all the light it needs in order to photosynthesize and grow healthily. This is particularly important if you're keeping your plant in slightly lower light conditions because if the light it's receiving is already slightly limited, then having dust or dirt on the leaves basically just means it's the equivalent of keeping your plant in pretty much zero light. These plants tend to grow towards the light fairly quickly. You can actually see here, like you can tell why it's kind of leaning in the direction I've had it. So it's really, really important to turn them regularly so that they can absorb equal amounts of light from all angles, but also so that growth doesn't become lopsided like this. So when I put mine back in its spot, I need to make sure to turn it so that the light is going to be hitting it from this side for a while. A lot of the common issues for this plant are often caused by over-watering, which happens when either you give your plants too much water when it's not ready for it, or you don't provide it with good enough drainage, meaning that the roots will be sat in water that they don't need and it can cause them to rot. As I've said before, I keep pretty much all of my house plants in their nursery pots inside their pretty pots so that then when I come to water, I can take my plant out, give it a thorough, thorough soak through, allow it time to properly drain, and then pop it back into the pretty pots just so that the roots aren't going to be left sat in water. To avoid over-watering and making sure these plants are just getting exactly what they need, it's a really good idea to let the top few inches of soil completely dry out before you water them again. You can use a moisture meter for this if you're not quite sure. What I tend to do is just stick my finger a few inches down into the soil and feel. You can also often tell when these plants are ready for a drink just by looking at them. You can tell down here the leaves have kind of started to droop and drop a bit, and that is often a telltale sign and my plant is definitely ready for a drink. The leaves can, however, do this due to other issues such as over-watering or root rot. I have spoken about this before in other videos, but if you catch root rot early, it can be treatable and fixable. I will post all the details on that in the description box below. Over what's known as the growing season, which is the spring and summer months, it's a really good idea to fertilize these plants regularly just to help encourage and support new growth. I tend to fertilize these plants pretty much every time I water during the growing season and then just completely lay off during the winter months. If you've recently repotted your plant, so long as you've used a really good nutritious soil, then chances are you probably won't need to fertilize it for at least six months or so just because your plant will be able to get all the nutrients and energy it needs from that. Over-fertilizing your plants can also cause issues, so as I've said before, it's just really important to read the instructions and make sure you're not giving your plant too much. Also, what I really like to do if I've got a plant that I've never fertilized before, I'll just basically ease them into it quite gently. I'll start with less than it says and then gradually increase it over time just to make sure I don't do irreversible damage. These plants also really love humidity. I've got my humidifier set to about 65%, which is just constant and they really enjoy that, but so long as the levels don't drop below about 50%, that should be absolutely fine for them. If they're not receiving enough humidity, it's really, really common for them to start to get kind of brown patches and edges on the leaves. I was going to show you, mine's actually got some browning on a couple of the leaves, but she did come like this, so I'm pretty sure, unless the environment wasn't good before, which I would have thought it would have been, I think it was just kind of damage from her being knocked about a bit in the post. I've talked before about some of the ways that you can increase the humidity for your plants if you don't have a humidifier, one of which is using pebble trays. Pebble trays are basically trays filled with pebbles and you pour water into that and then essentially sit your plants on top, just so that when that water evaporates, it creates a nice humid environment for them. The other thing you can do is actually just group lots of plants together because that again naturally increases the humidity. Temperature wise, these plants are going to do best when kept at a steady temperature of between 15 and 28 degrees Celsius. A steady temperature basically just means it's fairly consistent and it's not constantly fluctuating up and down all the time. They can also really suffer in cold draughts, so although making sure that there's good airflow in your house is really important, it's just good to make sure you don't place them right next to an air vent or a draughty window or anything like that because they're going to be pretty unhappy fairly quickly. Pilea peperomioides are also really, really easy plants to propagate. You can either just propagate them to make new little baby plants, but also if you notice your plant starting to kind of go downhill, you can essentially either divide it or take the cuttings and start all over again. You can either propagate them from pups, which are the little mini plants they produce around themselves in the soil. That is literally so easy to do. It's just a case of dividing the little mini ones from the main mother plants, but my one here doesn't actually have any pups at the moment, so I'm going to show you how you can propagate these plants through leaf cuttings. I'm just going to get my other camera set up so that you can properly see what I'm doing. Right, hopefully that is working. So what I'm going to do, I'm just going to take that out of the pretty pot. I've got a really clean, sharp knife. I'm hoping it's going to be sharp enough. I've sterilized this knife just to make sure that there's no cross-contamination or anything like that. And what you want to do with taking cuttings, although they're called leaf cuttings, you actually want to make sure that you get a bit of the stem because otherwise your plant's not going to root. I'll just pop the camera down here as well, just in case you need to see. Otherwise your plant isn't going to produce roots. So although, as I say, it's called leaf cutting, you need to get a bit of the stem. So I'm not going to go for any of the top leaves here because they're not quite so well established. They're new and they probably won't have as good a chance. So I'm going to go for one of the older ones at the bottom, maybe this one here, that looks like quite a good one. So I'm very, very, very carefully, to make sure not to get too much of the stem, I'm just going to try and cut that out with a kind of chunk of the stem as well, if that makes sense. And I'm not quite sure how easily you're going to be able to see me do this. So I'm just going to, so there we go, that's the sort of thing that you want. I'll show you here as well. It's got a bit of the stem on it and all I'm going to do now is I'm just going to pop that into a little container of water and wait for a few weeks and then hopefully it will start producing some roots. You want to wait until the roots are at least kind of three inches long before you go ahead and pop the cutting up just because otherwise you risk sending it into shock and it might not take. But yeah, I'm just going to stick that in some water and hopefully in a few weeks time I will have a brand new plant. But yeah, if anyone's got any questions, feel free to ping them down below and I will do my best to help. But yeah, I really hope this video was useful. If it was, please make sure to give it a thumbs up, subscribe to my channel, have a lovely day and I will see you in the next video.