okay so around a year ago (last spring) i got a parlor palm plant (chamaedorea elegans). they're... i mean, they're actual trees? just dwarf trees that only ever grow six–ten feet tall, and very slowly at that. pretty common houseplants apparently. but when they're sold as houseplants they're usually sold bunched together -- ten or twenty shoots in a small pot, to make it look thicker and more shrublike, and also to make it grow even more slowly so it stays at manageable houseplant size for longer.
so i got mine and i was like, i'll let it stay in its original pot for a while. and then nine months passed and then the other day i was like "i should probably repot it and break all the shoots apart". so i got some pots and some soil and did that. so from the one very overcrowded pot i separated out the sixteen(!) plants, all sharing a little three-inch pot, and split them apart into four separate pots: one small one got the original pot, and then groups of four, five, and six got bigger pots. even though it's the same number of plants, having them basically taking up four times the space makes it feel like i have a lot more plants.
anyway the repotting seems to have gone well. i mean, hard to tell since it's only been two days, but none of them are withering at all that i can tell. i'm not sure if winter is a good time to repot plants -- i know spring is a bad time, because the transplant shock can basically totally ruin a plant's growth cycle for the year, but i don't know if, you know, the whole winter hibernation thing will lead to worse transplant shock. i also trimmed some of the roots -- previously i had been pretty lackadaisical about breaking apart the root ball, and i tried to keep all the roots intact, but since then i read up some on... roots, and i guess the deal is, hey turns out having big folded-up roots 3x the length of the depth of the pot is not actually great for plants. so i trimmed some of the really long roots, and i guess we'll see how that goes.
also i guess chamaedorea elegans is one of the kind of trees that has sexual differentiation? so there are male trees and female trees, and i don't really know what the difference is aside from presumably the male flowers produce pollen whereas pollinated female flowers produce seeds. but also that given the rate at which they grow they probably won't start to put out flowering branches for like... years and years from now.
so i got mine and i was like, i'll let it stay in its original pot for a while. and then nine months passed and then the other day i was like "i should probably repot it and break all the shoots apart". so i got some pots and some soil and did that. so from the one very overcrowded pot i separated out the sixteen(!) plants, all sharing a little three-inch pot, and split them apart into four separate pots: one small one got the original pot, and then groups of four, five, and six got bigger pots. even though it's the same number of plants, having them basically taking up four times the space makes it feel like i have a lot more plants.
anyway the repotting seems to have gone well. i mean, hard to tell since it's only been two days, but none of them are withering at all that i can tell. i'm not sure if winter is a good time to repot plants -- i know spring is a bad time, because the transplant shock can basically totally ruin a plant's growth cycle for the year, but i don't know if, you know, the whole winter hibernation thing will lead to worse transplant shock. i also trimmed some of the roots -- previously i had been pretty lackadaisical about breaking apart the root ball, and i tried to keep all the roots intact, but since then i read up some on... roots, and i guess the deal is, hey turns out having big folded-up roots 3x the length of the depth of the pot is not actually great for plants. so i trimmed some of the really long roots, and i guess we'll see how that goes.
also i guess chamaedorea elegans is one of the kind of trees that has sexual differentiation? so there are male trees and female trees, and i don't really know what the difference is aside from presumably the male flowers produce pollen whereas pollinated female flowers produce seeds. but also that given the rate at which they grow they probably won't start to put out flowering branches for like... years and years from now.
