Dividing Kangaroo Fern and Blue Star Fern

Hmm. I think something's wrong with that sprinkler head. I bet a squirrel has something to do with it. It's always a squirrel. Let's see here. Oh, yep. That's got to be a squirrel damage. Shoot right through the coupler. All right. Well, good thing I have more of those. Just turn that down for now. Hey, what's up, garden friends? Jeff here. How's everybody doing? I hope you're doing well. I'm great. I got a fern here and it's very pretty. It's one of my favorites. You smell it? Oh, it smells good. Yes, ferns can smell nice. This is one that smells very nice. Not everybody can detect the smell, but I can. It's a very sweet vanilla, spicy sort of fragrance. Smell it in the morning and in the evening. And if there's old dying foliage, you really smell it. It's a kangaroo paw fern. It has outgrown its basket. And I was thinking as I'm putting it in a bigger basket, maybe just divide it up. So I have the tray here. I need the hoary hoary. Don't need my boy juice. That can stay over there. And I think it'd be nice to be able to make at least probably four new plants out of that and keep one main plant on the inside. But we will see. Can't really say what's going to happen with it until we pull it out of the pot and have a look at what's going on with those roots. Now, I was just noticing my blue star fern is looking pretty overgrown. Maybe we should do that one, too. Yeah. You see how overgrown this thing is? It's about popping out of the side of the pot. That one's going to be more tricky to deal with, though. I just know I don't always have as much luck tearing those apart. Tearing them apart, that sounds aggressive, but that's essentially what we're doing. I suppose we should probably grab this guy and start with this one because that's where we started. You see all this stuff coming out the side? All of this. This can all be rooted and grown into a new plant. You can really, really propagate the heck out of these kangaroo paw ferns. I don't know why they're not more popular. I know they don't have like the classic fern look to them. And sometimes that can be enough to make people go, I don't really want it. I want the, you know, the typical like floral type fern. Something you'd see in a floral range. Oh, this one has a root growing right through it. I might have to cut that one off. Now, I don't have to. We can just peel this hook back. That's what I just did. See? Peel that back. We can pop this whole thing out of there. There we go. Awesome. So that took the hanger with it. Let's see what's going on with these roots. Oh, wow. Nice, healthy plant. Yeah, this looks good. Looks really good. So the ferns have very, very, very fine roots. This is what you would typically see. This of course varies, but most ferns have those really fine roots. You know, you may notice what you're seeing up here. See that? Those are all above the soil. That's important. I really love these ferns. They look like, you know, sea creature of some kind. Very easy to propagate too. So every single one of these pieces right here, I don't have my clippers on me, so I'm just gonna, I'll just snap a piece off like that. See this piece right here? If you set that down to soil, want to use a staple or something to hold that down on the surface of the soil, that's going to grow a whole new plant. As long as you have a node, which you can see them right here, see that bump? There's a node, there's another node, and then there's a third one right here. Yeah, it'll take it a while, but that's all you need. So we could make hundreds and hundreds of plants out of this one basket. I don't want to do all that. That's getting very complicated. It would take an extremely long time, and I think that it's a pain in the butt making sure that all of those rhizomes, these above-ground rhizomes, that's what these are, the rhizomes really just a modified root essentially that trails underground. This is an above-ground rhizome. Making sure that all of those stay on top of soil, it's just a royal pain in the butt. They get moved when you water, they flop over, so you have to find a way to pin them all down. I don't really want to do all that. So what we're going to do here is just take the Hori Hori knife, and we'll just cut this into a few different sections. See if I can't maybe get this clip off of here now, free that hook from the plant. There we go. Cut that out of there. I'll spread these out as much as possible. Then come in here, this is the Hori Hori, want to make sure yours is clean, mine's a little muddy, so be better than me and clean your knife. I can see that there's a section in here where I have a cluster of plants right there, so I'm going to come in with that knife, we're just going to cut, cut down in a little section right there, and you just sort of feel around the top of the container and you try and find spots where it seems like it's going to be good for division. I just keep at it until parts of it start to come apart. Sometimes you can just peel them apart too. If you can just peel it, that means you did a good job and you have a good section. Look at that. That's a nice big section, maybe even a little bit too big actually for one of these pots. No, no, I think that's fine. I think that's totally fine. I want to take at least one more off of here. At this point I can probably come in and just do this by hand. Here we go. So I think that what I'm going to do is probably save this one and put this back into its original