Episode 212: back to basics - houseplant watering
Raffaele DI Lallo with some of his houseplants. Photograph: Ohiotropics.com.
Transcript
Episode 212
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Jane: Hello and welcome to On The Ledge podcast and this week we are going back to basics. The number of ways of giving your plants a drink are as diverse as the number of ways of pronouncing water - wor-ah, waata, or, indeed, worter! My name is Jane Perrone and, surprisingly, I don't make a living from my voice acting but I do love to tell you about houseplants! Trust and believe, whether you're an absolute beginner or a seasoned grower, there will be some useful advice on giving your plants a drink in this week's show. I'm joined by guest Raffaele Di Lallo, author of new book, Houseplant Warrior, aka OhioTropics, plus I answer a question about a pot-bound Jade Tree.
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Jane: Thanks to my new Patreons this week. Grace, Liz, Ludwig and Claire all became Ledge-ends and Nikki became a Superfan. Where would I be without you Patreon subscribers? You are wonderful! If you don't like Patreon, then you can buy me a coffee; I like a latte, not in one of those tall glasses, I hate those tall glasses, don't give me one of those, latte with a teaspoon of turmeric and a couple of grinds of black pepper please. But seriously, if you go to the website, you'll find a link for ko-fi.com where you can give a small, one-off donation to keep the show going, or a large donation if you are so equipped in the monetary sense.
Like everybody else, it's been a week of feeling helpless, looking at the headlines coming out of Ukraine; shout-out to any of my listeners in that part of the world, or those with relatives there. I'm going to be making a donation to the UNHCR Ukraine appeal. I'll also link in the show notes to an event that James Wong has organised at the Garden Museum. He's doing a talk on the 8th March, that's next Tuesday, as I speak, March 2022, and you can live-stream it or buy tickets to go in person. I'll put the link for that, all the money will go to Unicef's Ukraine appeal, so that's a great cause and a former guest of the show who you can support in his fundraising efforts. Well, I hope this week's show will provide a bit of light relief which, god knows, we all need, and perhaps you've been also enjoying the mindfulness of some seed-sowing for the On The Ledge Sowalong?
Let me just round up a few of the things you've been up to. Kev has been germinating Haemanthus seeds. Those are - what are they called? The Paintbrush Plant, the succulent plant with those amazing paintbrush-like flowers. They look really cool, Kev. Morgan, aka LeafyExotics, got in touch about the question about where to get Hoya seeds, from last week's episode, and says Hoya polyneura seeds from Turn-It-Tropical, an online firm. I've just checked and they're still in stock, which is strange as they're only £2.50! I shall try to track down a link for that and put it in the show notes. Thank you for drawing attention to that Morgan - that's good to know!
Over on Facebook, Sally has got some Alsobia dianthiflora and found a seed pod while giving the plant a clean up, so Sally plans to try to grow another Alsobiafrom seed for the Sowalong and is going to send any extra seed to the Gesneriad society seed bank. That's great, Sally! Greg over on Facebook has gotCoffea arabica castilloand Inga feuilleei, the Ice Cream Bean Tree. I've never heard of that! I'm going to have to go and Google after that, but that sounds really interesting! Do keep on sharing your On The Ledge Sowalong successes and even failures! I need to go and check on my seeds that I sowed last week and see if there's any signs of life yet - always that exciting, and potentially disappointing, moment!
If you're not up to speed on the On The Ledge Sowalong, maybe this is your first-ever listen, well, welcome! Do go and check out the show notes for links to all the On The Ledge Sowalong episodes. It's just our way of growing houseplants from seed and having a heck load of fun at the same time! I also had a lovely email from Jennifer this week, who's recently "discovered the show while trying to distract myself from overthinking" and is delighted to find that the show is proving useful but were saying that she hadn't heard much in the episodes she has listened to so far about how plant care is nurturing. Jennifer writes: "At one point, when I was taking care of my mother-in-law who had dementia, I had 60-plus houseplants. I'm down to about 25 and working my way back up. I nurture the plants, they, in turn, give me purpose outside of work." Well, that is fantastic. I think we probably do have some episodes where we cover that kind of territory, but it's always good to hear that that is helping you and something I think so many of us have discovered over the last couple of years.
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Jane: Whether you grab your plant water from the tap, or put it through lengthy filtering processes, it's important that you know what you're doing when it comes to figuring out when and how to water. That's why we're going back to basics this week, to have a look at how it's done. My guest this week is Ohio Tropics founder, Raffaele Di Lallo, so let's dive right in!
Jane: Welcome Raffaele! Your new book, The Houseplant Warrior, is currently on my desk and you've signed it, so thank you very much for my special new copy! There's lots of great advice in this book about watering and we're going to start with the big granddaddy of all annoying houseplant misconceptions, which is the term "overwatering".
