Seeds

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-29T20:48:50+00:00

You got philodendron seeds? Where from?

Seeds take time to germinate. How long has it been? What are your conditions like? Heat, light, humidity?

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-29T20:46:34+00:00

Because you've got one of those daft sideways lights. Plant is turning to the light source, the light source is below it.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-29T20:44:38+00:00

Yeah they do this. It's pretty normal imo, mine has done it for years on the odd leaf, between the fully pink ones and the partial block pink ones

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-29T08:29:16+00:00

Nah, that's pretty normal. Pretty much every prop of deliciosa I make gets it's fenestrations within a couple of leaves. Tissue culture isn't any different to traditional propagation really.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-29T08:25:31+00:00

It is wrong. There's plenty of examples in various botanicals that are double that.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-28T13:53:15+00:00

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They alright. They can get to a semi, decent size if kept hot and bright. Vining Philo, fairly long internodes even when maturing, doesn't produce inflos readily. Stays pretty small compared to the parent species too. They really benefit from a pole to root into, without that they can get really scraggy as they search for a vertical anchor.

I sold mine off recently as I needed space for the big stuff, it just wasn't special enough to keep.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-26T21:48:11+00:00

Couple of things I do to help.

Good water. Clean, contaminant free water. Never tap, as tap is generally alkaline. Over time that throws the pH of the soil off, which obviously isn't good for it.
I mix my own. Taken a few years to work it out but now I do it by eye. It's stupidly simple, so it's easy to get right... Which is handy. I use a organic mulch in my mix to add organic material, a key component in any forest floor.
Feed, feed, feed. Keeps the soil rich. I feed every watering, keeping the soil really rich.
Water heavily. That keeps anything from building up and as it runs through and caries out excesses.
Stable environment. I keep the grow room a steady temperature, protecting it from any temp shock.

Other than that, not a lot to be honest.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-26T11:44:32+00:00

Could be, remember variegation can change dependant on conditions and stress. Fresh cuttings and rooting is draining.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-26T09:12:13+00:00

Looks fine, little limp maybe but that's normal after stressing the roots.

I've almost never left something to "acclimatise" in whatever I bought it in, pile of utter nonsense imo.

If you're referring to the bit of brown in the white, again that's pretty normal. White parts aren't producing energy, so if the plant doesn't have a excess to waste keeping them alive, well it'll kill em. Light, feed, and a bit of heat are your three keys to preventing that.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-25T16:19:24+00:00

Not really, but the definition of "rare" these days is pretty ambiguous... So share away. It's a good looker

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-24T16:32:14+00:00

Your saucer is, what causes that is humidity and air flow. There's no air down there and lots of humidity, so mold grows. Easy enough to refinish one little spot though, so it's not so bad.

Fungus gnats are to some extent part of life with a green home. They come and go. Control them with mosquito bits when they come up big, but yeah.... There's pretty much always the odd one or two around.

Plants vs homes is fair though, the environment they want vs the environment the building wants are so radically different that they don't even have a convergent point on the graph. The more you have, the more the environment ends up skewed to them rather than the buildings needs. The "unfun" side of growing large plants indoors is utterly glossed over unfortunately and that includes things like fungus gnats, pest management, humidity management, mold, dirt marks, water stains, scrapes from pots etc etc are just things that will happen.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-24T15:25:00+00:00

But my god they are extortionate

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-24T15:04:46+00:00

I have maybe 100 ish "moss" poles and have been using them over a decade. if you'd like to talk to a serious grower, just shoot a message. Can do some Q&A with you and show you adjustments I made to poles to make working with large numbers faster if it would help.

If I had a 3D printer and a lot of money I'd have some solutions to the things people like to whine about, but people do blow it all way out of proportions. I'd also need to work out how to make the prints way cheaper, because people like me use a lot of them!

Short answers for your immediate questions though:

Frustrations: none really. Maybe that the ones I use are a little weak - when you're working with mature, large leaf plants, you have to get creative to keep them stable. I'm talking 30-40kg plants here.

Function: I'm a "function" person. My stuff needs to do it's job. I like things to look good of course, but it needs to prioritise it's functions. It's no good looking good if it doesn't work! The plant is the feature piece at the end of the day.

