These Rare Plants Were Neglected For 2 Months Watch How I Save Them

Hey guys, my name is Sean and I'm a houseplant enthusiast from Jakarta, Indonesia. And actually I've been away for two months, I was in Bangkok. And now that I'm back, everything around me has exploded in growth. Now as a disclaimer, I did tell my gardener, who actually did a fantastic job of taking care of my collection, and I'm extremely grateful, but I did tell him that if you see something that needs to be worked on, you should go ahead and do it. If something needs repotting, something needs rescuing, you know, you don't wait for me to come back, you need to execute right away. And unfortunately, in Indonesian culture, people aren't really taught to be initiative or to initiate any action. If you look at the government position or corporates here, it's very like top-down kind of thing. So I don't blame him at all, it is a cultural thing. But I did wish that he would do some of these actions before I got back, because he had all this time. But it's not exactly laziness, I do find that he has the right skills. But it really boils down to confidence and communication, and things like that. So it is a struggle, and for those of us who will grow up in the Western world, we are known to take charge of something, take care of a project, and run with it. But unfortunately, in Asia, that's really a rare commodity. So in today's episode, I'm going to be working on a lot of these wonderful plants, there are going to be some interesting updates to show you. This plant here is just so beautiful, I'm going to show you that up close in a bit. And this one here, the Bulbasaur, has given me so many roots. This actually should be repotted like a month ago, I just don't know why he waited that long. And I did see some scale on the underside of the leaf here. So they've been under a little bit of neglect. We do have a routine of spraying them down with pesticide, fungicide, bacteria, and fertilizing. So he does follow that routine, he takes pictures of it every week to show me what he's done. But again, it's just going to be a lot of plant chores for us to do today. So I'm going to try to get to as much as possible, without this video stretching maybe over 30 minutes. Alright, one of my pride and joy is this Anthurium Carla, crossed with Nucleus. And by the way, the seller had a sticker on, but I took it off because I actually bought this plant at full price. So for your information, if you're a seller and I'm buying plants from you, and if you ever want me to mention your garden or your business, because tens or twenty, fifty thousand people watch this video, so I'm not going to give you free advertising. So if you're going to give me a discount, or if you're going to give me plants, I will 100% mention your business, but because I paid this at full price. But it is a beautiful, beautiful hybrid made locally here in Indonesia. And it's got beautiful frills. When I bought it, I'm going to see if I can find old pictures of it. When I bought it, there was a bet to see if the frills will come through. And it's really outperformed. And look at that new leaf that's just coming out. So this is a wonderful hybrid made in Indonesia. And if you want this kind of a curly, roughly finish on the Anthurium, look for the Nucleus as a parent plant. The Nucleus itself is a freeleaf plant out of Indonesia. And the offsprings will tend to have that similar trait as well. While we are on this topic, we're going to quickly unpot it to see if it needs any work. Done. I think this is quite fantastic. The roots look good and it's still got space to grow. So I'm going to leave it as it is. Although I might say that I would probably add just a little bit of media on top of this to bury this little bit of aerial root. Just like a teaspoon of it. Not too much. And this, this is looking so cute. This burst into growth. I think it put out maybe like one, two, three, four, maybe at least four leaves while I was gone. And it's starting to give me that Belle Isle look on the leaf. And this new one is even more curlier. But this has missed its chance to adhere to a moss pole. I mean, all of these are going to be caught up at some point. I do wish that this will climb up and give me more mature leaves. So when I cut it up, the baby leaves will be faster to be mature as well. But I'm happy with this growth, to be honest with you. This is actually the Monstera staff given to me by Amazon Garden Thailand. It was like not doing so well because I actually unrooted the whole thing. And when we got it back, shipped back to Indonesia, it was like really sad. But now it's really, you know, over the next four days, it really rooted really fast into this new potting media that I gave it. So I'm going to give it a while for the leaf to perk up. Now, Haish, who is the owner of Amazon Garden, does not even know, despite him being a Monstera expert, doesn't know how the full size of this, what is going to show up. So we're going to grow it up and we're going to see what it looks like when it matures. And I'm just taking plants off the table now so we can eliminate them because we're going to just check on the beauty and I'm going to show off a little bit as well. This is the Radiatum variegated, the philodendron. And it's given me a ton of growth. So let me check to see if I need to do any action with the potting media. It is a little bit wet, wetter than I would like it, but the roots are incredibly healthy and it still has a lot of room to grow. But this one will soon need a moss pull because as you can see, it's starting to like put out like this longer vines that climbs. So if I want to get mature leaves or I could also opt to cut this up because this is a plant I think deserves to be propagated and multiplied. It's so beautiful. This, this is an easy one to do because this is actually a variegated Diffenbachia. It actually came from a larger plant that I cut up before I left. And it came from this stump actually. So we just cut a bare chunk of it and