Plants, Pitties, and Power Foods

When I first started acquiring plants, I wouldn’t go near the alocasia plants. They always looked beautiful but too finicky for me. Now that I am in my third year of plant mom life, I started acquiring a variety of them to see how I do. Nothing like testing your boundaries and love for plants by exploring a whole different genus of plants. I am on multiple Facebook groups for plants and someone posted about having alocasia corms. I figured, why not start at the very beginning and see how it goes. A few days later, another post came up about obtaining smaller plants. I figured, why not. Now I have 6 different varieties of the alocasia plants and love them all! Of course most of them are small and like their semi-hydroponic containers. I have a few corms that have been in their cloche for weeks now with no growth while others started growing in less than 2 weeks. Patience is everything with plants. At least in my experience. In general, alocasia plants like bright, indirect light and watering (when in soil) after the top 2″ dry out. They love humidity. The few that I have in soil, I place their pots on pebble filled trays and fill the trays with water to help keep the humidity high around them. I make my own soil mixture so for them which consists of perlite, vermiculite, coco chips (small), and orchid mixture. The semi-hydroponic ones that I have, I use two different sizes of cups which the smaller I burn holes around the bottom to about half way up to allow water to enter the cup and water the plants. That particular mix is layered horticultural lava rock pebbles with perlite. Then the larger cup I place a little of the rock pebbles and fill the large cups to the top holes of the smaller cups. By the plant itself I place sphagnum moss to help the plants retain the moisture and provide a humid environment for them to grow. Now I just water them and watch them grow – its absolutely amazing how well they are all doing, even though some are not actually in soil.