Repotting My Bird Of Paradise Plant Strelitzia reginae

Welcome to Gardening at 58 North. So in this video I'd like to give you guys an update on my Bird of Paradise plant here. So it's been about two years, it'll be about two years next month since I last did an update on this plant. That first update I only had it for a couple of months. It was quite a small plant, it was needing repotted so I repotted it in the previous video. But as you can see now it's really grown quite a lot and it's desperately needing repotting. In fact it's so badly needing repotting that it's actually pushing itself out of the pot. So this plant has been growing in my conservatory now for about two years. It's done really quite well. I haven't done any maintenance on it whatsoever since the previous update. Just to show you the amount of leaves that you'll probably get off it and what it will look like after a while. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start off, do a bit of maintenance. All I've done let's say over the two years is water it and also feed it as well. So what I'm going to do now is take off any of these dead leaves or yellow looking leaves just to improve the appearance. Normally the yellow leaves such as these on the side here I would leave until they completely brown off just to let the plant absorb the nutrients. But just to make it look a bit better and because there's plenty of other leaves and it's got big roots full of energy I'll take those leaves off because it should be able to recover no problem. So that's the yellow leaves now taken off as you can see it's already looking a lot better. But I'll now give you a closer look at the roots and just show you how much they've been growing. When it comes to Strelitzia or Bird of Paradise plants they have very thick fleshy roots and what can sometimes happen with plants with very thick fleshy roots is they will keep pushing down at the bottom where there's most water in the compost mix. So most of the water when you water your plant will settle at the bottom of the pot and that will be where you get the most vigorous root growth because the plants will be searching for the water and they'll put most of their energy into the new roots into the area that has the most nutrients for the most water. So you get a lot of growth at the bottom of the plant pot and what that can do especially with thick roots like this is as they swell and turn into tuberous roots you'll get the whole plant popping up. So I'll give you a closer look at that now. So when I first repotted this I did actually put the soil level just below the lip of the pot but as you can see it's now completely pushed it out it makes it very difficult to water and it is really starting to push out the pot and if I have a look at the bottom we've got some thick tuberous roots starting to come out. I'll probably have to cut these off just to make sure that I can get this out the pot so I'll do that now and if you are cutting big fleshy roots like this you need to make sure that when you repot it keep the compost quite dry for the first few weeks just to let this callus over and so it doesn't start rotting because if this starts rotting it could cause damage in the rest of the root system. So I'll take this out now and show you the root system. So as you can see there although there's a lot of compost in this pot there's barely any compost around the roots so the plant will be struggling to get water and nutrients it's just got roots surrounding roots so it can't really absorb much and there's loads of thick tuberous roots storing lots of energy so what I need to do here take out a couple of these slugs because I've got a few slugs that might be nibbling the roots as well and I'm going to scrape off any of the top soil that hasn't got roots in it just loose soil that's no longer necessary. So that's the loose soil taken off you can see plenty of roots very little compost so now I need to put this in a larger pot and give it some more space for its roots to grow into some fresh compost. So the compost mix I'll be using is similar to the mix it was in previously Strelitzias tend to like a soil-based compost so this is just a mixture of topsoil from my garden I made sure I got the nice loamy topsoil which is the richest kind of topsoil I've got in my garden and I've just mixed it with a really rich multi-purpose compost just to make sure there's plenty of organic matter in there so that there's lots of moisture holding potential and also there's lots of nutrients and then it doesn't look like it but I have added a lot of perlite the perlite when you add it with the soil mix it tends to go dark brown so it doesn't stand out as much as if I'd done it in a pure organic mix but with the topsoil and the organic content mixed together although it has a lot of water holding potential which is good for the plant it can get a bit waterlogged and Strelitzia is like a free draining mix so that's why I've added in all the perlite make sure it's nice and loose you can see it's a nice loose mix there even though this is damp it's a nice loose mix so that roots can grow through that nice and easily and they won't have any water logging issues with all the perlite in there so this is a new pot I'll be putting it into now if you want Strelitzia to flower slightly earlier you're best to keep them really pot bound and not have them in too large a pot that's what I was trying with this plant previously as you saw it got to a point where it was just growing too much and the roots were pushing the soil out too much I just had to go ahead and do something so I'm now going to be putting in a bigger pot now ideally I would have gone for a slightly smaller pot than this but I don't have anything in between a three litre pot which it was in originally and this 15 litre pot so I'm just going to go I have to go straight up to a 15 litre pot size which is five times the amount of root space so what I'll probably find is this will put on a huge amount of growth now this plant has been held back from its growth because its roots have been constrained and most of its roots have been growing in amongst other roots so it's not really been able to absorb much nutrients and water now it's got all this extra compost it's going to grow really well become a much bigger plant it probably will delay flowering slightly because as I say if you constrict the roots you tend to have better flowering performance so what I'm expecting for the rest of the summer is when I first put it in there I won't notice a huge amount of change in the growth at the top half but it'll be putting on lots of vigorous roots spreading into the new compost once its roots are getting nicely established it'll then start putting on lots of strong growth I'll get much taller leaves much bigger leaves at the moment its leaves are about two and a bit foot in height but I'll probably get leaves up to three to four foot later in the summer when it starts to get established and hopefully next summer I'll get my first flowers most relitzias they do tend to be quite large before they flower you can sometimes force a smaller plant into flowering but generally they do need to become quite mature so although it's going to be a few years for me to wait I'm hoping by the third year which is just me next year I'll have my first flowers so I'll go ahead now and I'll repot this into the larger pot make sure there's a nice layer of compost on the bottom before I put it in the pot to make sure the roots are nicely covered and I'll be just burying it around about the same level as it was previously as it looks like that's around about where the roots are coming out from the base of the plant and what I'm also going to be doing with this is I'm going to be making so it's got a good centimeter or two below the rim of the pot the reason for that is because as you saw previously you can push yourself up and out the pot if I give it a bit more space that just means it's going to be a bit longer until that starts to happen and so I'll be able to grow it longer in this pot before it has that problem of pushing out of the pot so that's it now repotted into its new pot as you can see it's got plenty of space now it's much more fitting with the size of the plant and it does generally look quite a lot nicer so what I did when I repotted it is I firmed the compost in gently I don't want to cram the compost in too hard you want to keep it nice and loose you don't want to compact that compost otherwise you'll have problems with water logging and difficulty for the roots to grow through it so I've just firmed it in slightly just enough to make sure it's stable and there's no large air gaps or large spaces without compost I've also given it a shake to help with that but I've not pushed it down hard make sure the compost is still nice and loose and has plenty of air spaces so that's all for this video it should grow much better now and I'll probably give you guys an update next summer they are relatively slow growing plants especially in my climate here in North Scotland even in the conservatory where it gets warm I have very dark winters so it doesn't really grow for six months of the year so I'll probably give you guys an update in about a year's time by then this plant will probably double in size roughly and hopefully we'll get the first flowers forming