Hello all....
I've been "indoor gardening" for a number of years, but I just inherited sixteen
plants from a neighbour who moved away pretty suddenly, and some of them are in need of a bit of rehab and recovery. She neglected them a bit over the last couple of months, but most should survive. However, many of them seem to be, well, overgrown, overpotted, and/or under-attended. One (slightly scraggly) spider
plant is in a pot that I'm sure was meant for a
tree! And speaking of
trees, I have never seen a croton in
tree form before....
So my first question is: is it a good or bad idea to downsize a
plant into a smaller pot? I am not sure how established the root systems are, but there is no way this spider should be living in a pot this big! Several others seem quite overpotted as well - a couple more spiders, a peace
lily (which is really withered and sad-looking), a grape ivy, and one that I think is a dieffenbachia although it has very small, plain leaves. Usually if I want my
plants to live in a big pot without it spending all it's energy
growing roots, I just stick it (in it's pot) inside a bigger cache pot and fill that up with rocks...so I really don't know what to do!
My second question is...does anyone know if you can air layer a croton? This particular croton has 2 branching
tree trunks with clumps of leaves at the end of the branches...the trunks and branches themselves curl around instead of
growing straight up, so the
tree is about five feet in diameter. I mean, this thing is incredibly unwieldy, and since the only place for it was the bedroom, that means climbing over one another to get out of bed in the night, because the darn thing has taken up so much room!! If I do air layer it, will it sprout new leaves from the chopped down trunks? I had a croton years ago, but I remember it as a little bush, which got killed when the pipes burst one winter....
There is also a rubber
plant growing about a foot and a half tall on a single trunk. Do these ever branch out? Does pinching or pruning the tip encourage branching, or is this a no-no with a rubber
plant? I have the same question about a Norfolk Island Pine.
Sooooooo....can anyone help? Oh please and thank you in advance! I'm pretty good with the
plants I have, but I raised them from babies, and I know all their quirks (and they mine!). Now I feel like a mom who's been put in charge of sixteen foster babies with no medical records!
:rolleyes: The soil was pretty loose - it totally fell away from the roots. Sooooo, spidey #1 got downsized, quickly (emergency surgery?), amidst the supper leftovers on the table (with my now-visiting mother giving lots of unsolicited advice, of course!!). Actually I was surprised how little of it there was worth potting up. It was in a 12 inch pot, but I got only about 4 decent clumps out of it! One clump has tubers in the root system...I assume this is healthy and normal?? It's been years since I raised a spider...and I don't recall ever repotting that sucker (I just gave her periodic haircuts, and then passed along her babies to friends....and even to strangers at one point!)