My Secrets To Growing Alocasia Frydek HUGE 🌱 Levelling Up My Alocasia Micholitziana

One of the plants that I feel like I don't talk about enough and definitely deserves more credit is this one, the Allicacia michelitsiana and as you can tell mine is growing very big and very wild at the moment and I've been looking at it for months and I've been thinking oh my goodness there's so much I need to do to it I really want to kind of help this plant to level up and bring out her best potential because she's growing kind of like a weed at the moment so I thought it was probably a good excuse to do a little bit of plant TLC take you through all the stuff I do to keep this plant happy share some tips and tricks all that sort of stuff just kind of have a really a really in-depth look at this plant and tell you some of the mistakes I've made some of the things I wish I'd known sooner all of that sort of stuff but first 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 yeah so this is probably going to be a repotting chat meets focused Allicacia tips talk uh so yeah I hope you enjoy it and I hope you find it useful let's get into it so just a little overview of where this plant is currently at as you can see this is a plant that is in a pot that is actually a little bit too small for it at the moment I'm growing it in pure semi-hydro this is in Lechuza pond and for me personally and I've spoken about this in other videos before using semi-hydro for Allicacia has been a game changer Allicacia is a genus previously that I from time to time struggled with especially actually velvet leafed Allicacia I don't know why but they were just a little bit more challenging for me and when I started growing them in semi-hydroponics honestly it just made my life so much easier and I would say that this now is probably one of my lowest maintenance Allicacia's so yeah that's how I'm growing the plants that is how I would like to continue growing the plant but as you can see there's actually two plants potted in the same pot and if you look at the bottom it's got roots bursting out so that is definitely something on the to-do list today but before I start doing anything I'm just going to give its leaves a little wipe down not because this plant currently has pests but just because firstly I know it is quite susceptible to pests and secondly just because I haven't given its leaves a wipe down in probably about five months and it's good to do it from time to time as I say to prevent pests but also just prevent dust and dirt building up because that essentially acts as a filter and means that your plants can't absorb as much light and it can't therefore effectively photosynthesize in the same way as it would be able to if you were to keep its leaves clean and I'm just using warm water with some horticultural soap for this I will link the stuff that I use down below because it's absolutely brilliant and I know I have said before with velvet leaf plants it's a good idea not to get their leaves wet and I absolutely do stick by this when it comes to misting your plants and I've had people saying to me before as well if they're not allowed to get their leaves wet then how does it work in nature like when it rains isn't that contradictory and yes I 100% know what you mean but when we're talking about growing tropical plants in a home environment typically airflow isn't as great in a home environment as it would be in a plant's natural habitat and for that reason if you do keep velvet leaf plants very damp and you don't have good airflow it can lead to mold it can lead to mildew it can lead to fungal issues that can bring down your plant pretty quickly so as a general rule of thumb I would say don't mist those plants to be honest I know the benefits of misting are a little bit in debate at the moment anyway but I I'm not a massive mister nowadays but this is one that I definitely do not ever mist but yeah as I already said the main reason that I am just starting off by giving its leaves a little wipe over front and back is partly because of pests and secondly because of light and when it comes to light for this plant it is a fairly what I say a fairly adaptable alacasia it's one that can cope with growing in slightly lower lighting levels and believe me when I say lower lighting levels I don't mean low light I just mean probably the upper end of medium light however if you do grow it in those lighting conditions what you'll probably notice is its growth is going to be a little bit more stretched and leggy and the growth that it's giving you is probably not going to be quite as big so ideally if you're able to provide it bright indirect light is best for this plant and I live in the UK and my alacasia litulitsiana lives right up against my south facing window I'll put a clip in so that you can see she literally especially at the moment is literally pressed up against it and she seems really really happy like that the one thing you do need to watch out for is if you have just got your plant or you're moving her to a slightly higher light spot you do just need to make sure that this is a gradual process and you're not doing it suddenly because if you don't acclimate your plants slowly then they can go into shock they can burn there can be all sorts of issues and I have definitely learned this the hard way many many times with my plants so yeah if you do want to move this plant I mean it applies to moving it to lower light as well but I think typically the more dramatic issues tend to occur when moving a plant suddenly to higher light I would say just kind of transition your plants slowly and gradually over time but don't suddenly pick it up from a spot in the corner over there and move it right in front of the window move it maybe like a meter a day or something like