Plant Chores Chill Day 🌱 Repot Propagate and Chat 💚

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 learnt over the years to help keep your plants happy and healthy. And I've just woken up and decided that I'm going to do a little plant chores style vlog video today. I'm also really sorry about the piles of mess behind me. I'm in the process of potentially moving out. I will talk to you about that as we get into the video. But yeah, I'm going to be doing some repotting, show you some plant updates, talk and show, show and talk a little bit about pollination as well, because I know quite a few of you've been asking about that. Oh, my brain hasn't quite woken up yet and I'm struggling to speak. But yes, I hope you enjoy it. Let's get into it. So I haven't got dressed yet because I thought it made sense to do some of the messier repotting bits before I showered. So you've got me in my, my ferret top for now. Shout out to my ferret family. You know who you are. So I thought I would first give you an update on the Anthurium clarinibium seeds that I planted, I think about three months ago now or something like that. This is the biggest one and it's doing absolutely amazingly. I'm so, so, so happy with it. They're all sprouting and they're all doing well, but this one is definitely the best, the best established one out of all of them so far. I've got one in my cabinet there that's got one leaf and one of them's actually still in the prop box just because it was way slower than the others. But this one here is doing so well. I still am so interested in whether it's pure clarinibium or if it's maybe a potential hybrid. So as always, if you have any theories, do let me know in the comments, but it's got a new little leaf coming there as well. And I feel like they're getting bigger every time they come up. That was the first leaf and then that was that one. And now we're on that. So I'm hoping it's going to be quite well established fairly quickly. It's growing very fast. The next update I will give you, and I haven't actually looked at these yet myself. These are the anthurium forgettii seeds that I put in sphagnum moss. Um, I want to say about three weeks ago and I'm pretty sure I've kind of just been trying to spy through the cling film, but it's not always that clear. So I'll take a look and I will show you how they're doing. So I don't know if I can't really tilt the box that well. I might need to put some clips in a bit, but they are by the looks of it, all rooting. I've got six of them in there and one of them looks like it's got a little sprout coming. So I'm really, really happy about that. They've been on my heat mat under grow lights and it's just been very warm in this room anyway, which always helps the germination process. But yeah, they're doing well. And I know I've been saying for absolutely ages that I would talk about how you get the seeds for anthuriums to grow them from seed. So I thought I would quickly go through that. I've got two of my Clarinurbiums here. So I did actually take a video of when I pollinated these ones recently. So I will show you that in a minute, but I'll very briefly explain. So you obviously need to wait for these things here to pop up, which are inflorescences. And I've actually got another one already coming up on this plant. Just there. That's a new one coming up. But once they produce an inflorescence, they'll basically start in the female stage and that's when you'll be able to see kind of droplets of sap. It's called stigmatic fluid and that will be covering the spadex here, which is this bit. And that is when they are receptive and that's when you can pollinate them. But if you don't have pollen to pollinate them, then unfortunately you're going to have to wait and probably store the pollen unless you've got two active plants, which luckily I did this time. I've never been that lucky before, but they usually stay in this female receptive stage from anywhere from about four days to a week in my experience. And as I say, if you've got pollen or you're able to pollinate them at that point, then that's great. But if you don't, after they've been in the female stage, you'll notice the stigmatic fluid won't be being produced anymore and instead it will be producing pollen. And that is if you want to pollinate in the future, what you should collect. I've actually got some that I collected in tinfoil just here. And again, I'll insert a clip of how I did that. But if you do have two that are one in the female stage, one in the male stage at the same time, then you can essentially take the pollen from one, transfer it onto the other. And hopefully in a few months time, you will start to get some nice berries, which you can then pick and plant and turn into new little anthuriums. It was really, really annoying with my ones. So basically you want to choose quite a mature plant on the whole because you want it to have a good energy reserves because producing berries does take a lot of energy in the