We’ve all seen those memes about how significant historical figures wrote or discovered amazing things during the pandemics of their time and how we all need to do something great during this pandemic. Most of us don’t have time for that with working from home while making sure our kids are schooled by us, virtually, in person, or a magical combination of the three.
Well, I didn’t discover or invent anything, I did learn how to keep plants alive, which is a big deal for me. I couldn’t even keep a succulent alive. But I learned something about plants earlier this summer. Some plants don’t even need soil and thrive in water.
Honestly, I feel like I should have realized this earlier, seeing I had a beta fish with a plant in with it growing up, but that was like twenty years ago, but I can hardly remember what I did yesterday, so I’ll forgive myself this time.
I was on a last-ditch effort to save a plant that was clearly on its way out. Like we’re talking all brown tips and spots on its leaves, and some stems couldn’t even stand up anymore. They were completely horizontal in its pot. I wasn’t ready to throw it out quite yet. I had one more idea, and I honestly thought it was a long shot. I had seen success with it in a couple of cuttings I had from different plants, but I never actually tried it with a whole, mature plant, one that already had well-established roots.
So, here goes nothing.
I carefully removed the plant from its soil, gently rinsed off the roots to remove any dirt that came out with it, and filled a glass carafe with water, and placed the plant in the carafe. Then I wait. Every couple of days, I would change out the water to remove the soil that came off the plant as it sat in the water, and after a while, you could see the roots better.
This is when you can start removing roots if you need to. You’ll want to remove the ones that are entirely black and squishy because they have rotted. I only remove the worst ones because I don’t want the plant to go into shock. If you see any white roots, those are the good ones you’ll want to keep.
Nothing happened with this plant for probably five days, but then I noticed the leaves that had been curled shut were opening. Other leaves started to perk up more. Brown spots on leaves began disappearing. I still kept up with my routine of changing the water often to clean out any more dirt that fell out of the roots as they began to untangle.
You might start to see some tiny white roots starting to grow from your plant’s base or from larger roots that are still in somewhat good shape. This is a good thing! Your plant is starting to thrive and develop a new, healthy root system!
I really wish I had a picture of how this plant looked before I took it out of the soil to show you because the words just don’t do it justice. The change in it has been so dramatic.
So, how did I gain my new plant mom magical powers? Facebook. Yep.
I know Facebook hasn’t exactly been the best place to be right now… but there are some amazing houseplant groups out there that are nothing but love. I’ve been stalking them for a while because I’ve always wanted plants, but as I said, I kill succulents, so I had a long way to come.
Long story short, I learned that you could take a plant cutting (it has to be cut from just the right spot) and place it in water and roots will start to grow. Then I read a post of someone who had a cutting in water for nine months and still didn’t have any roots. Normally this type of plant only took two to three months to start growing roots. Someone replied to this post, saying whenever they put a cutting in the same water as a pothos plant cutting, she always saw roots, no matter what the other plant was.
I had just rescued a plant from the clearance rack at a local hardware store, and a small part of it fell off. So I decided to try that little experiment. I had recently propagated a pothos cutting and threw the part of the new plant in with it to see what would happen. Within weeks, I had new roots growing on the new plant that usually took people months when it was propagated alone. I felt like I had just won the lottery. And it’s pretty cool to see the plant’s roots grow.
That was months ago, and now I have three completely different plants thriving in just water, a tiny bit of fertilizer every couple of months, and some indirect sunlight. And I couldn’t be happier!
