Banana Tree & Elephant Ear Planting || Rootbound Plants || Division / Propagation

Hey, what's up, garden friends? Jeff here, Tropical Plant Party. How's everybody doing? I hope you're good. I am great. Let's do some stuff with banana trees. A cute little tiny banana, isn't it? Did you think it was big from that close-up? Probably not. I had someone ask me to talk a little bit about like colocages, alocages, and them being root-bound, and how to kind of deal with that. The problem is I don't have any root-bound alocages or colocages, and it's kind of early in the year, so the nursery's stuff isn't really very overgrown yet. But I was at a nursery, and they had this little banana. The pot feels very, very firm. I would say it's maybe root-bound, hopefully. Maybe not. If not, we'll just talk about it. No, banana trees, not the same as an alocage or a colocage. However, they are fairly similar in how to deal with them being root-bound. So in general, I'm just gonna kind of talk about planting up a little banana tree into a container. It's gonna be a simple planting, and some of the things I do to deal with a plant that's root-bound. For starters, what is a root-bound plant? Well, that means that the roots are wrapped very tightly in the pot. Usually, the pot will be very, very firm to touch. You can sometimes see roots growing out the top of the pot and out the bottom, and or out the bottom. And when you water, it'll just kind of go all over the place. This plant, not particularly showing any of those signs, other than the pot being very, very firm. It's really not uncommon at all, though, to pick up a banana tree, and it turned out to be somewhat root-bound. And transplanting them isn't tricky, but they tend to react to it. So let's say that this is a heavily root-bound banana tree or colocasia, alocasia, just one of those plants. First thing that I would do is go ahead and try to water it in thoroughly from the top, make sure that you're getting the soil nice and wet, the roots will be nice and wet. Sometimes, something will be so root-bound that the water just goes everywhere. So when that happens, then what I do is I just fill up a bowl or a bucket of water, not typically a glass bowl like this, I'm just, you know, keeping things fancy for the YouTube. Then I'll go ahead and unpot the plant and put that into the water. Fully submerge the roots and let it soak for at least 15 minutes, maybe even upwards to like 30 to 45 minutes. And the reason I like to do it that way is because it makes the roots more pliable. So if this were a root-bound plant, it's really nowhere near as bad as I thought it was. It's fairly firm in there, but it's not so bad. These roots would be wrapping in heavily in a circle around the bottom to a point where you don't even really see much soil, and then all the way around the sides. So, but just with a typical plant, just like this one, you just score the sides up a little bit, loosen up the root memory, and you can plop it onto a pot, which I'll be doing in a little bit. What I would do if this were a heavily root-bound plant, I would take a very sharp, sterile knife, and I would start cutting away at the roots that are wrapped so incredibly tightly that there's just not much that I can do with them. Can also take like a chopstick and work that in between the roots and just sort of tease them out as much as you can. The main thing is I just want to get it to a point where it doesn't have a shape to it, so the roots don't look like they're moving in a circular pattern. And so that when I pot it up, it will be able to have soil in between those roots and not just be a big, massive roots. And then if I needed to divide this up, which I don't really need to do with this particular plant, but if I were doing that, I mean, there are a little plantlets in here that I could divide out, right? The thing is, I highly doubt that there are actually roots on any of these little guys that are grown in here, so taking them out, they're probably just gonna die, the little ones, but I don't know, we will see. But if this were an alocasia or a colocasia, then what I would do is go ahead with a sharp knife again, make a clean cut, try and make sure that there are as many roots as possible on that piece that I've cut out, pot it up into some damp potting soil that drains very well and is organically rich, which I'll talk about more when I pop this banana, and don't let it dry out for very long at all. I like to make sure to water them as soon as that top inch or so of soil starts to dry out, and I would normally put them in probably part shade until I start to see some growth out of them, then I can move them into more and more sun. With the colocasias, alocasias, not always as much. Sometimes I think they look a little bit better when they're getting slightly less sun than a colocasia. No, this is weird talking about a plant that's not in front of me, but these plants, the bananas, alocasias, and colocasias, they respond the same pretty much to everything I'm talking about here, to the repotting, to their soil. Colocasias can take a lot more water, they can be grown as bog plants marginally, alocasias sometimes can too, depending on the variety and the system or setup, I should say. Even bananas can as well, as long as the water is circulating very well and it has a lot of oxygen