plants. And this one obviously is quite big and this would have been the perfect one to pollinate. But annoyingly, and I've taken a risk here, this is the one that was in the female stage at the time that this one was in the male stage. So I could have just collected the pollen from both of them and saved it. But I took the risk and I have pollinated this plant and it's only actually got three leaves at the moment. So I could risk doing some serious damage to this plant, but it was kind of more like a trial and error thing. I don't know if it's going to work. I did the pollination, I think about three, four weeks ago now, and I'm kind of kidding myself that I can see bulging already. I think it's too soon to tell, but I'll keep you updated with these. And as I say, I'll pop a clip in of me pollinating them to show you exactly how it's done in case I didn't explain that well enough. So the plants that I need to repot today, the first one is my Pilea peperomioides. It is just not in a very good quality soil. It's not the fact that I think it's outgrown. It's like I can't see any roots and the soil still feels pretty airy, but it just, I don't know. I can just tell that it's not as kind of good as it could be. It's a bit, it goes a bit hard and the water doesn't always absorb very well when I water it. So I thought I would repot this one. I'm not going to drastically move up a pot size because as I say, I don't think its roots actually need a much bigger size, but I'm just going to go with this one, which I colored in a while ago and made to look a little bit prettier. So that's what we're going with. I will just tilt the camera down and I will, I guess, give you a little life update. So if you follow me on Instagram or I guess if you've watched my other kind of repotting chatty videos, you will know that, oh wow, actually look at those roots and also the little pups coming up here. Yay. But yeah, if you follow me on Instagram or watch my other videos, you will probably know that I've been getting ready to move out and it's just been, it's been a bit of a, a bit of a mission. I won't go into all of the details because it's very, very, very boring and honestly it's not even worth talking about, but I was pretty certain I was moving out. I got incredibly eager and literally packed ready to go and then everything fell through and it was like, nope, it's not going to happen. And I was so, so, so gutted. The place that I found is not huge, but it's so perfect for me, Yoli, all of my plants. It's literally got two, the living space area has two massive walls that are all window. So my plants would have been so, so, so happy there. And so it was almost definitely a no go. And I was like, okay, right. I'm going to stay packed. I'm just going to accept the fact that it's going to happen soon. So I'm going to just stay packed. And now it's kind of looking like it might happen again. So I'm really, I don't really know where I am with all of that. I'm, I'm packed, ready to go and accepting the fact that I could potentially be moving in a matter of weeks or I might have to wait another six months. So luckily I hadn't packed any of my plants. That would have been a nightmare. But yeah, I'm kind of living out of boxes at the moment and just, I really don't want to have to unpack. I don't know if any of you know, but like once you've got ready to go and kind of like mentally prepared yourself for that, the thought of then having to be like, right, well, I'll just put everything back to how it was. It's just not a good one. And as, as some of you know, I am living at home at the moment. I moved back during lockdown, back with my mum. And I honestly, I can't complain at all. I'm so lucky to be able to be here with my plants, my dog, all of that sort of stuff. It's absolutely amazing. But space is just a little bit limited. And because Yoli's so bad with cats and my mum's a cat, it just means that she has to be pretty much in the same room as me at all times. She's just sat watching me repot now. So, so yeah, I think we're, we're ready to make the move now, but we're just holding on and hoping that it will all turn out. All right. So I'm trying to stay positive and just hope that it will happen soon. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. Oh, for goodness sake. So it's got the, it's not mesh actually, but hang on, I'll see if you can see. Around the roots, it's got one of those little things holding the roots in place, which means that they are not able to grow properly, which is so annoying. I just need to grab some scissors so I can cut it off. I really think when people do this around the roots of plants, they should make it with something biodegradable, not kind of like plasticky stuff so that the roots aren't permanently stuck in that position because it just affects, oh, and it's, it's stuck around one of the little pups. I'm going to try and cut it out very carefully. Yeah. It just affects the health of your plants and it means that