that so that it has time to adjust but yeah the other thing that you want to think about when it comes to lighting for this plant and I know some people don't mind this too much but if you do want your plants to not just be facing one way and you want its growth to kind of be lovely and 360 and rounded then it's a really good idea to turn your plants on a regular basis and to be honest mine is a very good example of not doing that because as you can see all of its growth is very much just facing one way and that is purely for the fact that I am a little bit lazy from time to time and I don't get around to turning the plant as much as I probably should but with some types of plant you won't really notice if you don't do it for a few weeks whereas this is one that is very very quick to chase the light so if you think of it just every every few days every week just give its pot a spin and then it's able to absorb equal amounts of light from all angles and you won't get it leaning in the way that mine is now and with this plant a really common question that often comes up is why does it cycle so much? Why do older leaves die off? And to be honest that isn't specific to the Michelitsiana, it is very much a known allocation thing, lots of different species of allocation within the genus are known for doing this and light can absolutely be a key factor in this, it can come down to a few different things that I'll talk you through in a minute but light can absolutely be very very important in preventing this from happening and often it's just because if your plant doesn't have enough energy reserves to be able to support more growth then it will essentially let go of its older leaves as it starts to produce newer leaves because it's essentially not capable of upkeeping the older growth with the new growth if that makes sense and this is why very commonly over the darker winter months you'll notice allocations start to do this more, for example I'm not sure if you can see but I've got my big Allocasia portadora behind me here and this one's currently stuck in the two leaf pattern because I've got it just back from my window, it does really need to be receiving better light but I haven't got a grow light on it so for that reason pretty much every single time a new leaf starts to emerge within a few days to a week the older leaf will start to drop and that means that I just have to trim it back and this also very commonly happens when you first bring an Allocasia home like for the first few months that you own it, again this can come down to what I said before about acclimation which is basically just the process of your plant transitioning into life in your space and getting used to things but while it's doing that and some types of plant are more hardy and resilient than others but Allocasia if you can tell by the way I'm speaking about it can be quite a sensitive and dramatic genus so it is very very normal for it to lose a few leaves at first if it's losing all of its leaves or if the cycling's happening a lot then that's when maybe you need to kind of re-evaluate what you're doing but it can be completely normal and as I say I have lost more leaves on this plant over the winter months than I have done in the summer, it tends to hang on to its leaves much more when the light's better. Okay so now I've given all of its leaves a really good wipe off, I'm going to get it out of its pot, have a look at the roots and see what needs to be done here because I can see this plant is incredibly root bound and in fact some of the roots that are coming out of the bottom of the pot here mean that I can't actually get the plant out of the pot so I'm going to just take a clean pair of scissors and I am just going to trim these back and I know some people are very scared of root pruning, they think it's going to disrupt the plant, they think the plant's going to not be happy because of it but if you've got a well-established plant like this root pruning can actually be a really positive thing for the plant, kind of in the same way as stem or leaf pruning can be because it can just essentially help your plant to push more of its energy into in this case making a fuller and more kind of beefy root system for that reason often if you trim back some of the spindly roots some of the ones that aren't quite as well established this could be a really good thing for the plant so when I'm working with semi-hydroponics you don't actually it's not like soil you don't need to get all of the semi-hydro off it but I'd like to try and just have a look and see if I've got any corms here ah in fact I can see one right away so that I can talk a little bit about propagating this plant as well look at that so yeah if you're repotting your plants and you come across these don't throw them away because this is how you make more of this plant for free and as I'm going through and I'm removing the semi-hydro I'm not being too precious about these little spindly roots for the reason that I just said and as you can see she's incredibly rooty so she can definitely afford to lose a few here and there so when it comes to watering for this plant obviously as I have already said and I've showed you I'm growing this one in semi-hydroponics I haven't always grown this plant in semi-hydroponics so I'll talk about watering as if you're growing this plant in soil to begin with and then I will talk a little bit about how I water but if you are growing this plant in soil although alocasia is one that does like to remain fairly moist I actually found that watering them a little bit less than I water my calatheas for this one is what it seemed to like the most so I wouldn't keep it hydrated the whole time I would allow probably the top inch of soil to completely dry out and when it had then