Wandering Jew Plant Care: Growing Tradescantia Zebrina

The Wandering Jew plant is actually most commonly referred to as one of three different plants in the Tradescantia genus. You have Tradescantia fluminensis, which is green. You have Tradescantia palida, which is dark purple. And then you have this guy, Tradescantia zebrina, which I think we all understand why it's named that with the way that these leaves are patterned. So in today's video, that's what we're talking about. How to care for this amazing house plant. Extremely easy to grow. And we're going to be doing some potting, some pruning, some propagation, everything. And I actually have joined forces with Espoma Organics. We're going to be using some of their potting mix as well as some of their fertilizers to talk about fertilization. So huge thank you to them. 90 year old company, been organic since the start. So I'm really excited to partner with them. But let's go ahead without further ado and figure out how to care for this plant. Lighting. The first thing to talk about when you're growing any plant, because it's the number one input that a plant needs to survive. This is an east facing window. The Tradescantia zebrina and other types of wandering jute plants want bright indirect light like many plants, but they can handle being just completely outside. And in fact, if you give them more light, you're more likely to get a lot more flower production on this plant. And the flowers are pretty. I wouldn't say they're incredibly beautiful, but they definitely give it a nice little texture and a nice bit of aesthetic value. So if I were to be growing this in my home, in my room right here, this is my east facing window. It's the best one I have in this room for light. I'd be pushing it right up against it, as you can see, and probably rotating it throughout its growing cycle. So it kind of grows balanced. When watering this plant, just keep in mind, it's like many other plants, although it does prefer slightly more moist soil. So it can be kind of hard to get into this plant and check the soil. But what I like to do is kind of peel it back and really look in there and get a sense for how moist that soil is. This is just slightly dry, so I might top it off a little bit, especially before we repot it. But again, one of these easier to care for houseplants, as long as you remember to water it when the soil is dry to about an inch, inch and a half or something like that, you're going to be in a pretty good spot. Now comes the soil section. And like many plants, especially indoor plants that are vining like this, kind of like our Pothos that we've seen videos on before, it's going to want just a general high quality potting mix. So for this video we're going to do a little bit of a repot. You can see that we have a pretty sizable pot. It's hard to see the bottom because sometimes these just get sold and they're so bushy, but we're potting it up somewhat significantly. I would say maybe two, two and a half inches, which is kind of aggressive, but this is an aggressive grower guys. Any plant that's invasive in other areas is oftentimes you don't have to stress about, Oh, did I repot it in too big of a pot? That type of thing. So we're not going to worry about that. We're going to pop open our, it's from Organic Potting Mix over here. It's just a really high quality potting mix for both houseplants and edibles. But of course this is the houseplant video. So let's go ahead. We're going to start filling up the bottom. And while we do that, let's talk about a couple of problems that you may run into when you're growing this plant. The first and most obvious is as a semi-invasive, it can just grow like absolutely crazy. It can grow insane. What I would highly recommend is as we repot this, we're going to do this as well, to do a pruning of sorts. So you want to be able to take away some of those trailing stems and propagate those because that is where your bread and butter lies in creating more wandering jute plants. It's so easy. It's literally buy one once in your life. And from then on you can propagate forever and ever. Let me grab my gloves real quick. That's what I would say about that. And let's go ahead and finish up filling this pot and then we will go ahead and repot. So what we want to do now is let's take the gloves off. We'll grab, we'll grab our pot. And it's always helpful to water it in slightly before you repot just so that soil stays nice and firmly together. But we're going to flip it upside down, ideally without spilling too much and let it gently come out. And you can see, look at how root bound that truly is. So if I want to, I can kind of come through and just break this up slightly. It's really not going to harm a plant, especially one that is so forgiving like this. And so we're just breaking it up. We don't want these roots to circle. Give it a nice kind of breakup and you can come through and just tease it apart. And then we need to go ahead and fit it in. And sometimes it can be annoying to repot these because there's so much plant material that it's hard to get the soil in afterwards. So kind of like hold the hair back type of thing and do it that way. So let's flip it over and we've given it just a little bit of room here. So I'm going to kind of bring it in like this and then we're going to have to do some pulling apart and filling from the sides. Okay, we've potted it up. I'm just going to give it a quick little water. You can see it, you just kind of have to give it a little bit of a haircut, a little bit of a nice prune. So what I'm going to do is come around and just tidy it up aesthetically exactly how I want it to be. But you don't want to throw away your stem tip cuttings or your cuttings of this plant because it's so easy to propagate. So let's go ahead and clean it up, polish it up. This is going to grow like crazy in this new pot and then we'll talk about exactly what to do with your cuttings so you never have to buy this plant again. Now that we've given our plants a really nice cleanup, you can see there's a lot of just pieces that are off of the plant that we can really just propagate from. And so what I like to do is I focus on the stem tip. So here's the growing tip right here and I'll come through with my snips and just cut right below this node, leaving this little section on right there. And so we can see what we do here is clean this up cause it's going to go into either the soil or the water propagator. And I may also decide to clean that one up too. And honestly I might actually cut right there and take this leaf off. Now we have a cleaned up cutting that you can take this and you can put it into a jar of water or you can put it into soil. Either one works. It kind of depends on your preferred method. So what you'll do is you'll come through and just all the trimmings that you can take off of your plant, you'll just do the same process. And I'll do one more just for the example, just for the sake of it. And so you've got, let's say this growing tip right here. You can see, you know because there's, there's new small leaves coming out, right? So we'll come through, this kind of curves in an awkward angle. So I'm going to cut it off right there. We'll take off this leaf and we'll take off this leaf right here. And now we have another prepared cutting. So again, these things root like absolutely crazy. You almost don't even have to try. So I have my plants in my water propagator. You can see the stems just sticking out there. But again, you could just use something like this if you want to, or you could just stick them in soil. It's really up to you. I just really like this cause it works really well for me. And sometimes because this is such a soft piece of plant tissue, it can tend to rot quickly, which is why I like to have water spraying at the bottom. But I don't like to necessarily have it sitting in water personally. Now as far as problems that you may run into with this plant, you might find that overwatering can be an issue that's going to rot it out. They do get really crowded. And so repotting or propagating or trimming is a really good idea. You may run into something like spider mites. That's usually a too dry environment issue. So if you up your humidity and combat those, you can be in a really good spot. I've got an article on the website about that too. But honestly, it's an invasive in many areas of the world, which means it's very, very easy in general to grow in your home or personally if you do a hanging basket, throwing that in like the side yard or in an arbor or an awning or something is such a good way to use it. So The Wandering Jew treats Scantia Zebrina. As always, full care guides available on my website. And again, thank you to Espoma Organic for sponsoring the video, providing the soil. Super cool, super high quality. And I really, really love it. So until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.