this sprout of it. And I wanted to see if it's rooted because yes, it has. Look at the beautiful roots. But I'm going to bury it. I'm going to repot it and it's going to have soil up to like this level because I want this to put out roots into the, into the media, the chunk here, and there's a high chance for this chunk to be rotted off because it's so old and woody. So I would really want to depend on the new roots here to sustain the new plant, if you know what I mean. But for now, these roots are going to help with this plant for a few months. So I want to take out the media that it's in. It's still good potting media and I'm going to place this right in between. And then for this, I really want to make sure that I back off with watering because you don't want the bottom chunk to be drowned in water. You don't want it perpetually wet. If you keep it wet for too long, it's going to rot the chunk and it's going to spread. The rot might spread up to the leaf, to the new plant. So there you go. And I think for me, because my potting media has been recently fermented, I will not give this a slow release fertilizer or pesticide just yet. I need to wait two to three weeks before I add anything to this. Now this is actually the same variegated Diffenbachia, but this is the top cutting. And as you can see, in just two months time, it's given me so much roots. So I'm actually going to take off this one leaf and you need to be careful when you work with Diffenbachia, try to wear gloves. But in my case, I'm just too lazy, but you want to peel this leaf off and make sure none of that juice gets in your eyes. It's going to sting if it does. Okay, that's got to go. And I'm going to just plant this right up. I guess that's a decent sized pot. Much nicer. Okay. And I have a trick for you when you have potted up your water propagated plant. Use that same water. Water that plant because it's used to the pH value. It's got some of that natural rooting hormone that it releases into that water. So it's going to help it adapt to the potting media much better. And for now, I want to keep it a little bit on the wet side, but slowly I do want to back away with watering, turning the water roots into soil roots. So there's that. All right, next one. We have this Lassia spinosa variegated. The new leaf is deformed and it's a little bit etiolated, so I'm assuming it may not be getting enough light. Something tells me that the Lassia spinosa made like a little bit of bright, a little bit of direct sunlight. I mean, this is grown in sort of bright indirect light, but we're going to unpot this and I need to be careful because there's all these spines along here. So I'm going to unpot it because I think the new leaf is deformed due to it being very root bound, but I could be very wrong. Moment of truth. It's not really that root bound. Okay. Things are falling out. I need to check. This is still hard. It's not like rotted off or anything, but it is a swampy plant. It is a plant that likes, ooh, it's like poking me with the, with the spine. So let me take this all out, but it does need to be in a bigger pot. If you ask me, let me get this out of the way. All right. So it is in a bigger pot and I believe this cocoa chip might be the original media that the plant came in because when we shipped them, they were in full cocoa chips. So I think it would really benefit from being in my custom potting media. I have way more confidence in my growing media and this one, it needs to be perpetually wet and it's the rainy season now. So we just put it outside and it gets just like very good, bright, indirect light. Although I'm starting to kick it out to get a little bit more, just dappled direct sunlight, but it is cloudy most of the day. So there's that. If you watch my shorts, I have a shorts on the Lascia Spinosa. It shows you the gorgeous forms of them. There's so many beautiful, wonderful forms and physical characteristics just from the one species itself, just based on their locality, based on which seedling they were propagated out of. So they are quite a beautiful variegated plant, I think. We're moving pretty fast here, but this is actually a Leah. I forgot the full name of it, but it's going to be on a screen. It's a variegated Leah and this is not the exact growth habit. So it's been sitting on this table for two months. It's supposed to be like a dense, bushy plant with just beautiful variegated leaves. But instead, it's given me this very elongated stem with very, very long internode. This is going to suggest that this plant might actually be a full sun plant, although I might not bet all my horse money on it. I might consider it maybe like a bright, indirect slash, some direct sunlight type of plant. So I'm going to just cut here and I'm going to cut it right here and I'm going to put it in this vase right here. I've done a lot of the Leas and different species of Leas and they've worked really well. Let me see if the length. Yeah, this length is okay. I'm going to cut it a little bit off. I'm going to stick that in here. And Leas, for me, they do really well with water propagation. I'm going to do that. So hopefully, this will give me new plants and I'm definitely going to give them more brighter light. And this here, if you look at it here, we made the cut up here. It's going to put out a new vine probably from here or with the node below that. So this has a high chance of giving me a bushy plant. And as you can see here, it's also put out a new vine from underneath here. So this might actually take off, but let me check the roots real quick. I need to make sure it's always full of mealybugs. And when I get plants full of mealybugs like this, I just give them, not very proud of, but it works very well for me, Carbofuron right on top of this. And I would not subject this Carbofuron to the soil, to the ground, because you don't want to kill all the living beings under the soil. But in a pot like this, I think this is okay. So it's going to take care of the mealybugs, not instantaneously, but