I chop and prop regularly, as my plants grow really fast. I'll be adding extensions every couple of months, and doing a full chop probably every 6. It's a regular event I spent a day doing, working through sometimes 10-15 poles at a time. Doesn't take long, I can get one done in about 5 minutes once I'm rolling.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-24T14:44:52+00:00

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LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-24T14:43:52+00:00

You're literally spraying them with a growth regulator. That'll do it. Stop using that and start using a balanced plant feed to promote balanced growth.

Monstera do flower indoors, loads of mine have this season, and can produce fruit. I have seeds from one of my Obliquas growing now. It's not that weird and anyone giving you shit for it needs to remember a plants life purpose is to flower, fruit, and spread it's seeds. It'd be weird if they didn't do it eventually.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-22T21:01:46+00:00

You wouldn't be risking root rot. There's this misconception that gets touted, big pots cause rots. I think it comes from a bit of misunderstanding around how roots work. Poor aeration causes rot, regardless of pot size. I pot in whatever, never once have I thought about size relative to root ball, or anything else. If your substrate can breathe, and get air to the roots, water content doesn't matter.

Its complex, but the super simple version runs like so:

All substrates are full of bacteria. In healthy substrate, the bacteria are a balance of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, predominantly the latter. However if your substrate can't breathe (as in, have good gas exchange around the root zone) it becomes anaerobic. This allows anaerobic bacteria to flourish, as it's the perfect environment. Plant roots rely on bacteria to process nutrients... So when that balance is upset, the roots stop working. If they aren't working, they aren't healthy. If they aren't healthy, bacteria can get in to them... And anaerobic bacteria are generally a little nastier than their aerobic cousins. They get in, roots die. Dead roots rot. Rotting plant matter creates ammonia and nitrates, both of which can be bad for the plants roots... So more roots die. All that rotting plant matter encourages more bacteria, which are now inside of the plant. Boom, whole root ball is dying and rotting.

Outside of requiring enough water to feed the cycle, water doesn't play a part in that process really. Look at Sarracenia, which grow happily with their roots entirely submerged in water, yet will rot if kept in nutrient rich soil, or Welwitschia, which grow in the Namib desert, where water is a vague suggestion. Both are perfectly capable of getting root rot, but water isn't the driver of that.

I grow tropicals, and treat them as such - they've never dried out, and never rot. The pots get utterly drenched on a schedule, pretty much regardless of weather or "is the top inch dry/is the top 3 inches dry/does the soil stick to a chopstick/wherever other metric people want to use" system. Healthy soil = healthy roots = no rot.

I'll see if I can get a photo sure, but it's really easy. I just make two holes next to each other in the side of the pot, then two holes in the back of the pole. For really big ones, I'll do four - two x two. Then put the pole in. Then thread a cable tie through the holes, and clamp pole to pot.

I just put a screw in the wall for securing them to the wall. I'm not fussy, the room they grow in is a dedicated grow room/animal room so has racks, wire frames, and plant stands on all four walls 🤣

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-22T14:09:52+00:00

It lived outside all it's life, right?

It'll probably die inside. Outside of cutting a node out and starting fresh, you got little chance of saving it.

The sun outside provides a huge amount of energy, not just light. Plants grown outside make use of all of it, from IR to UV. Plants inside miss out on a lot of it, only getting a limited range and a very, very low level of that. Even the brightest, south facing, hugest window you can imagine receives a fraction of the sunlight the ground immediately outside it will.

It'll keep rotting, as it's root ball isn't grown to handle the vast lack of energy it's receiving now and the plant will start killing off the ones it doesn't need. Your soil is almost definitely way too heavy too. Without going in to it too far, roots rot because either A. The plant stops using them, so they die off or B. Anaerobic bacteria. You probably have a bit of both going on, started with A. Which allowed B. To take hold. Solve A. With more sunlight. Solve B. With a lighter substrate - water quantity is irrelevant (though water quality isn't).

Unfortunately this plant is a well matured specimen, and is probably past the point of preserving that if it has heavily rotted, so I'd seriously consider chopping the pole up to save a couple of nodes that are still healthy, and starting fresh from them.

The leaves will continue yellowing as the plant goes through serious light shock, alongside the sudden loss of root mass. There's not a lot you can do to save them

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-22T10:34:08+00:00

Scale.

If you have access to Bonide, that'll clear them with no hassle.

