How to Propagate: Pilea

1. Introduction: I'm Sam and in this class I'm going to be showing you how to propagate Pilea, Also known as the Chinese money plant or the UFO plant. The first thing that I'll be covering in this class are two methods of propagation, which is propagating from water and propagating from soil. I'll be talking about the pros and cons of each method. And I'll also be giving you some guidelines that you'll want to follow as we're propagating after that, I'll be going over the materials that you'll need for each propagation method. And I will follow that up with two demonstrations. One showing you how to propagate with soil, and one showing you how to propagate with water. When it comes to the demonstrations, if you know you prefer one method over the other, you can just go straight to that demonstration. If you are still unsure. After we talk about the pros and cons, you can watch both demonstrations and see which one you think would work best for you. Once I've gone through the demonstrations, I’ll cover how to care for your newly propagated plants. And then finally, I'll go over your class project. So let's get this class started by looking at the two methods we can use to propagate our Pilea. 2. Propagation Methods: So as I mentioned, the two methods of propagation that I'm gonna be covering in this class are how to propagate your Pilea, and water and soil. Now, some people swear by water propagation and other swear by soil. I personally prefer to use both whenever possible because it gives me an opportunity to observe the difference it makes in the plants. So one of the main pros of propagating your Pilea using water is that, first of all, you don't need any roots to start with. If you take a cutting and there's no roots, you can just pop it into water for a couple weeks and then you'll start to see root sprouting at the bottom. Also, propagating in water generally means you're gonna get roots a lot quicker. So this one here, it only has a few roots at the bottom there. And within about two weeks, I should start to see a lot more growth. How quickly the roots grow though, are also going to be affected based on how much light your plants getting, the temperature room that your plant is in, and also how frequently you're changing your water out. The main con of propagating with water is that eventually this is going to have to be planted in soil. And after being in water for two to three weeks, it is going to start to get used to that environment. So once you place it in soil, it may have a bed of a hard time adjusting, which is why it's important to keep your soil moist for the first couple of weeks once you have planted it, just to help you get acclimated. As for soil propagation, the main pro with this method is that it's a quick one step process. You simply take your cuttings and you pot them up and you're all good to go. You'll just have to keep your soil moist for a couple of weeks to help the roots start to establish. The main con, on the other hand, is that it's going to take your roots a little bit longer to get established in the soil and to start growing. But if you already have a cutting that has substantial roots, then it's not really a problem. One thing to mention is that if you do take your cutting and if you already have quite a few routes established and soil propagation is gonna be your best method. Whereas if you had little to no roots than water propagation is your best method, whichever method you decide is best for you. There are a couple common guidelines that you'll want to follow when it comes to taking your cuttings. The first one is that you're going to want to take cuttings from pups that are at least two inches, and this will just give them a better chance of surviving. The second guideline is that when you're taking your cuttings, you want to take the cutting below the soil, preferably one centimeter below. In some cases, this may be difficult, especially if the pup is really close to the mother plant, which you'll see in the one demonstration with this pup here, it didn't quite end up getting a centimeter below. But if you encounter a situation like this, try to get as much stem as he possibly can. And the third guideline is that the best time to propagate your Pilea is going to be in spring. Although if you are keeping your plants indoors, then you can propagate anytime, so long as they're not going to be exposed to extreme temperatures. So those are some things that you're going to want to keep in mind as you're propagating. I will give you a little reminder as we're doing the demonstrations. But now that we've covered the methods of propagation, let's take a look at the materials that we're gonna be needing in order to propagate. 3. Materials Required: The materials that you're going to need in order to propagate your own Polya are going to depend on the propagation method that you choose. If you choose to propagate your pile EA by water, you'll want a container that is clear. See you can observe your root growing and the one that makes sure that the opening of your container is narrow enough that your whole cutting isn't just going to fall right in. You'll also want a sharp knife to take your cuttings with. And as always, I recommend sanitizing the blade before and in-between each cut that you take just to help stop any spread of disease. Other than that, the only thing that you're going to need right away is some water. Once you see that your plans have established roots, you're going to want to put up your plant. So for that, you will also be needing a pot, preferably one that has drainage holes because pi Leah likes good drainage. And then you'll also want some regular potting mix that has pearlite. If you choose to start your pie Leah