How To Package Houseplant Cuttings & Potted Plants for Shipping! | How I package Plant Mail!

Hey guys. Today I am going to be packaging up some plant mail for a planty friend. You guys probably know him. It's Brad from What The Flock Farm. He has a YouTube channel, so I'll link that in the description box. You can go check out his stuff. He's a really nice, wonderful guy. Puts out great, excellent, planty YouTube content very consistently, so I highly recommend his channel. It's one of my favorites. Just throwing that out there. That's a little side note. But the main point of this video is I'm going to be packaging up some plant mail for him, and I thought I'd show you my process for shipping out plants. Let's do it. Everything I'm going to be using in the video is repurposed from mail I've received at my house. I save all of the packaging for pretty much anything I order so that I can reuse it for shipping plants. That way I don't have to use more stuff unnecessarily. Now let's get into it, for real this time. First things first is you have to have all your plants laid out, or with you, of course. The plants I'm going to be sending to Brad are a ZZ Raven. He knows he's getting the ZZ Raven. He commented on one of my videos and said he didn't have one. I told him I had some cuttings that were well-rooted, so I'm going to be sending him those cuttings. I will also be sending him some Skindapsus silvery and cuttings. I don't think he has one of these already. Well, they're actually not cuttings. They're rooted cutting. They do have pretty substantial roots. I mean, I think you can see. Also sending him a variegated Maranta plant because I also don't think he has one of those, and I know he kind of does a lot of Calathea, that type of plant. The ZZ Raven and the silvery and Skindapsus I'm going to be sending bare root. Variegated Maranta I will be sending in soil. So I'll be showing you how I package these two different kinds of packaging, you know, a potted plant and then also rooted cuttings. You have to find your biggest plant. In my case, it is the ZZ Raven. We of course have to find a box that he's going to fit in comfortably. Oh, I have a whole bunch of boxes here. Initially, I wanted to send them in this tiny little box, but I don't think that's going to work. Nope, that is not going to work. I'm actually going to be using this box. I ordered Ryan a Ramstein hat for his birthday. This is the box that came in. Yeah, I mean, it's not cute, but it'll work. I have a bunch of bubble wrap that I'm going to put a layer down at the bottom of the box. So I'm just going to cut like a section of this off, like so, like this. Just line it, give it a little padding. And then I'm also probably going to put down some tissue paper on top of that. Like I said, how I package plants does vary a little bit depending on what supplies I have in my house, depending on like the PR I got or orders I made online. Do the best with what we got, you know? That is what the inside of my box looks like. Now I'm going to set this aside. Wrap up the roots on my two plant propagations. So I just grabbed a few paper towels. Where's the other one? Dip this in some water. I don't want it to be too wet. So I'm just getting it a little bit wet and I am going to wrap the roots in this. Just so that they have a little bit of moisture in case they are stuck in shipping for too long. You know, sometimes things happen. So just to be safe, but we don't want it to be too wet. Otherwise it is going to cause root rot. And now I'm going to take this brown paper. I'll also use tissue paper sometimes. Just enough so that it can cover the roots. Yeah, that's fine. And then I am going to take some of this pure twine, cut off a couple of pieces and tie her up. Pretty snuggly. You don't want it to come out, of course. That's the ZZ Raven. I know a lot of people like to wrap them in plastic. I don't personally like to do that just because it does hold in a lot of moisture. So of course, if you're sending a moisture loving plant, that works really well. But in my plant shopping experiences, the ones that have come in plastic haven't fared as well. The bare root ones I've ordered. So yeah, I prefer to not use plastic. Just going to do the same thing with silvery ants and skindepsis. Gather all my cutting so the roots are at as much of an even point as possible. I hope this is a good little plant for him. Hope he likes them. Brad, if you're watching this, I hope you like them. If not, don't tell me. Just tell me you liked them even if you didn't. Okay, so wrap up the roots just like before. There we have it wrapped up. Rigid plants are harder to shift. So where this one is kind of a bendy little sucker, it's a lot easier to package. You know what I mean? Where'd my piece of twine go? I'm losing my mind. You guys are probably much more organized at life than I am telling you that now. Cut a new piece of twine. And then wrap around the paper and tie it pretty snug. Not so snug that you're going to harm the plant, of course. So there's our two rooted cuttings packages. And then I'm going to set those aside and package this baby up. So I'm a dum-dum and I've misplaced my paper towel roll. So we're going to improvise and use newspaper. You really can use anything you want, your little heart desires. So I'm gonna rip it into more small usable sections, crinkle them up and get them wet. I'm making a mess as per usual. You guys know me. And I am just going to put this around the base of the soil. I have been bottom watering this baby. Some plants I wouldn't bottom water or I wouldn't really worry about watering before you send them, unless it's like a super moisture loving plant where this guy is a moisture loving plant. Yeah, I would definitely recommend it. Although it's not totally necessary for all of them, especially because we're putting damp paper towel or newspaper or really anything over top of the plant. It just kind of depends on the plant you're shipping, but this will help hold in moisture in the soil. So yeah, it's good for this kind of plant. I'm gonna make sure the entire top of the soil is covered. You can see this is going to hold in the soil. If I flip it upside down, no soil is coming out whatsoever. And now I