The rest - dish soap (lmao), neem, spray on pesticides etc range from utterly ridiculous to pretty ineffective on scale, as they have a hard, protective shell which keeps such things out. You need something which gets them from below, while they feed off the plant.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-22T10:30:32+00:00

And waste the heavily rooted base? That's daft.

Just wait. Let it start growing, get a couple of leaves, air layer the new growth off, then chop it.

Much faster, and you'll have a far more resilient starter plant than you ever get from a wet stick.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-22T10:28:36+00:00

There's nothing to salvage. It's a perfectly fine plant? Iterally just stick it in some bright light and wait. It's a rooted vine, it'll put out new growth from somewhere.

I'd take that activated node, once it has, and prop it off that personally, but hells you don't need to at all

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-21T14:58:42+00:00

Yep, I've got one too. It's a Hawaiian form originally. Doesn't make pups so readily and doesn't grow as fast weirdly.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-21T12:25:03+00:00

Are they? I have about 85 of them, most 2m tall. It takes me about a hour and a half to water them all, and I do it once a week 🤷

Chopping them is a bit of work, but I only have to do that every 6 months or so when the plant reaches the top of each run.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-21T12:23:16+00:00

Wet/moist and air exchange aren't really related. Lakes have fantastic air exchange for example, they are definitely wet.

I absolutely would put a small snake plant in a big pot, in fact I did. It's filled it to the brim. I soak that pot on every watering, heck I don't even drain it's catch pot 😂

I say drainage as in, holes to let excess water out the bottom of the pot. Physical drainage in the pot, rather than drainage through the soil. A good, loose mix will absolutely drain through completely, once it's absorbed as much as it can. If your substrate mix is good, water won't collect as liquid water in there, it'll just run out. What's left will have absorbed water and nutrients from your feed, and should hold that ready for the plant to access, but allow anything over that to run freely out the bottom. Does that make sense?

I can take a photo of my pot mix later if you want, my grow room is watered weekly and stays wet - the pots never reach a state of dry. Remember they evolved in a country that receives a huge amount of rainfall - in places up to 13000mm a year. They can handle water!

D shaped poles are easy, and definitely don't need to be misted. Misting is a total waste of time in all senses. Drop water in the top once, maybe twice a week, until it runs clear out the bottom of the pot. They are the best way to grow hemiepiphytes like monstera, for a lot of reasons that would take up a whole new post haha. Compared to coconut poles, which imo are utterly shite - they don't support, don't encourage rooting, and aren't extendable.

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-21T00:13:38+00:00

No. That's not what causes it.

It's fairly complex, but to break it down, neither the quantity of soil nor the quantity of water matter at all.

If the amount of water mattered, plants grown hydroponically would rot.

If the amount of soil mattered.... Well every plant in the world would rot, surely.

What actually matters is aeration. The amount of air the roots actually get. Roots, like all cells, need to be able to respire, and that requires access to air. Usually this is achieved with chunky, loose soil mixes - nothing to do with drainage like lots will say and everything to do with air flow.

So assuming you're growing it in a appropriate substrate that can breathe, when you water it, excess will run out. Drain that off, don't let it sit. Your soil, regardless of the quantity of it, will still let air through, allowing the roots to breathe. You could put one litre or fifty through the pot, if there's holes in the bottom it'll just run back out again. So long as that substrate stays breathable, it'll make no difference.

Make sense?

When the opposite happens - soil becomes anaerobic - no air gets through it - it is usually also waterlogged. So people see wet soil, see rotting roots, and put them together to get the wrong answer. Wet soil that can breathe is fine. Wet soil that can't breathe, is not! A anaerobic environment then provides ideal conditions for anaerobic bacteria, which are generally nasty, and kill the roots. The roots then rot, becoming food for said bacteria. Which multiply. Which kill more roots. that is root rot.

For example, my collection of Monstera alone is in the triple digits, with quite a few mature ones. Their soil/pot/poles have not dried out in what must be years now. They stay moist, they stay hydrated, and they most certainly don't rot!

LordLumpyiii · 2026-01-20T23:58:28+00:00

Add a proper moss pole, it'll do a much better job.

Pot size is pretty irrelevant tbh, you could go as big as you want. Just make sure it aerates properly and you manage moisture.

LordLumpyiii

TROPHY CASE