Raffaele: That's a trigger word for me, Jane!
Jane: Well, I'm not going to say that I've never used that word before because clearly we all have used that word from time to time. Why do you find it so difficult?
Raffaele: I twitch when I hear that word and, like you said, I've used it a lot in the past, but I stopped using it. There's several reasons that I don't like the word. First of all, whenever somebody has a plant problem, most people end up going to Google, right? Why is my [insert plant here]... why is my Peace Lily having yellow leaves? Why is my Peace Lily drooping? or whatever the problem happens to be. Of course there's a lot of different sources online, but in most cases they'll often call out overwatering. The problem with that is that's only one of the ways that plant problems can arise, but the real problem is that a lot of people believe, "Oh I must have overwatered my plant" but without actually observing the state of their potting mix moisture, so they'll blindly believe it. The very first thing, if you're not actually observing if your potting mix is dry or wet, you can't say, "Oh my gosh, I overwatered!". That's the first thing that I often bring up. So when someone comes to me and says they have a plant problem, the very first thing I ask them is, "Have you felt your soil? Have you felt your potting mix? How does it feel? Is it dry or is it wet?" What I like to tell people is don't use the word overwatering. I'd rather that you say "My soil stayed too wet", or "My soil stayed too dry". Describe the state of your potting mix because you actually observed it, instead of made an assumption: "Oh I must have overwatered." So that is critical, that is a critical first step. Then you can determine, "Oh yes, it definitely stayed too wet," or "Oh my gosh, it's been bone dry for a while, I must have neglected my plants". Another reason I don't like the word 'overwatering' is because it creates an irrational fear of being able to water properly. A lot of times, when people think they've overwatered, ironically, their potting mix is actually overly dry, so it creates a fear of watering properly, especially, even, with succulents. They're so scared to water them properly that they'll measure out a teaspoon or a tablespoon and you're not going to water. I ask them, "Do you care about all of your roots, or do you just care about some of them?" Even succulents need to be watered thoroughly. If you're having a problem with your potting mix not drying out in a reasonable amount of time - because you do want to balance, you want some moisture retention, but you also want your potting mix to dry out in a reasonable amount of time - so if you're having issues with that, then you have to look at your other conditions. Maybe your lighting conditions are too low, maybe your temperature is too cold, maybe your pot is too large and you have too large of a volume of potting mix? I know you use the metric system, so I'll do a couple examples. Maybe in the US we go from... maybe you went from a four inch diameter pot to a ten inch diameter pot, that's much too big. I don't know what a standard metric size is. Maybe you went from a four cm diameter pot to a 20 cm diameter pot, or something like that, so in that case, your soil is going to take a lot longer to dry out if you do something like that. So you have to be aware of your conditions and actually observe to see is this really the case?
Jane: I can't tell you how many times I've seen people on Facebook... and it's always a variegated Monstera cutting and they're going, "Why does it look so sad?" They've potted it into, admittedly, a terracotta pot but it's about three times bigger than it needs to be. They're just worried about why it looks so sad and it doesn't look like they've used a particularly good substrate either! You just think, "Oh, where do you start?" Somebody else I saw, who'd just obtained a load of cacti from somebody who had died, sadly, and they'd re-homed their cactus collection, which is a lovely thing to do, and they potted them all into an aquarium -- like, a terrarium! - and I was just like, "I don't know where to start!" You get that feeling of, like... I've got to break down all of these misconceptions and start from scratch, which is tricky, isn't it? There's so much to consider!
Raffaele: It's very tricky.
Jane: I guess this is why, traditionally, we've gone for that very simple, "Well, it's overwatering" because that's a lot more simple than the truth.
Raffaele: Right! Exactly! When, in fact, you really have to ask a ton of questions to get down to what actually happened. I'm glad you brought up the potting mixes, and also social media, because that's even more dangerous. In social media someone might have a post, "What's happening with my variegated Monstera?" Someone will just comment just one word, "Overwatering," and then they take it as a fact and that's really dangerous. Everybody's conditions are so different. With potting mixes, I recently had a couple of readers write to me saying, "Oh, with that exact plant, my Monstera deliciosa, it looked so good and now it's lost several leaves. I don't know what's going on." I also like to ask for pictures when people ask me about problems with their plants, "Can you please send me a photo, so I can see it in your growing environment. Don't move the plant. Take a picture of wherever your plant is growing, so I can evaluate the light and anything else that could help". So this one gentleman sent me a photo of his plain green Monstera deliciosa and it had two leaves left and it lost several leaves. So he sent me a picture and I looked at the photo and it was planted in a terracotta pot, which is fine, which is fine, but the potting mix was mostly bark mix. I said, "Approximately how often are you watering your plant?" I don't like to adhere to a strict watering schedule, I always say "Water when you need to. Feel your soil." And he said, "Oh, maybe every ten days or so, sometimes longer." Well, if you're planted in almost completely bark mix and in a terracotta pot, you're probably going to have to end up watering every day, or every other day, because it's going to be drying out so quickly. So I reiterated the fact you want some moisture retention but at the same time you do want it to dry out in a reasonable amount of time, so you can cater your potting mix to suit your conditions and you have to feel your potting mix. You can go overboard in making a potting mix too chunky because then you're going to be watering all the time.
