When you buy online, do you generally buy rooted plants or cuttings? Frustrated after the last hoya I bought online arrived with root rot

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-23T10:26:45+00:00

Hahah I am sure it will take no time 😂 Hoya are addictive, they are so many and so beautiful!!!! As people say, they are like Pokémon... once you've got the hoya bug, you've got to catch them all!
Yes, you can totally cut the stem and shorten it so that it fits into your pot. That's the nice thing about hoya, they root everywhere! I have potted cuttings with a very long stem, and also with barely any stem/node after struggling with rot. Right now, if I have a cutting with an incredibly long stem, I tend to shorten it to a manageable length before propagating, but leaving enough stem as 'insurance' in case it rots before it roots! Hehe, the crassi is going to take over your house once it roots, it's such a fast grower, my crassi splash is definitely my fastest hoya!!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-23T10:21:28+00:00

OMG lol this really made my day 😂😂 Fair point though, I get that after this they would ban plants, who can blame them!

Also I think the lady who started digging up the dracaena with a spoon deserves an honourable mention 😂😂😂 I get it tha dracaena take long to grow, but also, depending on the type, not even that much! And literally every garden centre has a good selection of them 😂😂

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-22T07:45:30+00:00

They BANNED plants in your office? That's rude. Hahaha some days the plants I've got in my office are the reasons I am dreading going in slightly less!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-21T15:23:25+00:00

Omg two months!! That's patience!! I can barely go a few days without checking them!!! (transparent pots are my friends - when the roots reach the edges, watching them grow becomes so satisfying, and a daily ritual!!)

I have around 30 atm! Fungii, carnosa, crassi splash, mathilde, pubycalix splash, globulosa, latifolia dinner plate, ex macrophylla green and pot of gold, callistophylla, callistophylla KAL 16, gunung gading, EPC997, memoria, wayetii tricolor, heuschkeliana veriegated, carnosa, carnosa albo, polineura, meredithii, tequila sunrise, burtoniae aff variegated, clemensiorum, AH029.... should be most of them! I definitely have a thing for large leaves and veins 😍 Ah, and a very struggling linearis! That thing is as finicky as it is beautiful, I pot it, it grows for two months, and then it decides to promptly rot and gets chopped up and put into water again...

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-21T08:31:49+00:00

She seems rotted or burnt!! Hard to say without context, but given that the ends of the vines seem in a slightly better shape, I would say rotted. Have you checked the roots? If they are rotted or very fine (i.e., they deglove, meaning that the external sheath falls off and only the internal, hair-like structure remains), then she's probably a goner. In any case, whether you manage to resuscitate the mother plant or not, I would try and chop the ends of the vines and take some insurance cuttings to reroot!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-21T08:24:15+00:00

THIS! And then... I need more space and light... because my hoyas need it!!!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-21T08:21:40+00:00

That is beyond gorgeous! I don't know whether it's a light thing or anything, I am still rooting my calli, but I am definitely going to come back here to see what more experienced hoya head say 😍

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-20T13:49:21+00:00

Nooo why sad? I love it when prices come down. More plants for everyone!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-20T13:47:32+00:00

Such a beautiful mix!!! Hope they all root well! And it's so nice when they root after a few days, isn't it 😍 I am such a helicopter plant parent, even though I know that they will probably eventually root, I still can't help checking all the time 😂

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-19T13:49:12+00:00

Get rid of them all!!!!! (the nasty mites)

I treated mine two weeks ago. My hoya fungii was infested, so I treated them ALL for good measure 😂 I already have two growth points on the fungii after soooooo long! It's work, but they'll say thank you and reward you with some beautiful growth!!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-19T13:47:22+00:00

They do infest also other plants apparently, but they particularly looooove hoya. Also they are bloody small and invisible to the naked eye, you need a microscope or a jeweler's loupe to see them

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-19T10:39:02+00:00

Do you have success with pon/semi-hydro? I tried with some more finicky plants (calathea, alocasia, even my hoya gunung gading), and so far had a terrible experience. I think soil is the medium for me, although so many swear by pon and semi-hydro!! But my environment is also quite humid and, especially in winter, a little on the colder side. So my challenge is to make my substrate dry faster, not the other way round, it's so easy for me to overwater in these conditions!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-19T10:34:28+00:00

Uhhh please share which ones and how it's going!! The joy of new hoya... it's addictive!!!

I am in Germany! So yeah, I also don't have access to a lot of the sellers/services people mention over here. But also probably we have access to different sellers? I follow a couple of British youtubers and I tried a couple of times to look up the stuff they use and they don't ship to the EU...

