Easy Propagation Asplenium Nidus Fern Care Tips Satisfying Updates At The End YouTube

And actually, I don't really mind taking this, cutting it in half like a pizza, and then you will have two plants like this. And let me show you how beautiful that is. And then little babies would sprout from where you make the cut. Ooh, and I looked under the hood. Look at that. This is so sexy. It's trying to put out even more fiddleheads down below. Hey, you guys, my name is Sean. I'm a houseplant enthusiast from Jakarta, Indonesia. Here to show you how to care for and propagate this beautiful variegated fern. Now, this is an Asplenium. It is a mutated Asplenium that happens to be variegated. I don't know the origin story of this fern. So if you do know it, please do comment down below. I would love to know more. The name of this is just simply Asplenium variegated. Now, Aspleniums mutate like crazy. There's so many different forms of them with even within the same species. So a lot of them have really funky names and a lot of them don't even have names at all. Now, for the variegated one of these, this used to be very, very uncommon, especially during COVID era. But nowadays, I think most competent plant stores should have these. So if you live in a country where a lot of these tropical houseplants are available, you should find one with no problem. And they're actually very easy to care for. They're easy to propagate. So let me dive into the care real quick. Now, for these guys, they love bright, bright indirect light. If you give them lower than ideal light, they will start to revert to green. And also keep in mind, because this is a rosette plant, it does need even top light from above. So if you place this on a shelf like this, I mean, it looks beautiful, but it's only gonna grow fronds towards the one side of the plant. So it's not gonna look that beautiful over time, but they do make really wonderful vertical garden plants, if you ask me, but maybe not for long. If you grow them even against the wall, it may even just form a semicircle at some point. And actually, I don't really mind taking this, cutting it in half like a pizza, and then you will have two plants like this that you can place on the wall. It will actually look pretty, pretty gorgeous, and the plant will not die. Actually, if you cut it in half, in fact, you might encourage some new baby plants to emerge from the sides, which is how we're gonna propagate it later. But yeah, again, back to the light, bright indirect light. Low light will cause this to eutoliate, and again, cause it to revert. There's a lot of aspleniums out there, the green forms, that can probably take lower light conditions, but this is one that needs higher light. Now, I do give this a very, very general potting media. You can grow them in full moss. I've also grown them in just coco coir. Although, of course, if you grow them in just coco coir, you'll have to water it very, very often, like daily. So these guys are actually very forgiving. You water it when it's bone dry, or if you pot it up in something very, very chunky, very, very fast draining, because these guys are epiphytes, you can water them very regularly, and they'll totally forgive you for it, as long as the potting media is dry. So the potting media and the watering, you just need to find a sweet balance for it. Do not overwater it. You can actually rot this plant. A lot of the older leaves were to mush up, turn yellow, and die off. Or another sign of overwatering is if the tip becomes yellowing and mushy, that's the plant trying to expel excess water. But if you see a bit of dryness here, like this front here, you see some dryness, it just means that it's probably underwater, or we forgot to water it for a few days. But this is an absolutely forgiving plant. So I've never really had this plant die on me, despite the fact that I've moved around quite a lot, and not a lot of my plants survived those moves. And the beauty of this is that it's not only variegated, but the variegation looks like it's reversed. So the front is actually white in color, and it looks like someone just took a green ballpoint pen and just started drawing random strokes on the leaves. So that's one of the appeal for these plants for me. And combine that with the fact that the fronds are super, super crested. So the fronds just keep splitting and splitting in a way that is super wild. And this is a really wonderful statement piece for your garden, and also it'll do quite well indoors if you put it in a cover pot. It's definitely a conversation starter. Now, you do wanna fertilize this the same way you do with other houseplants. You can fertilize by foliar spraying the fronds, and also you do wanna fertilize the media as well. Now, in nature, they're pretty apophytic. So a lot of leaf litter and animal droppings probably just fall on the crown, and they will accumulate over time. Now, I have a feeling, just a hunch, that they can actually take in nutrients from the crown as well. But in our indoor growing conditions where environments may not be so ideal, we may not even have the best airflow, I would keep the crown inside