in it. And all of them tend to throw a bit of a fit sometimes when you have to mess with their roots when you plant them. So here I've picked up a pot to go ahead and throw this banana into. You can see there is a hole in the bottom that is very important for the bananas, drainage is key. And then I've also mixed up a soil blend here that's a standard all-purpose potting soil. I've added some sand to it, a little bit of compost to help enrich it. If it needed more perlite, I would add that because that helps with the drainage an awful lot. And then a very decent amount of Espoma Biotone Starter, that's gonna help the roots recover and build up all kinds of nice things in the soil. And there's some continuous release fertilizer in here also. You can kind of see in here, there are various chunks and pieces of bark and whatnot. That's good. That's what I'm talking about as far as keeping things organically rich. I'm gonna go ahead and pour some soil in here and get that to roughly halfway to being just slightly below halfway full. Then on the banana tree, coming in here to the roots, just gently roughing it up a little bit, rubbing the sides so that the roots kind of protrude out the sides. Same thing with the bottom. If it were swirled more, then I would do more with it, but this really isn't that bad. It's not that bad at all, actually. And then I'm making sure to put this in here so the top of that root mass, so the top of the soil is maybe, I'd say, a half an inch to an inch below the top of the pot. That way, when I water it heavily, the water won't just kind of spill over the place and wash the soil out. And go through, I'm just gonna fill in the rest of those gaps and water it in, and that's it. And then if I see any undesirable foliage in here, like you can see this leaf is looking a little bit sad, I just go in with my snippers and make the cut on there as close to the trunk as possible. And there it is. Simple, easy, and just overall adorable. I don't know the variety name of this banana. Two different varieties that say really, really small, and that's the Little Prince and the Truly Tiny. The Truly Tiny is the one that puts up lots and lots and lots of little suckers, little pups that come out the sides. So maybe that's what this one is, I don't know. That can also be influenced by the way these are propagated, too. If they are made from a root propagation, where they come into the trunk here and they cut the trunk and they make a sliver with a little nub of trunk in it and then some root, put that in some soil kind of at a diagonal, and it'll sprout up tons and tons of little baby bananas. Oh, it might not even be a dwarf variety. I mean, I'm pretty sure it is. Look at it. It's gotta be either a Truly Tiny, Little Prince, some sort of Superdwarf, Cavendish, something in the Acuminata. I don't know. That's all just speculation. It doesn't really matter. The only thing I care about is that it's just, it's adorable. Really cute. Also, I don't know if you can hear the wind. There are some storms moving in here, so pardon the audio if that's an issue. Now, forward care from this. Like I was talking about with the Alacajas and the Calacajas, more so really a Calacaja and a banana, it's really important that this is only allowed to dry out for a little bit of time. I'm gonna make sure that it gets watered when the top half inch to inch of the soil is dry. And this is for outdoors. For indoors, I would let it dry a little bit further in between, less airflow and cooler temperatures. The lower temperatures indoors, it actually keeps things from drying out as fast. And bananas aren't in super fast, active growth in cooler temperatures, like below like 80 or maybe upper 70s, but really over 80, they really take off and just grow like crazy. So inside, they're not going to do that. If you have it inside, I would let at least the top two to maybe even three inches of soil dry out. You kind of have to get to know your plants though. If you notice that the foliage is starting to wilt or droop in any kind of way, or get kind of just a weird flaccid appearance to it, then maybe go ahead and try watering it. Yellowing along the foliage, along the tips, usually starting from the tips and moving inwards is usually an indication of too much water, whereas browning is an indication of low humidity. Personally, I have never found bananas to be the easiest things to grow inside. If you have maybe a really bright window or an atrium, a spot that stays nice and toasty, then probably have better luck with them. Outside, like I said, since, especially because this is a fresh transplant, I'd be doing the same thing if it were in the ground. I want to make sure that it gets watered very frequently, should never be in standing water. And I'm going to start it off, just like I mentioned before with the collicoges or anything that's being transplanted really, or has been cut up. I'm going to give it less sun to start with, and then I'll move it into more sun. Bananas are extremely, extremely heavy feeders. I'm cupping my hand over the mic, so hopefully that's helping with the wind. Bananas are very heavy feeders. So during the active growing season, could even fertilize these twice a month with an all-purpose liquid fertilizer. Fish fertilizers are great. You can, if you notice that they're just like