How To: Propagate Spider Plants and Pathos!
I live in a jungle. With well over fifty house plants, many of them absolutely massive, you can easily tell that I am rather obsessed with them. Not only do they clean the air and keep me happy, but they are also a really fun hobby to keep up with! Watering, fertilizing, pruning there is always something fun to do. However, my favorite thing is more plants. Particularly when they’re free! So, today I’m propagating two of my larger plants into lots of babies! Some for me, some to gift, and some for testing out theories! So without further ado: how to propagate spider plants and pathos!
One of the most important things to propagating is understanding how each plant grows. When you know how the plant works you’ll be able to prune without damaging the plant! Each plant is a little different, but the two we are working with today, spider plants and pathos plants, both have something called ‘nodes’ which essentially are places where roots or leaves will grow out of when coaxed to. Each one of the nodes is at a joint in the plant and you’ll even notice that if you let your ‘mother’ plant- the one you are taking cuttings from- is big enough that these nodes might even have air roots that are starting to grow wanting to either make new connections to stabilize or create a new plant or branch of its own!
Propagating Spider Plants
Spider plants are easy! Each spider plant ‘pup’ can be distinguished as its own little plant with a bundle of nodes coming off a ‘runner,’ a woody stem that shoots off the main plant to produce pups. All you do with these is to snip off the pup and pop the already-formed roots or node into water! I use a candle votive filled with water to help these baby plants root until you transfer them to something larger or soil! You can also directly sow these straight into soil just make sure that your soil has good drainage and you keep the baby plant moist as they are quite fragile at this state! If you are planting into soil, I prefer glass jars like a mason jar so you can track the root’s progress!
Propagating Pathos Plants
Pathos are a little bit more involved, mainly because unlike spider plants, you need to find a node that is part of the plant instead of an offshoot. In my latest propagating adventure I propagated a pathos plant that decided that it wanted to be long and lanky instead of staying bushy as it grew (you can see footage of this in the video below!) When you are fixing a problem like this, or just creating more pathos plants you want to look for a vine with a few healthy leaves at the bottom and a series of established nodes.
On a pathos plant many nodes can be seen having two leaves sprouting out right above them, but the actual node looks like a knuckle or a joint. Many of these nodes will have little air roots similar to the ones you see on a spider plant if the mother plant is well established. When searching for a good place to snip, find the healthy leaves you want to propagate, count a few nodes up to give yourself some length to either plant or pop into water and snip on the vine right underneath the node in a diagonal! That’s it! Pop your cutting straight into water (I LOVE my gorgeous hydroponic vase trio) or into soil and you are good to go!
If you are anything like I am, you’d prefer seeing this in video format! Pop over to either Instagram or my YouTube channel (embedded below!) and see me talk you through the propagating process and update you on how this propagating session went!
Some links are affiliate links. All opinions are my own.