very, very clean so it's not to rot anything. And I've never really had pest pressure with these guys, but you can also do preventative pest control on these because eventually pests will get to most of our plants, even though they are not very prone to it. So this has overall been an easy one for me to care for. And I had many of these, but I've given a lot away. I've sold a few away. And right now, I guess I'm going to chop it up and show you how I propagate this and turn this into multiple plants. All right, first thing first, we need to decide which one of these to cut up. I'm thinking I'll cut up the bigger one because this little one has a lot of room to grow. This will turn into this in no time. And the baby ones of these plants are so stinking cute. I cannot wait to cut it up and look at the baby fronds come out of these parent plants. So this one here, I would guesstimate that this one probably took about a year and a half to get from a baby to this size. So without further ado, let's just get started. Now, this one is actually very, very root-bound. And actually, these guys do benefit from a repotting, especially when they're root-bound because their roots are already as constricted. But this perfect specimen is just perfect for us to propagate. Now, let me check the little one real quick. Now, this one still has some media in it. It's not got a ton of roots, so we don't have to repot it just yet. In case you're curious to see what their roots look like, this is what they look like. They're super fine, which means that they're actually rather thirsty plants. All right, you can cut this up into as many pieces as you want. But for me, let me see. Do I wanna cut into sixes or fourths? Let me show you how. First, I'm gonna cut it in half first. Okay, there. Beautiful. This is what I meant earlier. You could mount this on a wall like this, as it is, and then little babies would sprout from where you make the cut. Because in my experience, when you cut these out, they are a little bit stressed out, so they will start putting out babies from the sides. And the babies from these cuts are actually exact clones of themselves. Unlike some of them, when they grow bigger, they'll put out spores on the underside of the front, and the spores will disperse. Those babies will have mutations, they will have variations. So if you want exact clones, you really do have to cut it up like this. And let me show you how beautiful that is. This is the inside of the plant. Now, I can just cut this in half again, or I could cut it in threes. In this case, I think I would do threes, like that. That's one. One more. All right. We will lose a little bit of fronds, and that is absolutely okay. And this one here might be a smaller plant, so I might actually do it in twos. All right. So I've got a few of these. So I want you to imagine that from up above, that they look a bit like a pizza. Just cut it up from the top. You can also mount these single ones on walls and watch them grow into something bigger. That's also a possibility. But for us, we're gonna pot it up into little pots. I'm gonna show you real quick just two of them, so we can get on with our days. This one here, for example, I'm just pot it up right here. And I'm gonna grow this in moss. Hang on. Before I forget, something important. I'm gonna dab some activated charcoal here because there's some fresh wound here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna rub it in activated charcoal. I do this with all my propagations. They're a preventative measure. Activated charcoal is antimicrobial. That means it's gonna prevent bacteria or fungus. Now, here, for this particular one, I use moss, but you can actually use just a general potting media or any potting. As I said earlier, I've tried just in coco coir, coco coir is the little shredded coconut pieces that's in my wall here, or imagine your moss pole. You can use that as well, but you do wanna water it quite a lot. And you wanna just bury it gently like this. I'm even going to add some low-release fertilizer. They really respond well to a bit of nutrients, but they don't need immediate nutrients. Right now, all they need is to put out some roots. Now, some people say, can you tent this? Can you propagate this in a bin to increase humidity, to let it root faster? You absolutely can. If you put like an inverted cup, or if you just do something to seal in the humidity, it will grow faster for you. But for this plant, you absolutely don't need it. So for a situation like this that's in moss, I wanna water it only very little, and maybe spray it a little bit every single day, possibly even keep the bottom of the moss dry the whole time, just keeping the top part a little bit moist. This is so that it will seal in some humidity, because right now, it don't need a ton of water in there. It just needs a bit of humidity for it to put out roots. And we did not mention humidity in the care portion of this video, but I find it to be irrelevant with this fern, because I've grown this in an air-conditioned room. I've grown this in my greenhouse. They take off just the same. So humidity, if you can give