Jane: You're basically going to have to be the Amazon rainforest, aren't you?
Raffaele: Yes!
Jane: Just watering every day as if you are in a rainforest, which is not within most of our schedules to accommodate.
Raffaele: Exactly.
Jane: I wonder, with this whole thing, do people not want to get their hands dirty? My hands are filthy most of the time, so I don't really care, but I wonder why people are so reluctant to put their hands into the soil and check what's going on? Some people just seem to not want to do that. As you say, that's how you find out what exactly what's going on, isn't it?
Raffaele: Right. I think it's just like you said, as humans, we try to do the easiest, or laziest, thing and someone says "overwater", "Oh, I must have overwatered," but you have to take the time to observe your plants and I think that's what's missing when we have plant problems. We have to observe, we have to see, we have to feel and use all of our senses and see what we can determine from that.
Jane: Exactly and I think observation is key but what are those warning signs? Are there things that your eye can catch that immediately tells you it's time to water?
Raffaele: Absolutely. I can think of probably the two most immediate things that you can see - well, I'm sure actually there's more than that - but I would say one thing is if your plant is starting to droop. So you're not going to necessarily see this with very succulent plants, but with plants like a Peace Lily, or tropical foliage plants, a Peace Lily or even a... what's another... Begonias, Peace Lilies, even Pothos, when they go super dry, they're going to start to wilt. Unfortunately, if we assume that it's overwatering then you're going to withhold water even more, you're going to end up making the problem worse. So drooping is one thing. I always say, "Go ahead and feel your soil". As soon as you see a plant in distress, feel your soil, feel the potting mix, how does it feel? Has it been sitting in water? Maybe it has been sitting in water in the saucer underneath or in the decorative pot that it's sitting in. Or maybe you don't have a drainage hole - that's another issue - but maybe it's bone dry. So feel it and then decide, "Okay, well, what do I need to do if it's bone dry?" Go ahead and water it immediately! So the wilting is one thing. The other thing is when potting mix goes completely dry for a while, you're going to get yellowing of the lower leaves, that's another signal for us that should trigger us to go ahead and feel our potting mix. Oftentimes, that is the result of your potting mix going completely dry when the lower leaves turn yellow, but you have to confirm it, you have to feel your potting mix to really know. Even succulents need to be watered properly. So succulents can also go under distress if you leave them alone for too long, so they too will develop yellow leaves at the base but you won't know what you did until you actually feel your potting mix. I am oversimplifying a little bit, there's a lot of other factors, light is super important too obviously and all the other factors, but that's what I like to direct plant parents to do as soon as they have a plant in distress: feel your potting mix!
Jane: I think there are various apps out there, and websites, that sort of say, "Well, you need to water this plant with one cup of water every week" or something. They try to measure it. I know some people do like what they consider to be a scientific approach, "Well, I need to water it this much, this often" and that method might work for a bit, but I think, ultimately, you fall down because, as you say, conditions change, light levels change and that impacts the amount of water your plant is losing and therefore needing to draw up.
Raffaele: Yes and that's another danger. So that's an excellent point because a lot of times, my readers come to me and say, "I don't know what happened with this Hoya, or this fern. I haven't changed a thing and I was fine for so long and then suddenly I have an issue". And I also talk about this in my book as well. Even though we haven't changed a thing with our routine, your plant has. Your plant has grown, your plant has probably become rootbound and so your watering schedule may have worked for a while but, eventually, as your pot becomes full of roots, it's eventually going to fail. I have a Thanksgiving Cactus now that is horribly rootbound and I think I mentioned to you that I am a terrible procrastinator. I often push things to the brink of disaster until I'm forced to do it, but this poor plant is terribly rootbound and, previously, the once a week watering cadence worked fine for me, but now that pot is terribly full of roots and I can't keep up with that. I also have a Hoya that I've had for almost 20 years and even my once a week watering schedule, let's say, for example, was working fine, but now, since that pot is so full of roots, it's dehydrating very quickly. I'm getting some brown and yellow leaves because I've procrastinated repotting it into a larger pot. So our plants change and so we have to be flexible with our watering to compensate for that. So even though we're not changing anything, our plants have.
