Friday, June 22, 2012

Propagating the Wandering Jew

It's the plant that keeps giving!

I can't even tell you how many years ago I bought my original Wandering Jew, at a garage sale no less. It's the perfect plant for our house with its dearth of windows, since it doesn't require a ton of natural light--with a diet of more natural light we'd have flowers on our Wandering Jews, but even without it we still have happy plants that need to be repotted every year.

My favorite thing about the Wandering Jew is that it takes exactly one plant to create an entire household of potted plants. They are SO easy to propagate!

When a Wandering Jew gets really long tendrils, and also starts looking a little puny, I pinch off each long tendril and plop it into a Mason jar of water:

The plants will happily grow in their water for months, with you just remembering to refill the jar regularly, but really, as soon as those tendrils have roots, you can do this: 

And that's four new potted plants! After these start to look happy and growing in their new pots, I'll do the other method of propagating the Wandering Jew--with wire cutters, snip a paper clip in half, then use the u-shaped curve of each half to pin a tendril of Wandering Jew to the soil. When that tendril begins to form roots into the soil (and it will!), clip the piece away from the main tendril and remove the paper clip; this will fill out the plant.

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