How to Transplant a Spider Plant

1. Introduction to Spider Plant Transplanting: Hi everyone, my name is Gretchen would I have my plant lover, a gardener, and an educator, and I'm going to mix all three of those together today. And we're going to talk about transplanting a spider plant. I realized in a previous video that this little plant needed some love. We're gonna talk about how to transplant that. What are the signs that actually it needs to be transplanted? Or if even we can divide that plant base. So stay tuned and we'll do this altogether. 2. #1 Spider Transplant: Okay, step one, if you're a spider plant is then a hanging container. I'm gonna show you how to get her off and actually reuse it. You can see here are some little clips. This spider plant was so big. It was so big that I had to put a double plant hanger on it. But you push down on those and they pull up. Can you see that little clip? It's kind of hard to see up here, but take those off. Here's one. We've taken up one of the little clips and we're just gonna go around the container. Here's the other clip. Can you see down there see I just pulled down and then you pull that out. Now this one's getting old, it's getting brittle. So it's not only time to transplant, but perhaps find some new plant hangers. Slide your babies around and if parts of your spider plant break, it's okay because we're going to transplant it. Then we're going to give it some new life, fresh soil. I still have one more. There we go. So our plant hangers are removed. Okay. We're ready to take this container off now, I purposely waited for my soil to be a little bit dry because then it won't be so expanded in this container. This upside down. I'm gonna shake it a little bit. Try to give this out. Let's see if I can gently tug. There we go. Here we go. Now, flagged your babies around. I'm rolling and sliding. Goodness, look at that. It seems I have an ant farm in here. I know you can't see, but there's some that have decided they wanted to live inside my spider plant. Now, this was a house planet. I would be in trouble. But because it's not, I'm gonna take this outside and wash the roots and the Ansoff. These are not the kind of bite. These are the friendly little guys. 3. Using a Dramm: I'm going to gently wash this off. The ants do not like the water. I may leave this sit for an hour or so. And can you see my this is called a dram or water breaker. It keeps the water from being so forceful and it's a gentle rain. 4. Dividing the Roots of Spider Plant: Alright, wherever you do this, wherever you decide to transplant your spider plant, it's a messy job. You can either lie newspaper down where you can have an old table. I'm working in my greenhouse so that it doesn't matter if I make a mess. Now, you are gonna have to divide this before we transplant it. And I kind of want to look inside to see where some of my plants are. Before we divide, I'm going to look in here to see this might be a good space to divide and cut up, probably divide this in half. You can see there's clusters, the spider plant roots. Okay, so unfortunately my video about dividing the route did not record. My hands were pretty messy and I was trying to pay attention. So I'm gonna show you again on Monday plants that we had already divided, but I thought there was plenty of room to divide it again. All right. So I'm going to remove my clips again. How easy that was. Here, this is. Now it's a really sunny day. I'm going to try and make sure I didn't get into the shadows. And we can just gently pull this out and there's lots of fresh potting soil in here. What should come out, really if you're there, it goes. All right, let's get this one little baby out here. I said that it could use a garden trowel or you could use I have some old kitchen knives that I like to use. But again, my root system was full of the container was just full. I went inside up. There's one that broke off. I went inside and I tried to look between the individual plants, see how it looks like there's two separate bunches rooted here. So I'm gonna cut right between that. And the knife worked really good. I tried my garden trial, but it just wasn't sharp enough on the edges. This knife I can read sharpen. This will not hurt your roots at all. See those nice fat, tuberous roots. Look in here. See you all those in there. Right. 5. Best practices for Drainage and Potting: All right. I got two containers and we're gonna talk about drainage. And then there you think we need to talk about drainage. Because if your plant does not have the correct drainage, the water will sit in here and it will rot and you will never know how much water is in there. So I'm gonna take a drill. If you don't have a drug, that's okay. I'm just going to add a few holes. I just added a few holes around here. If you don't have a drill, you can use a sharp knife and just gently poke through. Now I have my holes for appropriate range. Alright, there was another thing I wanted to show you about your containers many times when we purchase something from a big box store from a garden center, your container will have this little tray attach to the bottom of it. I don't like to leave that on there and it does come off. It takes a little bit of work sometimes depending on how resilient it is, I removed that, that I just have an open base. But there's more. Anytime you will see this little circular tray. It is also to prevent your soil from getting too wet. I like to get down to the bare minimum. I showed you that I drill holes in it because I want to see how much liquid is either flowing through or not so that I know how much water my plan is getting. So I removed the vase and look. There's extra drainage holes, which is great, but that doesn't always happen in these containers. So you really need to make sure that when you purchase a container from the store, that it has good drainage. I want to show you what I typically purchase. I purchased these clear trace and this one has been used a lot. If it's a hanging plant, of course you don't need a TRE. But if it's a plant that you're going to sit on the ground, I still take that little extra tray off. I still take that off. I will set my plant on these traits so that I can see how much water is sitting in that base. Okay. Now that I've divided my spider plant, we've got to get it in a container and get soil around it. And again, you don't have to be to tender with your plant. Let me get this one out of the way. Give yourself lots of room to work. It seems that all the spiders, the babies were on this side. Oh my goodness. Alright, now have your soil ready. You can just get a standard soil from the garden score. But I'm going to start adding soil around the base. Now here I have this side. How am I gonna get it there? Just go ahead and pick up your fronds, leaves, your stems, the baby's just add soil. It's kind of tuck it down in there. Keep adding it around the sides. Over here. Again, this is a messy job. So make sure wherever you're doing this, you have lots of room to get messy and just enjoy it. I'm gonna shake that down a bit. Oh look, one of my babies broke off. That's alright, I will transplant that. This one's ready to break up. But guess what? I can transplant it. 6. Planting the Spider Babies: Okay, so we have successfully transplanted our spider plant. Look on my goodness. I probably could divide that one more time. And I found a pretty yellow container for this one hook. But there's one other thing I want to show you. You can get a standard potting soil from your local garden center. You can, if you'd like to mix your own soils, I like to mix a little more peat moss in with my potting soil mixture, but you don't have to. But there was one other thing I wanted to show you. Now. I have had friends said to me, What do you do with all the spider babies? Well, that's the fun. Let me tell you when you should transplant your spider babies. I'm gonna come closer. When you're a little spider babies have a good root system of their own, then you know, it's time to plant. That was the little one. This one has several. You can see the routes, see how good and hardy they are. If I could break that off right there and have 123 baby spiders. Here's another one and she can see the roots are more developed. That's when you know, when those roots have developed. That's the time to go ahead and plant these and enjoy some more spider plants. These are a wonderful, easy to grow house plant. It's also a good plant for low-light outside. You don't want this in full sun because it will burn. These beautiful leaves, their tender. I like to hang mine in the corners and the inside of my mind. Or I like to hang some under a tree where it gets some dabbled light. But either way, you now know how to transplant a spider plant. You know the signs of when it's time of browning leaves, the roots being so compact in that container. You also know that you can get a standard potting soil to enjoy. Your plant can grow in. And last but not least, you get to enjoy the babies and transplant for more spider fun.