Jane: Yes, that's really, really true. Tell me though, can you think of an example of the absolute most dire plant info request that you've had, where somebody's messaged you and you've just looked at the picture and your heart has sunk because you think, "Oh my gosh, that's an ex-plant, that! There's nothing I can say to save this plant!"?
Raffaele: That's why I like to ask for pictures and it's funny because it can go either way. When someone is exaggerating and says, "Oh my gosh, my plant's dying" and when I ask them to send a picture, the very oldest, tiniest, centimetre-long leaf on one of their plants has turned yellow and the rest of it looks glorious!
Jane: Ditto!
Raffaele: Yes, I'll tell them there's nothing wrong with your plant! Did you go too long without watering? The oldest leaves will be the first to go, but your plant looks fine! It's not dying but, like you said, sometimes someone will say, "Oh, can I save my plant? I think it's dying. I'm not sure." One of the most humorous ones, I received a picture of a Moth Orchid from somebody and it was completely infested with mealy bugs and it looked like someone just dusted powdered sugar all over the entire plant. So I just said sometimes it's not worth saving your plant, just chuck it. I know that's not related to watering, but that's why I like to ask for pictures.
Jane: That's the stuff of nightmares! Covered in mealy bugs? Oh my gosh, that sounds horrendous. Let's return to water because, again, it's easy to think overwatering is the cause of all ills, but people also get very tied up in knots about what kind of water to use. You've got the tap water camp, who are like, "Oh yes, I water everything with tap water. It's fine" and then you've got people who are like, "It must be reverse osmosis specially-filtered 1921 vintage water from a special well that you can only reach by a two-day walk!" What are the rules for choosing what water to actually use?
Raffaele: I would say unless you live in a super-polluted area with acid rain, or something like that, just look to nature. Rain water is probably the best water that you can use for your plants. Saying that, do I use rain water? No, because I procrastinate and I've had some rain barrels sitting outside that I haven't installed after a year or so, so maybe this year will be the year! But rain water probably is the best thing that you can use. I'm lazy and I use tap water for pretty much everything. Although, did I tell you I'm getting a greenhouse this spring?
Jane: Yes!
Raffaele: I'm going to try and set up my rain barrels and have a different system for that. If you can use rainwater go ahead, that's probably the best. If you are using reverse osmosis water, or distilled water, I think what we have to remember is that distilled water, first of all, is the purest form of water. I'm going back to my chemical engineering days. So, by distilling water, it's an ultra-pure water, it's the most pure form and we have to remember that we have to fertilise every so often because it's devoid of any nutrients because it's so pure. So if you're using RO or distilled, we do have to make sure that we are fertilising, otherwise our plants will probably suffer from nutrient deficiencies over time, but it all depends on how much effort you want to put in, how hard your water is. If you live in a really hard water area... but the fact is that most plants that we grow indoors commonly are pretty resilient. I would say, for most plants, tap water is fine. That's what I use for most of my plants. Can I do better? Sure I can. Are there some plants that are sensitive to hard water? Sure, absolutely. Calatheas, or Goeppertia, however you say the genus now - I can't keep track of all the reclassifications! - they are notoriously sensitive to hard water and so a lot of people I know use distilled water for that, with better results, so that you don't get the crispy edges that they're prone to getting. Some plants are sensitive to fluoride, supposedly, in tap water. I think Peace Lilies and Spider Plants fall into that category. So, just observe your plants, see how they're doing but we also have to be careful that we're not blaming everything on going back to overwatering or watering properly. Are you watering properly? Are you thoroughly soaking your soil and allowing it to dry out in a reasonable amount of time for that specific plant? So, if you're watering properly and you have consistent conditions, then we can't change too many things at once, we have to know what's going on so that we can see the effect of... is it the water that's causing the issue, or is it my watering method that's causing the issue? We can't change too many things at once. We have to diagnose and change one thing at a time to really determine is it really the water type that I'm using that's causing this, or are there a bunch of other things going on?
Jane: Yes, that's a really good point. It's like an elimination diet. You need to change things gradually and then see what's actually causing the improvement, or the decline, or whatever. Now, I love a vintage watering can, I have several, but I don't know that I use them a tremendous amount. I'd like to think that a watering can is the best way of watering just so I can get my money's worth, but how do you water and do you like to use a can?