directly and soil instead, then all you're going to be needing is a pot with drainage holes. As I mentioned, some potting mix with perlite and a knife to take your cuttings. So now that we have materials covered, let's take a look at how to propagate pi Leah in soil. 4. Soil Propagation: As I mentioned, in order to propagate our pile, Leah was soil. We're going to need a knife to take our cuttings. A pot with drain atolls, and some potting mix with perlite. And then after we're going to water it in with a spray bottle, once you have your materials set, you can take your pile, Leah. And you want to look at the base of the plant, at your pups. Just these little plants here. And we only want to take pups that are at least two inches because this will give them a better chance of surviving. So this plant, I have to that meet that requirement. There's this one here, and then this one over here. There are a couple other little ones. There's a tiny little one here. There is another small one growing here right at the base of the mother plant. And then there's another little one here. So those three little ones that I just pointed out, we're gonna want to avoid taking those. So for propagating with soil, going to take this one here because it's the biggest and it's likely to already have quite a bit of routes established. Once you've chosen the puck that you want to take, you're going to want to gently push back the soil so you can make your cut about a centimeter below the soil. That way you'll get a good amount of roots with your cutting. If you find that the pup you've chosen is like this one here and it's really close to the edge and it's hard to bring the soil back and just gently give your pot a squeeze. And then grab near the base of the mother plant. Tip your pot. Can a little wiggle. And you can just remove the whole plant and then just kind of gently loosen up the roots a little bit. Hold back some soil. You'll find that the roots that you're looking for or they're going to be leading towards the mother plant. Here you can see this is the stem of Baloo soil. And then it comes down in here and it's leading back to the mother plant. I'm just gonna keep pushing back. So I'm going to make my cut about right here. And then it's going to give it a little bit of a wiggle. And there we go. There's the first little pub. You're gonna take this and place it back into its pot. And if you wanted, you could place some, a little bit of cinnamon on the root here that's exposed Now just to help it heal, but it's not necessary. So filled back in that hole from removing the pump. And now if we and take a look at the pup here, you can actually see two other puffs WHO started growing off of it already. Already has a ton of routes established. So this is a really good one to propagate and soil. So now what we're going to do is we're going to take our soil, ring up the edges around the pot so we create a little Well in the center that we can pop our plantain do. And i'm going to bury this enough to cover the majority of the roots. But I also don't want to bury the leaves of these little pups here. So it's all potted up. Now you can see those little pups that were touched the side are still above the soil. The plant is still firmly in place and now we just want to give it some water. If you have a watering can, you can use that to I just prefer to use the spray bottle because my soil was already moist and a little bit before I planted it. So a spray bottle is gonna work well enough for me. So now that the pilot is all watered in, I'm just going to place it in an area where it's gonna get some bright and direct sunlight. So now let's take a look at how to propagate pi Leah and water. 5. Water Propagation: Alright, so as I mentioned, the materials we're going to need for water prop, are gonna be a little bit different than when we propagated from soil. So you're going to want a clear container so you can see your new roots growing. And you wanna make sure that the opening is narrow enough that when you go to place, you're cutting in. It's not going to fall Street to the bottom because we want to keep our leaves above water. You'll also need a sharp knife to take your cuttings and some water. So just like we did when we were propagating from soil, you want to look around at the base to find your pups that are at least two inches. So they have a better chance of success. Once you find the one that you want to take, we're going to just gently pull back the soil around the plant, find it underneath the soil. And we want to try to take our cutting about a centimeter under the soil. This one that I'm trying to take now, it's directly connected to the mother plant. So it may not be able to get that full centimeter underneath the soil. But that's okay because we are going to be propagating this one from water, so we don't really need any routes to begin with. So again, I'm going to take my knife and carefully we could cutting. I'm going to try to make it as close as I can and loosen up summed, get some roots. So there's our cutting and see there's a few little roots attached, but not too many. I'm just going to cover up that spot where we took our cutting from. The pot is looking a lot more MD. So a really important step with propagating from water is that if we take our cutting and we still have roots, or if there's any soil left on. In general, we're going to want to rinse this off. Because if we just placed our cutting in there right now with the soil still on, that, we'll call our cutting to rot. And we really don't want that. So I'm gonna go ahead and rinse this off. So here is the roots all rinsed off. They are quite dark, so it might be a little bit hard to tell that there is no soil left on here. But I've given them a