maybe in like a week or two. It's going to kill most of it. This next plant here, this is actually a variegated costus that I got from Thailand. It's supposed to be a pink variegated, and the new emergent leaf would be like a pink underside. I've actually brought a larger plant and most of it died off. So I put some in the ground. I'm going to show you the B-rolls of what they look like, but it exploded in growth within two months. So I think that plant is going to make it. But from there, in the beginning, we took some top cuttings, I need to be very careful here. As you can see, it's quite a tight fit. Some plants are growing underneath in there, some plantlets. Voila! Now, let's study this, and I think it is time, in fact, to pot these up. But I'm glad to have those parent plants survive, and then now we have these young cuttings to work with. So I'm thinking if I should plant them all in one. As you can see, costus are like calathea, so they're like ginger, they're like banana, so they grow in rhizomes like this. They're actually very, very vigorous growers. So I'm glad to have this. But I'm just now debating if I should put them all in one pot or separate them. Let me see. Decision time. This one, I think we might need a bigger pot. Something like this size. Yeah, I don't know why the camera turned itself off, but hopefully it's recording now. But basically we just potted this up in my potting media. By the way, I mean, a lot of you guys are mentioning, still questioning, like what is your potting media? And you should see my latest video, which I actually ferment. This is actually a very good general potting mix that I use for everything nowadays. I used to separate like potting media with like arid potting mix and forest floor and all that. But now that I kind of have less time and less space, I just relegate it into one potting media. And if I do have something that it's like very aroidy, something that I want to grow big leaves out of, I would definitely give a chunkier potting mix. Although these days I'm more in the business of growing things fast and growing things for propagation rather than growing them to a mature size because I don't have the space for a mature plant. So I've stopped using like that arid potting mix. I don't even bother using moss poles on a lot of my plants anymore. As you can see from this beautiful distantelobum crossed with Florida Beauty, which is actually from Free Shop Flora. Thank you for gifting me this. So this is actually doing well and I might actually do a propagation video for this just to see how the variegation for this philodendron hybrid sticks with the new generation, but just have this on the table to show off. And it is a very, very beautiful hybrid, very fast growing. So a lot of these new hybrids that we're seeing now are very vigorous. I'm very excited to be in the plant hobby now, especially with the new philodendrons and the Anthurium. And even with the Anthurium hybrids, they're a lot selected for their vigor and their beauty. So yeah. So that's done. I'm going to use the same water to water these, kind of spread them equally. So have a nice drink and hopefully this will make it. Okay. I'm going to try to grow this in different spots in the house just to see where they are happiest. The most, although the ones in the ground that I showed you earlier, that's doing quite well over there with the artificial light. All right. So we're going to look at this Vietciosa here. Now it's gifted to me by the Vietnamese. So I'm calling this the Vietciosa, although if you ask me for the difference, I don't know the difference between the Bulbasaur and the Vietciosa. It depends on where you grow them and you know, the leaf colors and pattern does change slightly depending on environment. But I really am not the expert on that. But as I mentioned earlier, I got this from the Vietciosa people. So feel free to contact them at ZanZan Urban Forest. If you want to inquire for their stock, I know that a lot of these are coming now into tissue culture and I see a ton of ants here and that's not good. When you have ants on your Monsera, you're most likely going to get scale somewhere. I'm going to look here because the one leaf here, one is propagated in water. That right there. That's scale. I don't know if you see that on the screen. So we're going to have to take care of that soon. But this one, I would definitely, first of all, give this a generous dose of pesticide, the carbofuran. But before I do that, I want to check to see if the roots are good. I don't remember how many cuttings we did. I feel like we did more, but this is one of the, maybe the bottom cuts. The root seems to be okay, which I'm glad because a lot of my Monseras, I tend to overwater them. But I do see a lot of ants and they have no business in a Monsera. So I'm going to start applying this very liberally on the plant. I might even like consider spraying this down very vigorously with a chemical pesticide or a neem oil. But if you see ants, the problem has gone way too far. So I'm going to go hard on this. All right, I'm going to put this away for now, but let's see if the new leaf comes out beautiful. Now, I've never really done a scale in my channel before, so I'm going to do that to show you how I do it. And here there's a drop of dish washing liquid that I just squirted in there. And then I'm going to take some water. I eyeball everything, so I don't really measure exactly. And for good measure, you can just do it just with a dish washing liquid. But I put a little bit of neem oil because it just adds an extra layer of stuff that the scale, they hate. Scale and mealybugs, they hate neem oil. Okay, just an eyeball it. And neem oil is very concentrated, you don't want to put too much. And then I would give this like a very good shake. And over here, I've got just like a cloth, I'm going to wet it. And then let me see if I can get around. Sometimes if the scale is still young, they come right off. Like in this case, they came right off. But if not, just