scorching and burning, maybe you live in a really dry climate, adding a couple of tablespoons of Epsom salt to some water, dissolving that and watering it in. Some people just sprinkle on top of the soil. That should have a similar effect. And you do that probably, I don't know, once a month, and see if that helps with scorching. The big thing, I'm not going to do this now, because I've just transplanted it, but once these have opened up, each one of these have put up, the leaves come out here from the center. You can kind of see that right there. Once that's come up and opened, probably two to three new leaves. At that point, which is really probably just going to be a matter of two to three weeks at the absolute max, I didn't have to mess with the roots very much. If the roots were messed with a lot, like on the alacajas or calacajas, let them put out a few new leaves, because they're probably going to drop the foliage that they had, because they just throw a fit when they get messed with. So do bananas. A lot of the times you transplant a banana and they just, blech, they drop, their leaves fall down, and it's like, what did I do? And normally that's just kind of their response to having a drastic change around their roots with airflow, change in water, and just, they don't like it. But with that TLC, they bounce back very easily. Just takes them a few weeks. Once there's a few new leaves coming up, move on with liquid fertilizing. It also helps to use a starter fertilizer. Like I said, I use the Espoma Biotone Starter in here. There are liquid starters that help too, that just help promote fresh new root growth. The point being though, that I was trying to get to, once you can tell that the plant has recovered, meaning a few new leaves have come out, it's recovered from being kind of torn up a little bit, from being cut up, divided, freed from being root bound, that's when it's safe to go ahead and start using a fertilizer that is higher in nitrogen. Bananas like a lot of nitrogen. Even my bananas I have in my yard, there have been times I've sprinkled just a little bit of lawn fertilizer around them, because it's like 33%. If you do too much, that'll scorch them and burn them, but it did a lot. They took off after doing that. This is also like a nice rich soil too, so it wasn't like just pure nitrogen. In a pot, I wouldn't do that. As far as fruiting goes, I have no idea, because I don't know what kind of banana it is, and they all kind of behave differently that way. I don't think there's anything edible anyways about the bananas on the Truly Tiny or the Little Prince. So for now, it's just cute. Bananas are a plant though, that when they do flower, that comes up from in here, kind of spirals down. It's really pretty, very attractive. It's really cute, but once that process is done, the plant that produced that flower dies, sort of like the hens and chicks. That plant that has flowered and fruited dies off, and it probably already put up lots and lots of little baby plants along the sides, and those will grow up and they'll do their thing too. Uncute, easy plants. Hopefully everything I was just talking about didn't make them seem complicated, because they're really not. I just really wanted to cover all the bases for indoors, outdoors, and since I am making this in response to somebody asking me about collicages, things got wacky. That's just kind of the nature of the beast. I had to get this video out because I wanted to answer those questions, and like I said, those things do still apply fairly well to bananas, because they have a similar behavior when it comes to propagation, transplanting, being root-bound, and whatnot. Isn't this pot pretty? I just picked this up, that'll, I think, be in the vlog that comes out a video or two from now. I liked it a lot more until a friend of mine told me it looked like crocodile skin, and I was like, why didn't you just ruin it for me? Can't something just be pretty? We don't get associated with anything. Doesn't matter, the banana's the star. Uncute, tropical little planter. I really, I'm not going to, but I really wanna go in and pull those little ones out, so that it just has the three larger trunks in it, because I think that'd be really cute, too. But I won't, I'll wait and divide them up. Well, maybe, we'll see. I hope everybody's doing well. I have all my social media posted down below, down in the description, so follow me, and I'll follow you back. I'm on Instagram, like, way more than anything else. And I have a lot of fun on there, looking at each other's pictures. It's good times being plant nerds together. And if you'd like to, you can give the video a thumbs up. I really appreciate it, it makes a big difference for the channel, for the videos, so thank you, and subscribe as well, and hit that notification bell, because I do upload multiple times a week. What are some fun things y'all been doing with your bananas? And collicages and allocages. Fun fruiting varieties, hearty varieties. I do, I need to talk about my bajus, the hearty varieties. I'll try and remember to do that. Let me know, comment down below. Had a conversation going about our plants. But, like I said, I hope everybody's doing well, and everything in life's just going wonderfully for you. As always, and most importantly, everybody, keep on growing. Bye-bye. Bye.