good thorough rents. If you end up placing your cuttings in your containers and then you find soils falling off and ending up at the bottom. Then you can replace your water and give it another rinse just to be saved and seen as a stem on this cutting is a lot smaller. Then the one I did previously, I'm going to switch these two bottles around. So I don't have to fill this one up completely with water in order to reach the root zone and ASM switching them. I'll show you these are the routes. You can see the clear looking ones that host grown. And that has all, all that growth has been over about two weeks. This plant dead already have some roots growing ahead of time. You can see the darker brown roots. But I wanted to propagate this one by water just so I could show you that after two weeks, this is the kind of growth that you can expect. And once you start having roots like these, Diane, your plant is ready to be potted up. So what I recommend doing is just place your pie Leah into your container and then add water so that you are just covering your roots. And so you can see it's covering up those roots. It is a little bit of floaters in here, so replace the water and hereafter. But that's how you propagate paella with water. As I said, in about two weeks, you should start seeing some significant root growth and then you can put it up the same way that we put it up are plants when we propagated them from soil. And just like we did with our other cuttings, we now want to take these and placement of area where they're gonna get some bright indirect sunlight. Now that I've shown you how to propagate Polya Leah using those two methods. Let's take a look at how to properly maintain your plant's health. 6. Aftercare: These aftercare guidelines are going to apply to the plants that we have propagated in soil, as well as the ones that we've propagated with water once they've established roots and been potted up. So the first thing that you want to remember is to keep your plants and bright but indirect sunlight. So you could still keep your plant near a big window. You'll just want to make sure you have some shears to help filter the light. You'll also want to make sure that your soil is kept moist, especially for the next two weeks. Well, they're starting to establish new rooms. If you've propagated them from soil, then a few weeks once you're pi Leah that you've propagated with water starts to spread out some new routes and you can put it up. And again, you want to keep the soil moist and that'll help it acclimate to the soil. You're paella will also be most happy in an environment where it's going to be between 1226 degrees Celsius, which is equal to 55 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. So keep that in mind if you're planning on having your pilot outside once they've established roots. And if you're going to have them inside, avoid keeping them near drafty windows and doors. There's some things that you're going to want to keep an eye out for. For one thing, if you start to notice that your leaves are drooping, then that is a sign that you're under watering your plants. Or if you have been watering consistently, It could be assigned that you are over watering them or that kid indicate a drainage issue, especially if you don't have a pot with drainage tools or you have chosen a different potting mix when that doesn't have pearlite in it. If you notice your leaves curling inwards like this one here, this is a sign that your plant isn't getting enough light or it's getting too much direct light. Consider which one makes more sense for your plant and then adjust accordingly. There's also many other symptoms that your plants could show. So in order to help you better identify what exactly is affecting your plant, I've included a chart and that is in the project section of this class. And this doesn't just apply specifically to pi Leah. So if you do have other plans that are showing some symptoms and you're not sure exactly what's causing it. You can use a chart help identify that as well. And that's it for aftercare. Now let's move on to your class project. 7. Class Project: So for your class project, I want you to take what you've learned in this class and apply it by propagating your own pi Leah, you can choose to propagate your plant using either method or if you want to go above and beyond, you could use both methods. Either way, I want you to take three pictures as you're propagating. The first one being of the pups that you're going to be removing from the mother plant. And remember that you want them to be at least two inches to help ensure that they're going to survive. And the second picture that you take will be of the pups monks. They have been removed from the soil. And in this picture, I'm looking specifically to see the roots or the lack of routes that the pump has, then if you're going to be propagating in soil, you can show your plant. I'll put it up in your third picture. And if you're going to be propagating with water, your third picture can be of your plant in its jar or container of water. Once you have these three pictures, you can upload them in the project section, which you'll find below this video. And that way everybody can see them. And I can offer you some feedback if you have any issues or questions along the way, please feel free to reach out to me in the discussion section. And that is also located below this video. And I'll get back to you as soon as I can. If you would like to stay up to date on my latest classes, you can follow me using the Follow button, which you'll see just below this class. And then you receive a notification as soon as I post a new class. I hope you found this class helpful. Have fun propagating, and I'll see you in the next class.