it's not able to absorb all the nutrients that it needs from the soil and all of that stuff. But hopefully now after doing this, this plant will just kind of spring into action and be a lot happier. There we go. Freedom for the roots. Yay. Yoli's overheating over there. I don't know why she does it. She will always go and lie right in the biggest patch of sunshine and get really, really warm to the point that you have to actually go and move her out of it because she's so hot. And why are you there? Why don't you go in the shade, you silly dog? Why don't you go in the shade? Also another little update is that I've just joined Patreon. I am doing more planty videos, planty content stuff over there. If any of you fancy joining, then you're more than welcome to. I'll pop up the details in the description box below. If you don't, then that's absolutely fine too. I will still be here on YouTube, but yes, I thought I would just throw that out there because it's awkward and I had to say it somehow, so I've just said it. Now we're moving on. We're going to pot the plant. Oh, damn it. I've just knocked off a really nice leaf and I don't think that's going to be propagatable because it hasn't got any of the stem on it. How annoying. I might stick it in water anyway, but I highly doubt, highly doubt that's going to work. The other thing I need to just do quickly is add some water to my potting mix, just because I've spoken about the perlite thing before and how it's so bad for you to breathe in. I only found out recently how bad exactly it was, but because it's really dry in here, I can feel, I can feel myself breathing in, so I'm going to go add some water to this to get rid of the dust. Right, this is now slightly muddier and messier, but it's, it's better for the lungs. I don't think I said either, this is, the mix I'm using is just house plant soil, perlite, orchid bark, and a little bit of pond thrown in as well, just because I had about a scoop left in a bag, so I thought I'd make some of that in there. There we go, that is that one all potted up and as I say, I'm really hoping that this one I will now notice some really significant growth in, just because whenever they've got those things around their roots, it seems to really, really hinder them and they can only kind of grow to a certain point. Oh, I need to move her out of the sun, she's panting like crazy. Come on you silly girl. I just moved her out of the sun and as soon as I did, she just went straight back, so I think what I'm going to need to do, I will repot this plant and then I'm going to have to take her out for a walk, because it feels like it's going to be really warm today and if it's too hot, it's not going to be any good for walking her, so I will do this one quickly and then we will do that. So this is my spider plant, my variegated spider plant, and as you can see, it does have roots coming out of the bottom. This one has been such a crazy fast grower, but I think I'm gonna move it up a couple of pot sizes. I think I'm going to go to that, just because as I say, it's growing like crazy at the moment, so I'm gonna just try not to damage any of the little roots down here too much. Wow yeah, those are some insane roots, look at that. Oh my goodness, this one was a teeny tiny propagation this time last year. I'll put a clip in actually, but it has just grown so, so, so, so, so quickly. Also it's Yodi's birthday really, really soon. We don't have an exact date when it is because she's a rescue, so they didn't know exactly, but we were told beginning of May, so her birthday could literally be like now. I know I joked in another video that I might do like a Yoli birthday vlog, but maybe I'll do like a birthday thing for her today. Maybe I'll make her some treats. I'm gonna make her some treats. I think I will finish putting this plant up, take her out for a walk, and then maybe when I get back before I carry on doing planty things, I will do a little, do a little birthday celebration for her. Why not? Why not? I know everybody wants to see that. No, just me? Oh my goodness, these roots are amazing. I feel like once this plant's in a bigger pot, it's just gonna go absolutely crazy. Look at them, whoa. Right, I'm not gonna bother getting the rest of the soil off because it actually hasn't been in soil for that long. It's just grown really quickly. I think it'll still hold some nutritional value, but I'm just gonna go ahead and put it up in this pot. Because of the leaves of this plant, it's so hard not to pop them into the soil as well. I'm having to try and hold them all up as I go. There we go. Oh my goodness, having it in the bigger pot just automatically makes it look like a much bigger plant, if that makes sense. It doesn't look like a little kind of propagation anymore. It looks like a huge full plant, and I love it. Yay. Right, okay, what I need to do now, I'm gonna get Yoli out for sunshine. I'm gonna go have a cooking for her. How sad am I? Cooking for her when we