Raffaele: Depending on how much time I have... If I have a lot of time and I don't have anything on my schedule, I like to take my plants to the sink or to a bathtub and I will use my watering can in that case because I'll measure my fertiliser, my watering can and the water amounts and all that. So I'll water things thoroughly in the sink, for example, let it drain and then I'll carry the plant back to its window. If I have a large plant that I can't move, or I'm not going to go move my six foot tall Monstera that's in my living room, I'll just water that in place, with a watering can. Sometimes, actually I shouldn't say sometimes, I do this quite a lot, I'll take my plants to the shower and I try to take one plant a day to the shower with me. When I do that I'll rinse off the leaves, rinse off all the foliage, all the dust that's accumulated over time and I'll also give my plant an opportunity to be soaked and watered thoroughly and then let it drain out and put it back to the window. So I do different methods. I do use a watering can for the most part to water my plants.
Jane: The thing I use most often when I'm watering is... in a rush, as I normally am, as opposed to a nice "Oh I'm going have a plant morning and do it all very carefully," we get milk delivered in glass milk bottles and the empty milk bottles, which have got a little tiny residue of milk, get taken out to the garden, filled up with the rain water from the water butts - which I have to say, you're going to love it once you've got those water butts in, it's so good -
Raffaele: I can't wait.
Jane: I fill them up with that and I bring them inside and they sit in my sun room which has underfloor heating. So they gradually warm up to room temperature and then I add anything that I want to add in terms of nutrients if needed and then they just get used up and then they get put out to be taken away and sterilised ready for the next lot of milk, so it works quite well actually.
Raffaele: I love that.
Jane: I have heard that plants don't mind a little bit of milk, I don't purposely give them milk, but there just happens to be a bit left in the bottle so it seems to work. The only thing you have to watch out for with the water butt is the time when the tap gets blocked, which inevitably it does, and I've got to do this to one of mine soon. You have to go out in your oldest clothes, you've got to basically get the water out but also try to unblock the tap and it always ends up with you getting soaked in goop from the water butt and it's very smelly, so just a warning about that! It will happen!
Raffaele: Thank you!
Jane: We're on water meters here, so it means that people are more conscious about their water use, which I guess is good, so that's a good thing that I can use my water butt water. It gets a little bit dicey in the summer when I'm using them to water the garden. The other thing I was just going to mention in terms of water - which I have mentioned on the show before and subsequently the company that produced this water filter actually sent me one for free, so #gifted here, at this point - but I've got one of these ZeroWater filters. I don't know if you've come across these? I don't drink the water out of it because tap water is perfectly fine, but I do use it to make water that I use on my carnivorous plants in the event of my water butts running dry but I also use that water when I'm filling up a mister for a plant treatment like an insecticidal soap or anything like that, I use that water because it doesn't leave any marks on the leaves because it has 0% total dissolved solids once it's gone through this filter.
Raffaele: Oh, that's wonderful.
Jane: That's actually quite useful. They sent me a free one but I'd be totally honest if I didn't think it was any good. The only funny thing was, I kept thinking, "Oh this spout on this jug is so rubbish, it's really awkward to pour it," and then I realised, literally after about two months because I was also using it to put in my iron when I was ironing so that didn't get all scaled up, I realised that on the back, at the bottom there's actually a spigot. So I was, like, "Oh, damn. Now I realise where I was going wrong!" So there we go!
Raffaele: Right! I'll have to look at that. You brought up a good point about carnivorous plants. They need that ultra-pure water. That's another one.
Jane: With it, you get a little detector which tells you what the total dissolved solids are, which actually is very useful because you can then test your tap water so, yes, it's a useful little thing.
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Jane: Back with Raffaele shortly, but now it's time for Question of the Week, which comes from Cynthia and regards an old Jade Plant. Cynthia's in Vermont, in the US, and acquired this large tree at the end of summer last year. It's in a big ceramic pot, but Cynthia's noticed that the soil is super hard and suspects the plant is probably quite pot bound. Cynthia is a little bit terrified of repotting the Jade, so what should happen now? I feel your fear, Cynthia, and I can totally appreciate how you are feeling. I think the headline news is that if you just leave that Jade in that same pot, it'll probably be fine, it probably won't suddenly die, it will just go on eking out its existence, as it has done for the past, gosh knows how many years, so try not to worry too much.
There are a couple of things that you could do if you want to keep it in that pot to give it a hand. Get a knitting needle or a kebab stick or something like that and just poke some holes into that rock hard soil, if you can. You might have to put a bit of welly into it, as we say here in the UK! Get some holes poked into that soil, that will help because it will just help water to percolate through because when soil gets very dry, it gets hydrophobic, so it starts to repel water rather than absorbing it. So by adding some extra holes that will just help the water to sit in the soil a bit better and get absorbed. You may have to soak it several times in order to get rid of that hydrophobic nature of the soil. Once you've done that, the other thing you can do and, looking at your plant, this is going to be tricky, you might need a teaspoon to do it, but scrape away some of the top layer of that potting mix and replace it with fresh. Don't go down too far so that you're affecting the roots but just a top dressing of fresh compost can help if you're not planning to repot.