am going to take my shipping tape. Oh, actually before that, I will link these down below. These are orange wood sticks. They're actually like a manicure tool. They come in so handy for houseplants as well. I use them as stakes on some of my smaller plants and I use them for packaging as well. So if you're packaging a plant that is smaller than your largest size plant and you have it in a pot like this, I like to put a couple of these in the soil around the plant to help protect the plant if it does end up getting like tousled around in the box. If this is being tousled around too much and I didn't package it in very well, which sometimes can happen, things can come loose, fluke things can happen all the time. Okay, this just helps prevent the plant from getting crushed and breaking leaves on the edge of the box. So that's a tip. I will link orange wood sticks in the description if you're someone that sends a lot of plant mail, I definitely recommend picking them up. They're super, super inexpensive. And like I said, come in so handy for so many different plant purposes. Now I'm just going to take shipping tape. I would prefer to use masking tape, but I'm out. And I'm just going to tape around the top of the plant to hold in the newspaper. I'm not the best packager. If you guys wanna know who the best packager is, it's my dad. He's the one that does all the packaging for my parents' plant shop. He's a pro. And then just add in a few extra pieces for my mental so that I feel better. And it's actually in there really well. Alrighty. So I think that's pretty, pretty good in there. If you have any plant shipping hacks or tips or tricks or things you do differently, please comment down below. As always, share your information as well. I learn a lot from my comment section. So I really appreciate all of your guys' knowledge and logic, really. You guys have a lot of logic, you know? Okay. So she's taped in there really well, not going anywhere. Now let me clean up my workstation and then we'll get to actually packing the box. We have the base of our box packed. Now what I'm going to do is lay my plants in. This guy's gonna have to go diagonally. Start with your biggest plant and then work your way to your smallest plant. The roots are facing this way and the foliage is facing this way because I don't want these stabbing the foliage on my other plant, on my ZZ Raven plant. Fold all of the leaves so that they are facing up in the direction the package is going, you know? You don't want anything bent weirdly in there like that. And then this guy, I'm just gonna lay in there. Kind of however, he's really flexible, so not too worried about this guy. Gosh, watch, Brad gets his package and everything is like not good. Everything's dead. Now I'm going to go in, add another layer of tissue paper over top of any of the foliage so it's not touching the outside of the box. Just for a little added insulation, I'm putting this around the outside of all of the plants. And now that I have everything laid in here, everything's covered, nothing's touching the outside of the box itself, like it's insulated with layers of tissue paper and paper towel and all of that. I'm going to fill it in so that there's not space for the plants to move up and down this way so that everything is even with this. You get what I'm saying? Here I have some gaps, I need to fill those in so nothing jostles around enough. I feel pretty good about this. So now that I have all that, I'm going to close the box, kind of shake it, see if I hear anything moving around a lot. Is this weird? Do you guys do this too? And then I'm just going to tape the box closed. I'm actually not going to tape it on camera because I have a little note I'm going to include in it, but I need to write it first. So yeah, I'm just going to put the note on the top, close up the box and then tape around the edges. And when I go to ship this box tomorrow, I'll take you along with me for the shipping process. Basically what you do is you go to your post office or wherever you want to ship it. I'm just going to do it at the post office. And with the address of where you want it shipped, they'll print the shipping label for you right then and there. They'll weigh your package, ask what kind of shipping you want, how long you want it to take, print the shipping label, stick it on there for you and that's that. So yeah, this is not the cutest box, but it's okay, right? It does the job. So yeah, I will be right back tomorrow when I go to drop off the package. I'm back from the post office. I dropped off the package and I just wanted to tell you how it ended up. So in my post office, I had, well, there were three options. One, I could weigh my package and get a shipping label printed online and pay online and then just drop it off. I don't personally have a weigher thing to weigh how much my package is. So I don't have anything that could have done that. So I didn't do that option. Some post offices will also have a self-serve kiosk thing where you can weigh your package, enter all the shipping information, how long you want it to take, and you can just pay for it on that machine, print off the shipping label, stick it onto your box and drop it into the parcel bin, I think is what it's called, and then they'll ship it for you. Or your last option is to go up to the desk, which is what I personally prefer to do. I don't know why. I just worry that I'm going to make a mistake on the self-serve kiosk. So I like to have somebody helping me. So basically you just give them the address you want it to ship to, you tell them the address you want it to ship to, you tell them the ship from address, pick the amount of days you would like it to take to get there. I chose two days and it was just under $15. They weigh it, charge yes, wipe your cards, you get a receipt with the tracking information. And yeah, that is that. Really easy, really straightforward. And now the package is on its way to Brad. He should get it this coming Wednesday. So that is it for this video. If you have any further questions, please leave them in the comments down below and I'll do my best to answer all of them. That is it. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in my next one. Bye!