basket, let it fill that basket back out. Those other two can go in a smaller basket. I kind of love when I'm filming a video and I realize I've been calling a plant by the wrong name the entire time. So I've been calling this a kangaroo paw fern, it's just a kangaroo fern. Kangaroo paw is an entirely different plant and it's not this plant. So yeah, don't mind me on that. I'm pulling off the bottom chunk of roots, setting that free to the garden. Let's have some fresh soil in there. Those roots just sink themselves down too. This is just Pro-Mix. It's just a well-drained, all-purpose potting mix that I have added some compost into just to help with moisture retention. These are a fern that they really do prefer to stay consistently moist, but they're more forgiving than a lot of other ferns. They can dry out for a little while, not too terribly long, but for a little while and they'll be okay. Make sure you get into all those little nooks and crannies. It's the one thing when you divide things up like this, you usually have a lot of pockets, so you got to make sure you're getting filled in. You don't want to overfill it either. I like to make sure there's a nice well in here so I can water the plant without soil spilling all over the place, especially with the hanging basket. So you don't keep having a soil spilling all over everything that's down below. And that's it. Just clip this in. There we have it. Got a whole new plant. About to have two new plants here. That one looks more full, but it doesn't matter. These grow pretty vigorously, the kangaroo ferns, especially if you can give them adequate humidity. They're typically fine with indoor humidity, just like your average household. You want to be probably above 40 percent at the minimum, but if you don't have that, they do really well in a spot like a bathroom, something like that, where you have some moisture. They can be pretty drought tolerant, though. That's what I was getting ready to say with the other one, is when I have these inside during the winter, I really don't water them all that often. And when I do, I try and just do it from below, so I'll just set them into a dish of water and let them wick that up so I'm not getting too much water in and around the crown of really just the growth points that those rhizomes have. It's have a growth center like a normal fern would. Gosh, those are so pretty, and they smell so good. I probably should have mentioned there is an appropriate and inappropriate time of year to be doing these things. This is technically not the appropriate time, so, you know, keep that in mind. This is really a better spring chore, I would say. Late spring, early summer, whenever it's nice enough for you to move your houseplants outside, that's a good time to be doing your divisions. That way they have all season long with those longer day lengths to get themselves rerouted. They're going into a greenhouse. These will probably have my grow space, but it's heated and good humidity. Everything is watered aquaponically, so if I have a pond in there, so they get a little bit of fertilizer, fish fertilizer, just, you know, fish poop, really, with each watering. I'm not just worried about it because of it. It's important that I make sure these don't dry out, especially right now, because they're going to need to heal from having their roots torn up, and they're establishing new roots too, right? So, got to keep that in mind. So, keeping humidity up might be a good idea. If you have low humidity, maybe putting a plastic bag over the top of the plant would be a good idea for a few weeks, because the plant's just going to be struggling to maintain moisture. Okay, a lot of that water that the plant has, a lot of its hydration, can just get moved right out of that foliage with every little breeze, and they don't necessarily have the healthiest root structure to help pull all the water back in that they need. So, that's just a little aftercare stuff. I won't fertilize these until I can tell that they are actually doing some active growing, because their roots can be delicate. They can scorch and burn, and when I do fertilize my kangaroo puffer, I just use my regular fertilizer. It's best to dilute it, but being completely honest with you, I usually forget and just don't, and they've always been fine. And there we go, from one to three in just a matter of minutes, and I could have kept going. Like I said, you can take one of these pieces and set them on top of some soil, staple it down or something, and they will grow and grow and grow. I could make hundreds of them. I'm going to want to make sure I get these watered in right away, too. They will wilt down. I'm going to keep them out of the light. These are going to be getting less light than I would normally let them get. They don't get that much light anyways. They really do best with a dappled light. Let's get some morning sun, and that's about it. Now, this guy right here, it can take some more sun. This is a blue star fern. It's tagus. Wow, okay. It does need to be repotted, but I don't know. I don't really know if I want to divide on this one. I think I'd rather just pop it up into a larger container. That is a solid, solid plant. My goodness. Rock hard. There's gonna be a lot of roots in here. Now, one of the reasons that I would want to repot this plant is just because, well, I've been having a little bit more trouble keeping it hydrated. You can see that's got some damage on it. That's really because we had