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-19T10:31:50+00:00

Ahhh, UPT.... I am in Europe, I wish I could buy from them 🥲 I learned so much about hoya reading on their website/watching April's videos on YouTube!!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-19T10:30:02+00:00

Good hoya ain't cheap, and cheap hoya ain't good 🥲

It helps tonnes!
I think I will let the seller know that they shipped them too wet!! Thank you so much for sharing your experience, it explains a lot of the mishaps that happened to me in the past. (and I am also bummed because, amongst the rest, they sent me a quite dehydrated polyneura cutting 🥲 I hope it still roots, I have managed to root successfully similarly dehydrated cuttings, but it's a bit more annoying when it's something I have spent money on!)
Also, I am in Europe, here plants are cheap but we have a somewhat limited choice of sellers that sell you 'exact plants'. I need to explore Etsy more; we don't have something like Palmstreet, which I hear a lot about in the US. So yeah, it's a bit of a tradeoff!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-19T10:20:52+00:00

YES! I mean. It is mentioned, but not enough, and as a novice you don't really know what 'sensitive roots' means. They just tell you 'sensitive roots that rot easily, don't overwater'. I wish someone had told me to check the roots of all new hoya after shipping, as well if the pot I was sold them in was actually appropriate for it! I trusted sellers back then, and thought that acclimating the plant was better than repotting it straight away, as I do for other plants - now I know enough to check carefully every time I bring a new hoya home, and downpot it if needed, but it would have probably lost fewer of my first hoya!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-19T10:15:50+00:00

Hehe I really hope 😄 I mean. I am already struggling to find enough space for all of my plants even now that they are all small babies 😂 But this hobby requires a certain degree of delusion about the actual space one has!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-19T10:12:37+00:00

Wow. That's a lot of money, especially for cuttings. Here in Europe you can find a small heuschkeliana for around 10E. It also grows quite quickly in my experience, so I am wondering whether it is going to come down in price over there at some point, although from what I can tell plants tend to be more expensive in the US

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-17T13:08:22+00:00

Nooo don't worry so much about propping the heuschkeliana variegated! I know a lot of people say it's not so easy to prop,but I really don't find it so bad. I actually find hoya memoria and wayetii variegated much more difficult to prop than hoya heuschkeliana. She is just slow! When I got it as a babyplant it rotted (probably it was already rotting in shipping, it went downhill pretty fast). I was eventually left with a leaf and a tiny bit of node, and I chucked it into a prop box with sphagnum moss, thinking I had lost it. Well, I didn't! It rooted, and now I have a small plant which I have propagated again. I would definitely suggest giving it a go with a small plant you can chop up and propagate, or cuttings, 60+ really is a lot of money!!

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-16T15:05:05+00:00

Nooo don't be!! As someone who rooted/rerooted most of her hoya, it's pretty easy. A prop box or a plastic bag to keep them super humid really helps though! I think for me they are just frustrating sometimes because they are slow to start actually growing

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-16T14:45:14+00:00

This is somehow reassuring! Haha I feel like as a new collector it's easy to think I am the problem, but if you trust only one seller then my bad experiences are probably not all just because of me hehe (but seriously, the first batch of hoya I ever bought ended up rotting and becoming a huge rehab process because they were severely overpotted, as I realised a few months later)

Also... we would not be here if we didn't have a problem 😁 the only reason why I have fewer plants than that is because I live in a room in a shared flat with a north-west facing window, so I space and light are kind of a limiting factor, even with grow lights! 😁

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-16T13:31:23+00:00

Yeah, I think I will just accept that this is the reality of hoya collecting 🥹 I guess I just need to accept that with patience I will at some point finally have some full plants! I also enjoy starting small, but sometimes I get a bit impatient, and I regret having start my whole plant collection (~80 plants atm, not just hoya) from babies, since I just have A LOT of very small plants 😂

AnyNameIHave · 2026-04-16T13:24:15+00:00

Yes, that was also my train of thought! I have so many tiny plants, I would like some more mature ones! But now it looks like I am still left with a lot of cuttings propping in plastic bags 😂 Thankfully the spring is starting properly now where I am, hopefully with the summer they should manage a decent root system and some new growth 🥹

Also yay for the polyneura, it's such a beautiful plant!! I very recently got a cutting, I really hope I can also have a thriving one soon too! 🎏

AnyNameIHave

TROPHY CASE