Ep. 105 - Ugly Duckling Plants

Chill ‘n Chat

This Chill and Chat is about houseplants that don't simply grow larger -

they undergo dramatic metamorphoses. Monstera deliciosa is a familiar example, Nepenthes do this when they're thriving, and the Blue Star Fern even has some surprises up its rhizome. How long until splits and fenestration develop in Monsteras? Stephen presses Matthew for answers, but has he ever experienced upper Nepenthes pitchers on his own plants? Then the Plant Daddies answer a listener question about propagating cacti.

Mentioned in this episode:

• how long should you expect to wait for dramatic foliage on a young Monstera deliciosa

• our approaches for propagating cacti and cactus-like succulents

This Monstera has reached this stage of growth and maturity over the course of Plant Daddy Podcast! Matthew discussed this plant and the journey they’ve been on together in Ep. 83, so here are a few photos to illustrate how it has grown since he did some air layering to salvage it from a sad state back at the start of the Podcast in 2019.

And here are some earlier photos of Matthew’s Blue Star Fern, Phlebodium aureum, showing the growth it’s achieved in just over a year since the cover image above. It started even smaller than this, but was struggling in a too-low-light spot until Matthew saw one grown by a friend directly in an East-facing window. He improved the light, let it recover and grow some new foliage, and planted it in this pumice planter that sits in a dish of water. By now, it’s massive, and Matthew picked up a new one, because he can’t get enough of these glaucous powdery blue fronds!