What do you do when you’ve done this to one of your plants? This is a dracaena. It’s a houseplant. And it’s something that a lot of people probably run into. Sometimes life gets in the way and you forget about one of your little plant babies and you want to bring it back to life. Now some plants, they’re simply too far gone, and there’s a couple in my personal little collection that I’ve done this to and rest in peace to those fallen brothers and sisters. But this guy, I think I can bring him back. And I’m going to show you how I do it in this article.
What went wrong? Before we get into how to save this guy, let’s talk about what went wrong. Now the number one thing, the number one killer of houseplants is going to be neglect or just not thinking about what a plant needs to survive. Plants are living organisms. Just like you and me, they need many of the same things. Oxygen, water, nutrition, proper growing conditions. And so what happened to this guy as we can see, we’ve got some yellowing leaves, we’ve got some crispy leaves indicating a bit of underwatering, potentially a lack of nutrition in the soil as well as I’ve had it in this pot for quite a while. And maybe it’s outgrowing its pot a little bit. So there’s, you know, usually never one thing that’s wrong with a plant that’s this far gone. Usually there’s a lot of stuff going on. And so how do we solve it? Well, we’re going to give it the better growing conditions that it needs, which means one thing we’re going to do is refresh the soil and we’re going to repot this plant. And then we’re also going to take off some of the growth that is not doing anything for the plant anymore. Some of these dead crispy leaves, let’s get these off the plant and so the plant is not on life support for some structures that really aren’t carrying their weight anymore. Now that’s not to say they wouldn’t have, but unfortunately the way that I decided to care for this plant, or not care for it, means that it went under. And so we’re going to try to resurrect this bad boy right now and that first starts with the potting mix we’re going to make.
Potting Mix
What I’ve got here is some standard potting soil right here. But I find that even pretty good potting soil might need a little bit of a boost for some houseplants. And so one thing that I like to do is I like to add back in a little bit of perlite just to increase that aeration in the soil. And then because nutrition might be an issue, I will give this soil a quick boost of some worm castings. And so what I’ll then do is just mix that in, make sure that I’m getting that consistency that I want. And we’re going to go ahead, excuse me. Whew, make sure that you have some ventilation when you do this because I just inhaled some warm poop, I’m pretty sure. And it did not taste good. All right. So that’s looking like a good mix right there. We see we’ve got that perlite in there. We’ve amended with a little bit of organic fertilizer to give our soil a little nutrition boost and we’re off to repotting this guy.
Cutting away any growth
Next thing we’re doing here is cutting away any growth that is no longer serving this plant. And so that would be anything that’s crispy, dead, yellowing, etc. Stuff like this that’s just falling off obviously has no use to the plant. And so I’m just going to go ahead and begin some light pruning because this plant is going to have to undergo a bit of a recovery process. It’s been damaged, it’s been hurt. And when something has been hurt it takes time to come back to life. I guess it’s the same as people, right? Not to get philosophical on us here, but we are talking about our plants and to a lot of us our plants are like our little babies, right? And so some of these are literally just coming right off with only a minimal amount of force by me, which is further proof that the plant no longer can support these leaves. And so I’m just doing some light pulling, seeing what comes off. We’re not going to rip off anything that wants to stay. But we’re just going to take off some of the stuff that is really, really weak and really, really unsupported by the plant. And already we can see we’ve taken off this much growth, just about this much growth. And so that’s all stuff that was probably dead anyways, but we’re cleaning this plant up and we’re looking to bring it back to life. And so the next thing to do is to then take it out of this pot, gently. We can see this soil was very, Potting Up, very dry and that’s my fault. That’s something that I didn’t pay attention to while I was gone on a vacation. And so that soil is dead for all intents and purposes. What we’re going to do is we’re going to just brush off some soil from these roots. You can see the area where it was initially potted up. We’re going to break up some of this soil and then we are going to refill with our fresh mix. So let me go get that fresh mix. Here we go. Let’s make sure we got it all out of the bottom. It’s looking good. And you know what, let’s pot it up a little bit. We’re going to go one pot larger for this guy, give it some extra space to really expand and grow. So we should top this off and you need to ensure you’re coming to the heart of the matter where you put sufficient in the base so that when you top it off it’s sitting easily straight up close to the highest point of that pot. So it feels like you’re kind of like holding its hair up right here when you do this. Let’s dump the rest around. There we go. Is that enough? Yes, it is. And so I like to compress it just a little bit, make sure that there’s not some really massive air pockets in there. And we’re going to go ahead and water this in very heavily because it hasn’t had a drink in a while and it’s probably pretty thirsty.
Conclusion
So here we have it. It doesn’t look that great at this moment however ideally, with time, returning is going. Furthermore, I’ll truly do a little subsequent update on a plant like this equitable to show you that this technique truly takes care of business. And so that’s it. What we did is we troubles hooted all the problems that were going on. We took off any dead growth that wasn’t serving the plant. We refreshed the soil, we increased the pot size and we added some more organic fertilizer. Made sure we watered it in really good. And now the only thing left to do is wait, put it in the conditions that it wants to grow. Make sure that if, you know, for a dracaena, it’s in bright, indirect light, maybe six to eight feet away from your window sill or a light source. And just make sure that it’s got the right temperature, the right wind, all that stuff is good.
And so it gets everything it needs. The perfect conditions in order for it to come back to life. And so we’re going to follow up on this guy in a few weeks and see how it does, but I hope that was helpful.