I would go and water it again and also as with all of my plants that I've got in any kind of organic matter I would always make sure that the pot had good drainage so for example any excess water that the plant didn't need when I did water it could just run off the plant because if you do keep it in a pretty pot cover or a ceramic pot or anything that doesn't offer good drainage and I know nowadays this is often how these plants are sold because they're sold as just kind of like I don't know nice things to look at people don't think about the care needs of the plant a lot of the time it's very easy for your plants to develop issues such as roots rots because as I say you're just not able to properly monitor the root system and a healthy plant always starts with healthy roots so yes how I how I choose to grow this plant is semi-hydroponically and that means that I'll use this this substrate here as I say this is what I'm using here is Lechuza Pond but there's lots of semi-hydro alternatives Soil Ninja also make a really fantastic semi-hydro equivalent that I will link down below but this mix essentially consists of pumice, zeolites, lava rock, all sorts of stuff that is not organic so it's much harder to over water your plants and what you will essentially do is you'll grow them in a reservoir of water and the semi-hydro will absorb lots of water and then your plants will essentially feed off however much they need it is it is possible to over water like for example if you were to keep a sky-high reservoir at all times then your plant might not be particularly happy but I have never had issues with that doing it this way with alacasia so as I say that is personally what I would recommend going back to the alacasia cycling as well in terms of losing leaves I found that my alacasia in fact all of my alacasia cycle much less when I grow them in semi-hydro as opposed to soil and I'm not quite sure why that is but I think they just like it they just seem to prefer it more and as I say usually I wouldn't be whoa I wouldn't be too worried about getting all the semi-hydro off the roots but I am finding so many corms here and I'd love to get some baby some baby alacasia phrydex going also just by dividing the corms from the mother plant again that just allows the mother plant to be able to conserve her energy and put that into new growth instead of essentially growing new babies so it's a really good idea to just remove them as and when you see them but it's one that I really enjoy growing from corms actually and it is fairly straightforward to do so as I say I'll get this repotted and then I will take you through how I do that and going back to watering I know something else that people often ask is whether or not alacasia require specific water because I know there's some types of plants that need to only have filtered water I only have distilled water and where I live in my experience tap water has been absolutely fine but I know in some parts of the world the chemicals and minerals can be slightly higher if you're able to use reverse osmosis water or distilled water then absolutely if you've got access to it rainwater in fact as well then yes I would recommend it but I haven't found it to be particularly fussy in that area compared to some of my other plants um so yeah as I say for me that hasn't been an issue and when it comes to fertilizing this plant I I've spoken about this in my videos before but I used to be someone that would only fertilize over the spring and summer months over the growing season and I have massively massively changed my mind on that in the last few years the fertilizer that I use is called liquid gold leaf and I honestly swear by the stuff is amazing I have banged on about it before not sponsored at all I just think it's awesome stuff and I use it on all of my house plants all year round so long as they're actively growing and I know some people say well how do you know if a plant's actively growing like if you've got a slow growing plant how can you tell if it's in an active state or not and with alocasia it's usually it's usually pretty easy to tell I mean this one is almost always giving me a new leaf of some sort you can see it's getting ready to push out a new one just there but if it's not actually giving me a new leaf then usually I can tell by whether or not the stem's swelling and if it's swelling then it's typically kind of getting ready to start producing a new leaf um so yeah I fertilize this one currently all year round and with liquid gold leaf it does have all of the instructions I think on their website about how to use it with semi hydroponics I'm not that strict with measuring to be completely honest which is probably not good advice to give but I will just dilute it ever so slightly compared to how I water my plants in soil or in an organic matter for example um I'll typically go around and I'll do all of my plants that I've got in soil and then I will just add a little bit of water into my watering can on top of what I've already got in there of liquid gold leaf um I've never had any issues it's very hard stuff to over fertilize with but obviously depending on what brand you're using read the instructions always follow the instructions um and as I've said before if you're in any doubt start with a little bit less than it says and then gradually build stuff over time I am oh my god there's so many gorms I had a pothos plant I can't remember how long ago I think probably getting on for six years ago or something um and I'd had it for years and years and years it's a very hardy plant it had never given me any grief it was growing quite slowly and I picked up some fertilizer in the garden center and I'd never really used fertilizer before and I thought this will help the plant and because I