#re-potting

The Begonia Lucerna before she got a new home.

The Table Begonias got together and moved into new digs.

On Sunday I re-potted two of my newest plants. I figured they could do with some fresh dirt, a little more room, and some fertilizer.

Neither plant actually got a new pot, but they were transplanted out of their smaller pots into the decorative pots they had been sitting in. So now they have a little more room for roots to grow. They are a Peperomia (top left) and a Burro’s Tail or Stonecrop Sedum (top right). I’m not sure which variety of sedum yet because its so little still.

I did a few timelapses of the process.

Both plants have a little cutting from a string of pearls plant. I’m not sure if the ones in the sedum pot will take, but the ones in the Peperomia have definitely started showing signs of putting down roots.

There are a few things I could have done better here:

I should have added in some gravel, or another drainage medium, to the soil, so they don't stay too wet. Because these are all tropicals, they like to be warm and dry out between waterings. They're in a south-facing window where they get sun all day long and are quite warm, so I think they'll be ok. The plants in this south window generally dry out pretty quick, so I'm not too worried about them. If I re-pot them in the future I will add some chunky gravel to the bottom of the pots.

There are two main reasons to re-pot your orchids, and they often, but not always, occur at the same time. First, an orchid needs to be re-potted if it gets too big for its pot. Orchids can have an extensive root system inside the pot and the potting mix, but they also typically have roots that extend out of the mix into the air, and this normal behavior is not usually a clue for re-potting. But…

While doing all the re-potting of my aloe vera plants, I realized that some people might not understand the need to re-pot or "pot up" plants. I took a few pictures of my process so that I could show why I re-pot.

Many potted plants, if you're not pruning/pinching them or cutting roots, will eventually grow larger than what their pot can healthily accommodate. At this time you can choose to trim back growth or separate shoots to put in multiple pots, but if you have something like aloe vera you will need to take the established plant out of its pot and put it into a larger one. This gives its roots more room to grow and in turn will help support the growth of a larger plant.

As you can see in the pictures, I had an established plant with many leaves that had grown larger than what its pot could really handle. When I gently pulled/rocked the plant out of its pot, I could see that the root ball had filled up the entire pot. At this time I took my kitchen shears and removed the bottom few leaves off the plant. [ Aloe plants produce leaves in groups of three from the top of the plant. The lower leaves are older, and should be the ones that you cut off first when harvesting gel for sunburns/skincare. ] Now I was able to put the cleaned up plant in a bigger pot and fill it in with my succulent mix.

Aloe vera (and succulents in general) will do better if they're potted in terra cotta/clay pots because clay encourages water to evaporate much quicker than a plastic or glass planter. Overwatering or leaving your plant excessively wet can cause root rot, so it's good to have a little extra help from a clay pot in drying the soil out. [ I was re-potting these plants in particular to be sold soon, so I put them in plastic planters with instructions to re-pot them as soon as the buyer could. ]