get back, and then we can carry on with planting things. Also, my cabinet humidity today is absolutely insane. It was at 90 when I first came up before I opened the door, and yeah, it's still at 82, and everything in there is doing very well. I haven't even had my humidifier running, to be honest. I haven't run it in about a week, just because I found a cheaper option is to just fill these with boiling water, get the fan there, and just let it all circulate up, but everything's doing really well. So before I left the house, I was having a chat with one of my plant friends who was asking me if I was going to be doing World Naked Gardening Day, which is tomorrow at the time of filming this, and if you don't know what World Naked Gardening Day is, it's pretty much in the name. It's just people celebrating being naked in nature, taking pictures naked with their plants, with their gardens, all that sort of stuff, and I've never done it before. I completely celebrate people that do, but I've never personally done it, but I've just been walking, and as I do, I've just been going into my own little world and completely overthinking things, and it's just, it's made me realize how much self-acceptance and body acceptance I have got from plant care, as weird as that might sound to some of you, and I guess maybe I should put a little trigger warning in here or something like that. If anybody needs that, I will put a time stamp there, so you can skip if you want to, but when I was in my, I guess, very early 20s, I went through a really, really, really dark patch for various reasons. A lot of things in my life were going on, a lot of things happened, and I basically was just being incredibly unkind to my body. I was doing all sorts of horrible, horrible things to it, and I was putting all sorts of nasty things into it, and dealing with the pain I was feeling in, in a way that wasn't healthy at all, and I basically lost all of any confidence that I already had in my body from before that, and I don't know. I think a lot of it, just kind of part of it, played into the wanting to, wanting to appear to have the perfect image and all that sort of stuff, which is fed to us by the media, but this went a lot deeper than that, and, and yeah, I was in a very bad place for quite a long time with it, and really thinking about it, since I've, since I've found houseplants, since I've found planty, planty life as a way of self-care, and I've said before, for me, it's like meditation. I get so much out of it. I honestly, I can't even explain. I probably don't have to explain to most of you, because you probably know exactly what I mean, but since I found that, and it's been my daily grounding, and allows me to be with my thoughts in a very healthy, positive way, even if my thoughts aren't particularly positive at the time, it has just, it's given me so much, and, and for that reason, I feel like, I feel like, I feel like I'm having kind of a new look on World Naked Gardening Day, and I, I feel like I want to get involved in it, and I think it would be a good challenge to myself as well, in terms of self-acceptance, and kind of pairing it with the thing that's been, sorry, my arm's going to sleep, pairing it with the thing that has been the most powerful healer for me, and just, yeah, I don't really, I'm also incredibly out of breath, because I'm very unfit. Um, I don't quite know how to put it, really, but plant care has just, it's opened up a whole new dimension in my life, and has, I need to switch arms, has brought me to the place where I feel that, after many, many, many years of, whether it's teenage things, and just going through what I think a lot of people go through in terms of self-acceptance, and not liking the way you look, and all that sort of stuff, it's really brought me to a place where, on the whole, not always, but on the whole, I do sit a lot more comfortably in my own skin now, and, and yeah, so I think I'm gonna get back, and I think I'm gonna take some naked pictures. I won't be putting that in the vlog though. Another thing to walk and chat with you about, because this is quite fun, is a lot of you have asked before why Yoli is on a lead, and if she ever comes off the lead, I do muzzle her sometimes as well, as you might have seen in other videos, I think one of my garden plant, house plant, garden centre tour things, oh my god, what's the name of, what's the name of that series? I don't know, um, so basically she, as, as you know, she's a rescue dog, she is sometimes an angel, she's an angel around the house, and she's on the whole very good, but she is quite reactive with other dogs, she has a tendency to, she's never learned to play basically, so she can launch in, and not that she's ever hurt another dog, but she can be a little bit aggressive, um, which again is something that, she's, she's a grown adult dog, although there's certain things that I can do to kind of help make her feel more secure, a lot of the time it is just kind of the