it, great. But if you don't have a ton of humidity, don't sweat it. So for this one, I'm just gonna use my general potting media for the rest of the pots. I'm just gonna gently plant this in. I must say that this pot is even too big for it, because for something this small, I want smaller pots. The idea is to have it root, and if you have a bigger pot, your pot, it may retain too much water, and there's also more areas in there for your pests, bacteria, and fungus to hang out and play with. So here's what I've potted up. I'm gonna finish up with the rest, and I will see you guys soon. All right, so we've got one in moth and four in potting media, so I'll give you guys an update. Welcome to a 15-weeks update. I've got some really bad news, in case this is not apparent to you. Three of these did not make it. Now, I've been traveling quite a lot, so I'm not sure exactly what happened to it. It could be over-watering or under-watering. If you over-water it, it'll obviously turn to mush, and if you under-water it, it'll turn to crisp, but one thing about these, I don't know if I mentioned it earlier, is that the variegated ones have very little chlorophyll, chlorophyll, so the chances of it surviving is a lot less than the all-green variety. And by the way, these guys do come in an all-green variety, and they come in, like, crested, they come in many different kinds of forms, just so you know. And this one in my hand is actually one that we did not propagate, so it's sized up quite a bit. It's put out a lot of little hands here, so it's doing well. So I've got one insurance plant going on. Now, these two here, I'm slightly worried about, but they're still surviving. This one put out two new fronds over here, so hopefully this will survive, and we're gonna give it more time. But 15 weeks is actually quite a long time to wait for these guys. I do realize that I'm not home as much, and plants really do suffer quite a bit when I'm not home, when I'm not keeping an eye on things. But I don't blame anyone. I don't blame the gardener that I have. He's doing the best that he can. He don't know many of these plant species. So this is just what happens. You just gotta forgive yourself and move on. Well, we've got two more plants, so this is pretty hopeful. So let's see them in a few months' time. So welcome to the nine-weeks update, and these are the two that have survived. Now, this one put out these fronds, and I guess they just continue to grow out of it over time. I'm gonna do a tug test to see. This has taken well to the media. And this one here is sort of the champion here. I'm gonna show you up close what that looks like. As you can see, multiple fiddleheads have showed up. This is gonna give me a few baby plants. This is gonna be one crown, one crown, and this is like another one, another one. So if I let this grow out just a little bit more, they will sort of form their own rosette. So we do have to separate them at some point. Otherwise, they'll start to constrict one another. But this is an example of what happens when you cut them up like a pizza. This is what's supposed to happen with all the cuttings if I didn't rot or dry them out. Unfortunately, we didn't know what happened to the cutting. It's been a bit neglected over time, but thankfully, we've got this to look forward to. Ooh, and I looked under the hood. Look at that. This is so sexy. It's trying to put out even more fiddleheads down below. So if I give this more time, more room, look at that. This is going to become a lot of plants. I love cloning ferns like this. This is such a beautiful process. All right, I guess thank you so much for watching this all the way to the very end. I hope this video gives you courage to slice your fern up. Keep in mind, pay attention to them. Make sure they don't dry out. You need to still give them pretty good care even after you chop them up, although they're really not the hardest one to propagate and divide and have multiples of. I've had literally 50 of these before because we sold quite a few when I had a store, I think three or four years ago. So we sold quite a lot of these and these are just the remnants of what's left. And I really don't know what to do with them. They're incredibly ornate, but if you put them behind a wall like this, I mean, I guess that could look really good. I've not really done that yet, but they are a little bit too, imagine if I slice this in half and I just turn it around facing us, we'll have two crowns facing all of us in the wall. So that might be actually be a pretty good idea to have moving forward. But I wanna thank you again for watching this all the way to the very end. And just by you commenting down below, liking and staying subscribed, it really helps the channel out a lot. But if you wanna help me out further financially for a cup of coffee a month, feel free to join my Patreon at patreon.com slash Sean from Only Plants, or you can join as a YouTube member simply by opening any of my videos from a browser, computer browser, and next to my channel name, there will be a join button. All right, I will see you guys in the next one. Happy growing, everyone.