Looking at the Jade, Cynthia, I think it's doing okay but it's not super, super, super-healthy, so I think in spring, I would think about repotting. It's going to be a battle to get it out of that pot. If you can get an old palette knife around the side to ease it out that would definitely help, worst case scenario is you have to break the pot to get it out, I'm afraid. It looks like it's a multi-stemmed plant. That may be because it's quite a few different cuttings all planted in the same pot. It may not come from one individual source, so then you have to make a decision about whether you want to put it all back into a single pot or whether you want to divide it up. You need to do a careful examination of what you've got once you've got it out the pot and take it from there. When you've got it out of the pot, if the soil is really hard and probably exhausted of nutrients, it's probably worth trying to wash off all the old soil and completely replace it so that you've got something that hopefully is going to last and do well for the next few years. Obviously, this is going to be a big, heavy plant if you keep it as one, so it does need to go into another big, heavy pot, most likely. Make sure there's plenty of drainage and that the substrate is 30% to 50% drainage material because that will just help the plant to thrive. I find that Jades like a slightly more moisture retentive soil than some cacti and succulents, so I tend to go about a third drainage material to two thirds houseplant compost. Just make sure you replant it at the same level so you don't bury the stems deeper than they were before and, hopefully, it should recover quite well. These plants are really, really tough. If you want an insurance policy, then do take a few cuttings. Give it a prune at the same time - that will be no bad thing.
It's always a bit scary when we deal with old plants like this, but I'd be a lot less worried about repotting this Jade, for example, than I would be, personally, about repotting a giant Boston Fern, or something, because they're tough, they're just tough plants. That's why they get to this size and why you see them in takeaway windows and so forth because they are super-tough. Obviously, there are other reasons why you see them in takeaway windows, as you will find out if you read my book Legends of the Leaf, plug, plug, plug! There's a whole chapter on this plant and it's really fascinating, the symbolism of those leaves in Chinese culture and there's loads of interesting stuff to say about this plant, so it's a good one! I hope you manage to get it looking as healthy as possible, Cynthia, whether you decide to repot or not. I'll put a picture of the plant in the show notes if anyone wants to have a look and add their tuppence to the discussion.
Thank you to everyone who has signed up for The Plant Ledger, my new email on the UK houseplant scene. It's been great to have so many subscribers ahead of the first edition, which comes out on Friday, 11^th^ March 2022. If you're a small planty business and you're interested in advertising, do let me know. It's been going like hot cakes for the first few editions, which is fantastic, and if you want more information please drop me a line about that. Link in the show notes, to sign up. This is specifically for the UK houseplant scene. Anyone can sign up, but you might not be able to attend a particular event if you happen to be intercontinental. I'm really excited about this newsletter because I don't think anyone else is offering this. It's going to be all that news condensed into one newsletter that you need to read. So, everything from, like, "Oh, there's a job going at this shop" to "This shop is having a special propagation event," to "This online shop has got an amazing discount code this month" to "Oh, did you hear about the release of this new plant?" and I think it's going to be fun! I really hope you subscribe. What have you got to lose? It's going to be free, it's always going to be free to read and funded by advertising. Coming out a maximum of once a week but, initially, it'll just be fortnightly. So check out The Plant Ledger now, you can go to janeperrone.com/ledger to find out more. Now it's back to my chat with Raffaele Di Lallo.
Jane: Now, I want to talk to you about another term that sends me loopy, which is "butt-chugging"! Please can we talk about this?!
Raffaele: Yes, what an appalling term! It's funny because when you first mentioned that, it's hilarious because someone else commented, I think on one of my Instagram reels, and I think he reposted one of my reels and I was talking about top-watering versus bottom-watering and he reposted it and he said, "For all you butt-chuggers out there!". I don't know if I had heard that term before, so it's funny but I'm appalled by it at the same time. I think, in the end, it's a personal decision but personally, for me, I top-water because I don't have the time to bottom-water all these plants. It's so much quicker to top-water, but it's fine to bottom-water. However, there is one thing in particular to be aware of if you're constantly bottom-watering, letting your plant soak up everything through the drainage hole, and let's say you're using tap water and fertilizing. Over time, all those excess minerals and salts have nowhere to go, they get absorbed by your potting mix and you can burn your roots eventually that way. So if you bottom water often, I always recommend that you top water every so often, maybe once a month, once every couple of months, to flush out any excess salts or minerals. It might be, even, best to use something like a filtered water, like you just mentioned, Jane, or distilled water. You can even just use plain tap water and just run everything through, just flush out any excess salt. That's probably the one thing to really be careful of if you like to bottom-water, if you're a butt-chugger!