didn't ease that plant into it because it had got used to living in a very low nutrient substrate when I did fertilize it at the rate it says on the bottle it completely sent the plant into shock and I lost a load of leaves and I think I think I'm right saying the plant actually died um so yeah if you're in any doubt start with less gradually build stuff over the time essentially acclimate your plant to fertilizer okay so I've got about 90 percent of the semi-hydro off and that is what I'm left with it is a ginormous root system and what I am going to do is I'm just going to peel these are some of the lower leaves the leaves that I've pruned back I'm just going to peel the brown off them just because that makes the plant more susceptible to rotting and what I want to do when I pot this when I pot size this one up is I just want to a little bit deeper because that will just allow these sections here on the stem to start producing aerial roots kind of in the same way as they've done just there and that just means that further down the line if I want to chop and propagate this plant that I can do it that way but even if I don't it just allows the plant to have a much stronger root system if hypothetically I was to have root issues such as root rot I can chop it much easier the plant's just gonna be much happier basically so yeah I'm just removing those bits before I pot it up and it goes without saying as well I could absolutely divide this so that I have two separate plants in two separate pots but I really like how it's growing as a big full plant like this so I am going to I'm gonna keep it like this for the time being and this is the pot that it was in and this is the pot that I'm going to change it into so it's the same style tower pot but as you can see this one here is significantly bigger I think this is about 15 centimeter and just giving it a little test with the roots I think that should be perfect for this plant and the only thing I'm going to change substrate wise is I'm actually going to go in this is quite a fine mix that I've been using which although the plant's been very happy with I'm gonna go in with something a little bit coarser this time oh my god that bag is heavy I'm gonna go in with again some soil ninja mix and it looks more like that as you can see the chunks are just a little bit bigger and that just allows for a little bit more aeration around the roots again less susceptible to things like root rot and not that I've had any issues with that with this plant but I'm just being being careful and one thing I'm going to do as well just at the bottom of the pot is with my old pot I actually put little bits of net from I think these were actually used to contain onions but just to stop the semi-hydro falling through but another thing that I often do is I always use lecca which is these clay balls I'll just put some of those at the bottom they just look like that yeah I'll put some of those at the bottom of the pot just so that I don't get bits of it falling out but the next thing to think about when it comes to caring for this plant is temperature and I've actually grown this plant in quite a few different environments over my time of owning it and so I've kind of been able to experience it in different temperatures and the way that it's growing at the moment is probably the happiest I've seen it to be honest it was growing in my conservatory before and the temperature in this room it tends to fluctuate from about 18 to 25 degrees I will try and keep it as stable as possible but that tends to be the average temperature and that seems to be the conditions in which this plant has thrived the most allocations don't do particularly well with big fluctuations in temperature as I've just said so a steady temperature is what you should aim for obviously it's going to drop a little bit lower at night but so long as it's not constantly going up and down that should be totally totally fine if you do grow it in colder conditions though again its growth is likely to be much slower because it's not as representative of what it will be receiving in its natural habitat so if you can up the temperature a little bit for it if you're in the UK or a colder country like I am then that would be ideal essentially I mean this goes for all tropical plants but essentially you just want to be looking at their natural growing conditions and seeing how you can attempt to replicate just a little bit of that in your own home because plants are way more adaptable than we give them credit for like none of the plants that I own and I've I've got about 300 plants and none of the plants that I own are growing in the exact conditions they would be growing in in their natural habitat but they're all growing pretty well on the whole so yeah it's just taking that and using that in whatever way you will but on a similar note to temperature fluctuations the other thing to take into account is cold drafts I mean cold and hot drafts but more commonly you tend to get cold drafts and so this is a plant that really does not like that so if you've got drafty doors or windows or air vents or anything like that just be very very careful of that with this plant oh and I've just realized as I'm doing this there's something else that I was going to do that I might actually be able to add in now I should have thought of this earlier um but basically this this is inspired by Marianne who's someone on my Patreon and oh my goodness I got some people on my Patreon to send in their own houseplant tours recently and I got to see some of your collections they are absolutely stunning but as I say Marianne did this amazing thing with her allocation she had a copper wire essentially running around them holding all of their foliage up because as I say mine is growing pretty