the soapy water will dissolve their armor. And it'll kill them, not instantaneously, but it'll give them a very painful, horrible death for a long time. And you can also do this with mealybugs and also with spider mites. And if you want to clean your leaves off for like, I don't know, to show off, this is also a pretty good way to like clean your leaves, a little bit of soap will take extra dirt off, but it'll take off any like spider mites, any pests that along from it, but I'm not in the habit of like wiping down every single leaf. Because if you count throughout my collection, I probably have, I don't know, 20,000 leaves in my home. And I've got better things to do than wipe them all down daily. All right, so that's done. And I'm going to gently take this out and put it in a pot. Now I am a little bit disappointed that this was not done sooner while I was gone, because this is actually too much. If you have too many roots like this, you run into the risk of the roots not being able to handle the soil condition, because these are actually water roots. So I'm going to slowly, there's a bit of a solid root here, I'm going to slowly twist it around. I don't want to give it a big pot. That is one mistake that I think a lot of people make is that they put it in a big pot right away. And actually, that might invite a lot of pests, a lot of rot, a lot of bacteria and things like that, because I do water my plants very often. I think this is a good size pot for it for the next three, four or five months. And when it's become soil roots, because these are still water roots now, then it is time to move it. Okay, pack it down. Make sure that every nook and cranny in there is well potted. Okay, now is the fun part. I'm going to use the same water. Give it a good drink. It's going to love it when you give it that water. You can use fresh water, but I don't know. This makes more sense, right? All right, so I'm going to put this away and this will do quite well. And I've got, I don't know. I really thought there were more of these, but I guess I just managed to cut the two of the plant. I really don't keep track of my plants well enough. So I don't know what I have, what's died or, you know, sometimes you come home to an empty pot and you just, you don't know what it was. Okay, this right here, this will be very exciting to work with. This is the Monsera unii. It's got a new leaf coming along the way. But the problem with this plant is that it's been in this like tight pot forever. So I think it is actually time to give it a bigger pot. And I give it a pot with a lot of holes because I do not want to overwater this plant, but it has become quite root bound. Now I really miss doing plant care. It's been gone for so long. I don't have a kitchen in Bangkok. I'm still living in like a small student type room or apartment situation. I miss cooking. I miss doing plant care like this, although I've been to a lot of nurseries when I was in Bangkok. So it's actually very good for my learning. And you'll see some videos up soon of my Bangkok trip. But it's nice to do this with you guys. And there's a lot of plants actually around that I think needs help. But I specifically wanted to work with my gardener. This is so that we are aligned with our plant care. Because while I'm doing this kind of videos, he's not very familiar with what exactly I did with these plants. He needs to see the roots together with me. There's that. I've got a lot more work that I have to do with him next to me. I did do a new plant tour video, I think about a month ago. Check that out. Because I showed some beautiful new plants, including this one right here. And I think it's too early to do an update video because they're still, I see around me, they're exploded in growth. But I do want to give it a few more months and I will do like a nice growth update type video to show you how they've exploded. And of course, I'm learning a lot about their care. I have a lot of them growing in behind you, behind the camera here in like a cabinet. I've got some growing on a windowsill. I've got some growing upstairs on my high humidity, high light balcony. So I'm trying out different ways to grow different plants, experimenting. So there's going to be a lot of fun, sciency project. The problem is that I just won't be here as much anymore. I'll be in Italy, just so you know, in May and Germany as well. And then I will be in China in June and I'll be doing a Bangkok show in June. So yeah, I guess there's a lot of exciting things happening. Thank you so much for watching this all the way to the very end. And I guess I will see you guys in the next one. Bye. Oh, hey guys. So I am actually repotting this beautiful Montserrat Unioi and it's very, very exciting stuff. But you know what's even more exciting? I'll be coming to Bangkok June 12 to 14 with two very good friends, Kaylee and Yan. Can you imagine the three of us coming in from different continents coming together to this plant show? It's going to be freaking amazing. The three of us have very good dynamics and we're going to be judging at a plant competition there daily. So there's going to be a lot of different genres. So for me, I love different kinds of plants, new breeds or botanical curiosities, especially those that have huge implications for future gardens. Now Kaylee, as you guys know, are into variegated plants and there are also certain types of green plants and pink plants that she adores. And Yan, on the other hand, hates variegation, but he's very, very passionate about growing plants big and healthy and strong. So it'll be interesting to see how the three of us come up with the winners for the show. So it'll be an interesting dialogue between us about plant trends and what's beautiful and what we should grow and what we shouldn't grow. So we do hope that you can make it to the show, but in case you can't, we'll be filming a lot of content there to share with you guys. I'm so excited about this and I want to wish you guys a great spring and summer ahead.