case of, I want to be a responsible dog owner, I want to make sure that everyone around me is safe and feels safe, and I am taking control of my dog, so what I do, there's a place really close to where I live, where, oh my goodness, this is why a place really close to where I live that has, um, like an enclosed little woodland and field space and stuff like that, so I take her there most weeks, and she has a really good off-the-lead runabout in a safe environment, where we know we're not going to run into other dogs or things that might be, um, a bit alarming for her, uh, but on the whole, if I'm walking out and about and there's other dog owners with lots of other dogs, which today there are, I'm avoiding all of them right now, I do tend to keep her on the lead just because it's, it's safer basically, um, she's got an eight meter lead and she has a good runabout and I usually have a run with her, it's funny though because I thought when I get a dog I was like, god, I'm gonna be so social, I'm gonna go out and meet all the other dog walkers and it's gonna be so great, little did I know what a nightmare she'd be, but we love her, she's great. So I'm back from the dog walk and I've looked up some dog treat recipes and the one that I found that I think I'm gonna go for, just because it sounds so, so, so easy, is basically just blended up dog biscuits, egg and cheese and then you bake it, so I'm gonna give it a go. An egg just splattered on the floor. I'm not sure if I'm gonna, like, cook it or what I'm gonna do. Also I'm sure I've showed you heads before, hello Bibi, but this is my mum's dog and Yolie's best friend, he's so cute, aren't you? I mean it's not quite master chef level but I don't think she'll mind too much. So while Yolie's biscuits are baking I'm just gonna go around and just check my plants and do a little bit of watering because I did do a load a couple of days ago but I do feel like this weather is so, so, so warm there's probably going to be some that need doing and I water in a really weird way. I know most people just take their watering can round to their plants and water them where they are. I mean I've got a lot of plants but I personally, I'll use a washing up bowl and I'll put a towel out to just absorb some of the water, like help them drain afterwards and I always bring them all over to me. I think just because I can get a better, a better overview of them then I can kind of have a look and see if any of them need pruning or if there's any pests or anything like that. I just, I personally always do it this way and I really enjoy doing it this way. I know a lot of people just like, oh that's effort, but yeah. Also this is what I was gonna ask, so I've had this variegated monstera, I propagated this one a while ago and it's had this little plant growing in the soil for ages and I've just kind of let it be, let it do its thing and it suddenly started flowering. I don't know if you can, yeah it's got a really nice, it almost looks like a pansy or something but the leaves don't look particularly, oh there we go, pansy like. So if anyone knows what that little plant is let me know. Look at that new leaf, how beautiful is that? I love new antherium leaves. Also variegated monstera update, so I was watching back one of my videos that I filmed literally a year ago, I think pretty much to the day and I was showing you various plants and I was like, oh it'd be cool if I kind of did a like this, this much growth in a year type thing and I will, oh, oh, okay there's a wasp in here and there's a dragonfly in here, hold that thought. Okay, I can't get the wasp out so I'm just gonna have to be aware of the fact that he's here and not walk into him. So yes, I was gonna do a kind of plant comparison, no, I need him gone, I need him gone, I can't do it, there's a window right there, out of it. Okay, the wasp is gone, what was I saying? Oh yeah, plant updates one year on and I don't know where I was going with this now. Anyway, I will put in a clip of what my variegated monstera looks like this time last year and show you her growth over this last year because it has been crazy, literally she's touching the ceiling now and if I am able to move to my new place, my new flat, it's got really high ceilings and it would be perfect because I could just let her carry on climbing but if not I think I'm probably gonna have to give her a chop back soon because there's gonna be, there's gonna be no room for her. But yeah, that was a very anti-climactic thing to mention in the video now, I feel like that I had a better thought going there before the wasp threw me off course. I've also recently started using predatory mites as firstly a pest treatment for one of my plants over there that has got spider mites at the moment but also just as a pest preventative because I've heard it's really good and I've got them, I've got quite a few sachets, I'll grab one and show you actually, but I've got quite a few sachets in my cabinet over here and I