crazy at the moment and I keep meaning to buy copper wire and try it because I thought it looked beautiful and it helps to keep the plant happy I don't have copper wire but I have got this wire here which I just use for arts and crafts and stuff and long term I don't know about how it would interact with water and semi-hydro so it's not a long-term fix but I thought I would just try it today it might not work but I thought I would just try it and see if I could get it doing what hers was doing because it just worked so well so yeah I've essentially made this I folded it back on itself like string I should have putted this right at the bottom but I can see a gap I'm going to just stick it down to the bottom of the pot and then I'm going to wind it in kind of like a spiral shape and it should help to support the plant is this going to work I don't know okay bearing in mind the plant is currently very much growing with all of its foliage facing one way I haven't finished adding in the semi-hydro but I think it's kind of worked I think it's kind of worked I'm going to finish potting it up and then I'm going to see how it looks but I think the next thing to talk about is probably humidity for this plant um because oh my goodness I'm making a right mess um because as I say this is a tropical plant it does naturally grow in quite a humid environment allocations are again very well known for loving humid conditions but this is one that I found doesn't need quite as much humidity as some places on the internet are telling you like when I first got this plant I was told that you should be growing it like 90% humidity and that is just not realistic and again unless you've got really fantastic airflow very high humidity with velvet leaf plants can lead to mold and mildew and all of that sort of stuff and I don't just mean on your plants in your home as well so airflow 100% an important thing but in my home here where I live I do run a humidifier from time to time but the standard room humidity tends to be around 50-60% and that has been absolutely fine for this plant I've had no issues its leaves I think look really lovely and conditioned it hasn't caused me any drama whatsoever so that is that is just how how I'm growing the plants and so yeah I know firsthand that it can be very much possible to grow it in lower humidity levels and I don't think this spiral thing I've made has worked quite as well as I wanted it to and it definitely doesn't look as lovely as the woman's that I was trying to copy but as I say I haven't used quite the right materials but I think it's definitely achieving achieving keeping the plants a little bit more upright which is good so yeah as I say now what I'll do is I'll just put this plant into a container where I can fill a reservoir I'll keep its reservoir filled to about there roughly if it does dry out a little bit from time to time that's not the end of the world you can also use self-watering pots they're very good they kind of tell you when you need to fill the reservoir but this is just a really good way of doing things for this plant in my experience I'm gonna pop it just behind me for the time being oh doesn't it look gorgeous that looks so pretty but then the corms that I'm left with oh my goodness I have got a lot of them look at all of those those are all corms I've just taken off the plant as I've been reporting it and I actually only brought one container over so I'm going to show you an example of what I do to propagate this plant and then I will take the others over to the sink in fact some of these very brown ones might need a little bit of a scrub they can be all right if you don't remove the brown but sometimes if you don't kind of just remove the excess outer I want to say like outer skin of them they can be more prone to rotting so I might just keep a few of them to one side I've got some here actually I've got three that are really quite kind of clean looking and I'm going to use them as an example but what I'll do is I'll just take a little container like this I think this is just an old hummus hummus tub or something like that and I'll just pop a few corms in it and then you can you could do it a few different ways but the way that I really like doing it at the moment is just getting a little bit of tap water and making a really thin layer of water like that is literally I don't know if you can tell but that is like a millimeter of water it's barely enough to just cover the bottom and then what I'll do is I'll cover that in cling film leave it somewhere fairly light fairly warm I will just occasionally take the cling film off and just make sure I smell it to be honest just smell it to make sure they haven't started to rot because if they do rot then you need to change things up pretty quickly for the ones in there that haven't rotted if that makes sense but yeah I will just I will just leave them covered and then hopefully in the next kind of three four weeks you should start to notice them root and then sprout and so yeah I'm hoping I'm going to have lots of lovely babies of this plant you can just as I say put these ones straight into either water or sphagnum moss like this and I have done that before and they haven't rotted but it does just make them a little bit more susceptible to doing so so I am just going to probably give these ones a little scrub with the nail brush at the sink and then pop them in here as well but yeah I'm really happy with how this one's how this one's looking I think she's looking much healthier and much more upright than she was when I started this video and I really hope that you found this useful if you have please make sure to give this video a thumbs up subscribe to my channel have a lovely day and I will see you in the next video stay sexy plant lovers