Jane: Yes, I kind of do a bit of a hybrid, in that I tend to, most of the time, I'm literally with my milk bottle, chucking some water on things. Oftentimes, if I'm going a little bit more time-consuming, then I will just get my trusty plastic washing up bowl and I will stick some plants in there and I'll just run water through the top and then let it sit in the bottom and let them absorb. When you've got a clear plastic pot, I'm sure you've noticed this as well, if you water and you can see what's going on with the actual soil through that clear pot, you can see that oftentimes you can water from the top and it doesn't necessarily immediately get soaked up, there's lots of dry soil still in there. So mine's a sort of a hybrid that hopefully covers both bits.
Raffaele: There's a couple of instances, that just triggered my memory, when bottom-watering actually becomes extremely useful. One of them - it's no longer the case now but I have an Echeveria that the crown was so dense that I couldn't even fit a watering can to water it - so I would bottom-water that plant, so that becomes very useful in cases like that where, if your plant is too thick, and there's so much foliage you can't even fit in a watering can, that comes in handy. Another time that bottom watering is very handy is if your potting mix has gone so bone dry that it starts to repel water and you're watering and it just streams straight through the potting mix doesn't even absorb anything, materials like peat moss will become hydrophobic over time and they actually repel water once they go too dry, so you'll either have to top-water several times in a row or let the pot sit in water and let it drink up over the course of a few hours and, gradually, it'll re-moisten the potting mix and then you can take it out. So those are the two cases that I find bottom-watering extremely helpful.
Jane: This sounds like one of those documentaries on one of those dodgy TV channels: "When watering goes wrong!" I have been, on the whole, horrified by the homespun remedies to the problem of a soggy plant, including using tampons to dry. Have you seen this?
Raffaele: Oh my gosh!
Jane: There's women in the world who can't get hold of tampons. It just seems like a terrible waste to be using them to dry out plants. Surely there's a better way than that to sort out your soggy plant? Please Raffaele, can you give me some tips?
Raffaele: Oh my gosh. You have to look at all of your conditions. For example, I grow a lot of my plants in plastic nursery pots and then I slip it into a decorative pot that does not have a drainage hole. Obviously the plastic pot that the plant growing in does have a drainage hole. Sometimes I get lazy and I water things in place. So sometimes it could just be as simple as that, maybe it's just sitting in water. Go and dump it, dump out the saucer, dump out the extra water in the decorative pot. Another important consideration is are you providing your plant with enough light, or is it sitting in a dark corner, because if it's sitting in a dark corner, your plant is not going to use your water efficiently. What else? The over potting thing. If you've gone from a tiny pot to this ginormous pot, that's an issue because their soil is not going to dry out in a reasonable amount of time, so you might have to re-evaluate the size of your pot too. Maybe it's in a pot that's too big and maybe you need to increase your light. In most cases, when people think that they have root rot, that's another one of my pet peeves. People automatically go to root rot without even observing the roots. Honestly, as silly as that sounds, I've run into it in a lot of cases. Have you actually observed the roots? Are they, in fact, mushy and rotted and stinky? If you can answer yes to that, then, yes, you do have root rot, but in a lot of cases, people automatically go to overwatering and they automatically say "Oh, it's root rot" but you have to observe your roots first. So, if you do indeed have root rot, then it might be beneficial to take your plant out of its pot and trim off any dead roots. You may need to maybe put it in a smaller pot if you've had it in a huge pot beforehand. Maybe that contributed to the issue. Make sure you're giving your plant good conditions: warm temperatures, enough light, a well-draining potting mix and maybe it will recover over time, if it's not too late.
Jane: Oftentimes now, the range and difficulty of the plants we're trying to grow, that we perhaps are seeing on Instagram and thinking "I must have that," means that, in a way, we're setting ourselves up for failure. I'm sure lots of people see these beautiful prayer plants on Instagram and then go to the big box store and see them and they just can't resist them. Whereas, if somebody says to me "What's a good starter plant?" I would not be naming any kind of prayer plant, right?
Raffaele: No, absolutely. Any kind of Calathea, anything in the prayer plant family, even plants like Alocasias, they're gorgeous, but, like you said, on social media it can be very deceiving because we see pictures of people holding these gigantic plants that are filling up the whole photo and dwarfing the size of their head because the plant is so big. But these plants were probably not grown inside of a home with average conditions. They probably came straight from a greenhouse and someone took a picture of it in their home, or maybe they just brought the plant home and it was the first day that they had the plant. So it's deceiving, it's very deceiving, when we see photos like that. So we have to really realise this probably didn't grow inside. For a plant to look like this, it was not just sitting in an average home, it was probably grown in a greenhouse. So we have to keep it real, we have to realise that most plants are not going to look like that if grown in a little window inside of our home.