some triple digit temperatures, and you know, there's only so much you can do when things get that hot. But also, this pot, I don't think there's much soil left in there, so that makes it a little harder to keep them hydrated too. But I think I would rather just bump this up into a larger container over dividing it up. I think it's going to be a challenge just getting this out of that pot, and that's not something I want to go into blindly. I want to be prepared with a larger hanging basket to put this in. I don't think I have anything bigger than this. That's not, no. I don't think that's going to come out easily, so I'm probably going to have to break the pot to get this out. I'll keep trying because I want to be able to show you guys what's going on down here in the pot. I want to see what's going on inside the pot. I'm curious. I don't want to do it at the expense of the plant, right? I just want to have a look in there. Let's have the hanger on the plant too. Okay. Moved a little bit there. Let's do it again. All right. Okay. That's not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Oh, wow. That basket was done. That just sold to pieces. Too bad I like that basket. It's nice and rigid. Usually these hanging baskets are so floppy. What if they just fall apart? It's a good opportunity to come in here and try and clean out a lot of the dead stuff that's on the inside. The swirl isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be in here. Got some nice big underground rhizomes there. This thing is dense. I would really prefer to bump this into a larger container. Otherwise, if you're in this situation, you want to divide it up, I would take this, put it in a bucket of water, and let that soak so that it's extra, extra pliable. Then you're going to have to cut through some of these because they're pretty knotted up in there. You can be really tedious maybe and get a bunch of those out on their own, but I think it's going to do a bunch of damage. These are pretty tight, but if yours are looser than this, then I wouldn't worry about it. You can get in there and just start sectioning it off. I'm just going to find a bigger pot to put it in. Okay, that took a minute. I had to find a hanging basket that was the right size, but luckily, I did have one. It could use a little bit of work, but this is better than it was before. Get this guy down in there. It seems slightly overfilled, but I think that this is going to settle quite a bit when I water that in just because that's what the soil tends to do, but it is important that those rhizomes that have been up above the soil surface, they're not under a wet, boggy soil. It's not for very long. This soil is dry right now, so I think it'll be fine. Yeah, okay. Hey, that's an improvement. That should make for a much happier and healthier and easier to care for plant. I'm going to set this guy over here. It's going to get some morning sun, a little bit of water from the sprinklers, and more of a consistent moisture is what I meant. I'm going to do something similar with these. I'm going to take them to a little bit more shade. Actually, a lot more shade. Oh, that smells so nice. They smell particularly awesome when you have traumatized them. Breaking the stems, that is. Okay, so these are all plants. I'm just kind of like letting them hang out in this spot for right now because I have a sprinkler head that mists right over here. So these are up there. I think it's just a good spot. I don't know what else to do with them, so this is where they're going just for like the next probably, I don't know, week and a half. If they're on the ground, they're front and center in my mind to make sure that they actually get manually watered because that's what's really important right now. For longer than a week and a half too, but the week and a half is more just like making sure that they get settled. You know what I mean? There we go. Make sure these all get a drink and that's it. Just some fun hanging out while I divide up some ferns. You guys should give it a try. I know a lot of you are growing these ferns. They're pretty common and they do divide up easily. This one right here, the blue star, it does have a much thicker rhizome on it as you saw, so it doesn't divide up quite as easily. But if you do it sooner than this plant, this plant, you know, it was a little root bound. Had to spend a while boosting up those roots if I put in that container. If you get to it sooner, it's not as bad. And these are some of my favorites. You can see I have some others over here. This is one that I divided off of another plant early spring time. Got a lot of good growth out of it. Hey, comment down below, tips, tricks, suggestions, some things you're doing with your house plants this time of year. For me, I'm just really prepping. It's prep time. I'm thinking about what I want to have an abundance of next year, like these ferns. I like to fill in my tropicals with these. So by having these two extra right here, I'll be able to tuck those in for greenery and just lushness and spots next year when I'm setting things up. I'm trying to get that tropical motif going. I like to have them around the entrance over here because they smell so nice. The more it's nice to have things that smell good near the doors and the windows. All right. Hey, hope everybody's doing well. Having a great day, everything's going absolutely beautifully for you. And of course, as always, and most importantly, everybody keep on growing. Bye.