Transcript:
Hey, guys, it’s! Erica, and in today’s video, I’m gonna be doing a care and propagation for string of dolphins, so these plants have become very popular and they are a lot easier to find than they used to be. I have been seeing them in a lot of Home. Depots and Lowe’s, for really great prices. I think around $10 and I’ve also been seeing them in a lot of nurseries. Just where I live. So I live in California. There’s been a lot popping up here. I’m not sure about other places, but it’s definitely becoming a more common plant to find easier to find at a more affordable price so all around it’s just becoming more available. These plants are named appropriately string of dolphin plants because they look like little dolphins, which is just the cutest thing ever, and these are actually a man-made hybrid between the string of pearls plant and a candle plant. Okay, well, let’s get into it. So these plants are pretty simple to care for for watering. You just water it whenever the soil is dry, but you should make sure to never let your soil dry out too much because the little dolphins will start to kind of shrivel. And there’s not even gonna look like dolphins anymore. They’re just gonna look like sad little grapes. So you want to make sure that you water them on time other than that? Watering is pretty simple. They’ll start to kind of shrivel up a little bit, if you if they need water, only water them when their soil is completely dry. If you feel more comfortable like waiting a couple days after it’s completely dry before you actually water it again. That would be perfect when you water it, though. What I like to do Is I pour water to saturate the soil completely. Let that all drain out and then. I’ll just do it one more time. Let the water drain through saturated completely. And then that’s all that’s all there is to, it’s pretty simple. I don’t bottom water them or anything like that, and I will give them enough water for it to drain out at the bottom of the pot. Another very important aspect for the care of this plant is kind of where you put it in regards to how much sunlight it’s getting so these plants do like a lot of sunlight. They are not here to be your low light plant. Don’t put them in your darkroom. Because they will not do well in that situation, but you don’t want to put them into full. Sun either so they can take some direct sunlight, just not just really scorching hot afternoon sunlight. I keep mine in an East in an east facing porch, so they get a lot of ambient lighting throughout the day and they do get some direct sunlight in the mornings. If you do give them too much light, let me see if I can find a little piece. Okay, here we go if you do, give them too. Much light, similar to a string of pearls. The plant can dry out kind of at the base. If you can see that here, and then there’s not going to be any water going through to the top of this plant and you can see. Oh, it just comes right off like that, and you can see here that there’s some dried out dolphins and the top dolphins aren’t looking very good, and that is not what you want. That is why you want to make sure that they’re not in too much sunlight, and they’re getting enough water. They’re not succulents that can stay dried out for a very long time, so you would, so you want to avoid that as much as possible, and they do not want direct, really hot sunlight. Otherwise this will happen and the little. Dolphins, you can see. I’ve dried out and that can also happen. – the good news. Is that, like a string of pearls. When this happens, you can kind of save the rest of the plant that hasn’t dried out yet, and that’s where propagation comes into place. So let me roll out my property materials over here. This is an example of a string of dolphins where that exact situation happened. I had my plants into my tube riot of sunlight, and I didn’t water it enough. So this whole entire base of the plant came off. The bottom part was dead, so I just stuck it into water and you can see now that long roots have grown out and this plant has been saved. So if that happens, you don’t need to freak out unless it’s the rot has gone or unless the drying out has gone too far, but most likely, you’ll be able to propagate and save the plant, so that kind of leads us into propagation and soil mixes for this plant, so there are two ways to propagate this plant. One as you can see here is by water. I just stuck this cut off the dry part. Stuck it into water. I didn’t let it callus over or anything. I just stuck it into water right away. You can see that roots have grown very nicely. This has been in a west-facing window and it’s really done great there. Another way that you can propagate. This plant is by cutting off a piece below a leaf and then ripping off that leaf, letting it callus over for about two days just whenever a callus forms and then putting it into a soil mix that you wet and water whenever it dries out pretty simple. So those are the two ways of propagation. I just got my plant stuck together. I’m gonna try and separate them so that we can propagate. So here we go. I’m just gonna cut. It doesn’t really matter where you cut, but I’m gonna cut right here. Oh, actually, I’m going to cut here. Below this broken dolphin. And then we’re gonna set this aside and you can see. There’s a broken dolphin here that I’m just gonna take off, and we’re gonna let this part callus over pretty much, just letting it dry out so that there’s not an open wound on the plant for about two days, and then I can place it into a well draining soil and it will hopefully grow roots from then, but since I do have this rooted plant. I’m going to show you how once it’s rooted, you could transfer over to soil. I have my homemade soil mixture here. This is pretty much Coco Coir. A little bit of pumice a little bit of fine grade orchid bark, some charcoal and then some perlite, so there’s a lot going into this mix, but essentially you just want a well-draining mix one that’s gonna dry out quickly and it’s not going to be. You know what and soggy what you could also do is if all you have is. Miracle Grow is get the cactus Miracle Grill and then some perlite and then do half cactus Miracle Grow and then half perlite. And that would work out really great as well. I have a terracotta pot here because this is a succulent. So the terracotta will help wick away the moisture from the soil. If there’s a little bit too much, and this is kind of a deeper issue because you can see that the roots on this plant are very long and you can see that these pots are deep as well. It’s not as deep, but it’s as close as I’m gonna get, and we’re just gonna fill the base of this pot up, just a little layer to get it started. Hopefully you can see there and then. I’m gonna grab my little plant and hold it in here and we’re gonna pour the rest of the dirt. In so there you have it. We have an entirely new plant, Then the other two that we have, and I’m gonna go ahead and water this right away since this was a water cutting, and I’m just gonna thoroughly saturate it and this is how I water all of my stream of dolphins plants, so we were talking about watering earlier and this is this. Is it in action? So you can see here that it’s draining out very slushy and I’m just gonna wait for it to finish draining out, and then I’m gonna go ahead and pour some water through one more time before it’s completely set to go back outside with a little bit of morning direct sunshine and then a lot of ambient lighting throughout the rest of the day other than that. I think that I’ve covered everything on this little guy. He is a really cool plant to have, of course, like who doesn’t want a plant. That looks like dolphins. So yeah, it’s a. Oh, also, when they flower, their flowers smell so good. They’re really fragrant flowers. You wouldn’t expect it from a string of dolphins. There are flowers Look very similar to that of string of pearls, but they smell really good, so that will be a pleasant surprise for you when they do bloom so. I hope that I’ve covered everything that you wanted to know about this plant in this video. If you have any questions, you can leave them down in the comment section below. Or if you just want to add on anything. I may have missed. That would be wonderful as well other than that. Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see in the next video. Bye, another weird thing. That kind of happens with this plant as is as they grow longer. Sometimes the little dolphins kind of flatten out like this, and instead of looking like offen’s. They kind of look like manta rays.