Jane: Well, Raffaele, thank you very much for keeping it real and I'm looking forward to seeing how your new book, Houseplant Warrior, does! Just remind us where we can find you on the socials for anyone who wants to find out more.
Raffaele: I'm very active on Instagram. My handle is @OhioTropics, one word, and I'm most active there. I am also on YouTube. I'm trying to do more videos. I haven't gotten my act together yet! Also, Ohio Tropics Houseplant Care. I am on Facebook as well, if you just search for Ohio Tropics Houseplant Care and I'm very active on my blog, OhioTropics.com and I constantly write articles on plant care.
Jane: Well thank you so much for joining me today, it's been a delight!
Raffaele: Thank you, Jane.
[music]
Jane: And that, as they say, is your lot for this week! Thank you to my guest, Raffaele, this week. Check out the show notes for details of his socials and his book, Houseplant Warrior. Want to do this again next Friday? Fab! I'll see you then. Bye!
[music]
Jane: The music you heard in this episode was Roll Jordan Roll, by The Joy Drops, An Instrument the Boy Called Happy Day, Gokarna, by Samuel Corwin and Whistle, by Benjamin Banger. All tracks are licensed under Creative Commons. See the show notes for details.
Subscribe to On The Ledge via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Player FM, Stitcher, Overcast, RadioPublic and YouTube.
Raffaele Di Lallo of Ohio Tropics joins me to talk about the best ways to water houseplants, and I answer a question about repotting an old jade tree.
This week’s guest
Raffaele Di Lallo is the founder of plant care website Ohiotropics.com and his new book Houseplant Warrior is available to order now.
You can also find Raffaele’s plant advice on his Ohio Tropics Blog, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook page.
On The Ledge Patreon subscribers at the Ledge End and Superfan level can listen to a bonus episode with Raffaelle where we talk Tillandsias.
Check out the notes below as you listen…
On The Ledge sowalong: Thanks for all your onoing efforts to join my project growing houseplants from seed! If you are new to the #OTLsowalong, it’s the podcast’s annual project to get everyone growing houseplants from seed - you check out all the past sowalong episodes here. Morgan got in touch about the issue of where to source Hoya seeds to point out that Hoya polyneura seeds are currently available from Turn It Tropical in the UK.
The water filter I mention in this episode that I was #gifted is the Zero: I haven’t had to replace the filter yet but so far it has been really useful for filling my plant sprayer when applying pest treatments, and for watering environments that should remain as sterile as possible such as seed trays and propagation boxes.
Watering advice from Raffaele
Don’t just assume that your plant’s problems are caused by ‘overwatering’ - check the substrate at soil level to see what’s really going on! Often plants are actually suffering from dry rather than wet soil.
Watch out for yellowing lower leaves and wilting as signs of potential problems with water levels in the soil.
When you do water, a good soaking is better than the odd dribble here and there.
Tap water is fine for the majority of houseplants, but there are exceptions. If you can, watering with rainwater is preferable. If you use reverse osmosis water or distilled water, you may well need to add additional nutrients.
If you bottom water, flush out the substrate every now and again to reduce the buildup of mineral salts from tap water and fertilisers.
If you water from the top and your nursery pot is nestled in a decorative pot or saucer, remember to remove the excess water that gathers in the bottom after a few minutes.
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Cynthia got in touch asking if a venerable jade tree she obtained last year (pictured left) should be repotted. This plant could probably do with a repot, but if that’s too difficult, one way to help the rock-hard soil will be poking some holes into the substrate with a knitting needle or kebab stick. Letting it soak in a big bucket or tray of water will also help to gradually allow the soil to absorb more water. Scraping away the top layer of substrate and replacing with fresh will help too.
If Cynthia decides to repot, this is best done in spring. Do note that it may be hard to remove the rootball - running an old palette knife around the inside edge may help. Otherwise the last resort is smashing the pot. I would advise washing off the old substrate and replacing with a mix of two thirds houseplant potting mix and one third drainage material such as perlite or grit. Take cuttings as an insurance policy, and make sure you do not bury the stems lower than they currently sit.
Want to ask me a question? Email ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com. The more information you can include, the better - pictures of your plant, details of your location and how long you have had the plant are always useful to help solve your issue!
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CREDITS
This week's show featured the tracks Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, An Instrument the Boy Called Happy Day, Gokarna by Samuel Corwin and Whistle by BenJamin Banger (@benjaminbanger on Insta; website benjaminbanger.com).