keep picking up plants and thinking that they've got pests on them and then realizing it's just a little mite, he's meant to be there. Yeah so they look like that and they basically just slowly release mites as and when they're needed over I think about four weeks and I've got to say so far it seems to be working well and it seems to be really doing the trick with my massive alacasia portadora which if you follow me on Patreon you will have seen because I did show you the other day but I will, I'll give you some more updates on her when she's a little bit more stable because she's not in the best way at the moment. This is one of the other anthurium clarinervium babies that I was telling you about earlier and obviously it is doing well, it's got a second leaf on the way as well but compared to the first one it's just, it doesn't compare, this one's teeny in comparison. Ah one of the main leaves on my anthurium silver blush as well is turning so I think I should probably chop that back, oh however there is a new little growth point there which is good, oh good because that was a lovely leaf and I've just been through to the kitchen and I'm not gonna lie Yoli's biscuits smell amazing, they smell really really nice, I don't think I'll be trying them but they do smell very good. The only reason I haven't chopped this leaf right back is just because when they produce inflorescences which this one is probably way too young to even think about doing but when they do they produce them through the kind of base of the petiole just there so I kind of, I mean I probably should just chop it all the way back but I always think if there's a chance I'll leave some space for it to grow further down the line. Oh another plant comparison from that video so I showed you my peperomia frost that I just started propagating about this time last year and you can see now it's absolutely ginormous, it's got, I mean its leaves are just huge look at that, I love the colour of this plant so so so much it's just so beautiful. This is the little philodendron marmaid that I got from the plant swap and I had three leaves at the time that I got it and I suspected it might have pests, I'm not convinced I don't know it's still in kind of isolation I've got it far over that side of the room with some predatory mites next to it so I'm hoping if there is anything nasty then they will be gone soon but I'm just I'm keeping an eye on it as you can see and that is what it is currently looking like and these two although they're in basically pure pond and they do have a little reservoir of their own just because they're planted quite high up in the pot because it's such a big pot and I didn't want to overwhelm the root system I do still give them a little water at the top as well just when I can feel it's a little bit dry and actually I've got to say having the soil in there with it is actually a really a really good indicator because I can tell by sticking my finger whereas with pond you can't really tell you've just got to rely on the fact that the roots are feeding. I'm also still due to swap a cutting of this plant which is an alternanthera with someone from the plant swap so I'm going to send that out to her next week when the evenings are a little bit warmer but look how beautiful that is it's getting so gorgeous and it grows really quickly as well I mean when I first got this it was only about there and it's branching out as well as up it's just it's so pretty another one year on plant update that I have shown you so many times before but it's just amazing to see how far it's come in such a short space of time I'll pop the clip in a bit from last year when it was a teeny tiny plant I just propagated from a cutting and then I will show you it now look at the size of her she's just absolutely huge and she's also got another leaf coming as well she's only given me that one in the last week or something she's already got another massive massive massive one coming yeah she's ginormous right so I think those are the main ones that needed doing for now as I say I'm I'm monitoring them a lot at the moment because this room gets so so so unbelievably hot it gets up to kind of 32 degrees which to be honest is too hot for them but I don't have another alternative so I have done the ones that are in desperate need of a drink today I have done a big water very recently so I think I will go and get Yoli's treats out of the oven and let them cool down mmm delicious they do actually smell really really delicious oh take your hand off light Yoli he's very nice we can have one more I really hope you enjoyed this little plant vlog day I realize it wasn't perhaps as planty as I had planned but if you did enjoy it then let me know and I will do more videos like this oh you finished that already have you finished that already was that nice oh but yeah if you did enjoy this video please make sure to give it a thumbs up subscribe to my channel have a lovely day and I'll see you in the next video