Tips on Repotting a Plant

On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Craig Morrell. I'm with Landscape Restorations in Miami, Florida. We're here at Palm Hammock Orchid Estate and we're talking about planting, and fertilizing. The title of this video clip is how to choose the plant for repotting. How would you know that a plant needs to be repotted in a containerized plant. Well sometimes it's just a matter of intuition, and here's a good example. In this particular example, this happens to be a crow's foot croton. You can see that the plant is approximately 3 feet tall with the pot, but it's only in an 8 inch pot. Usually when a plant is 3 times as tall as the diameter of the pot, it's ready to be repotted. Here's another good example. This plant happens to be a coleus. It is almost 2 ½ feet tall in a 6 inch pot. One other good way to find out if a plant needs to be repotted is when the root ball completely encircles the root. Therefore, we should repot the plant into a fresh potting mix into a slightly larger pot to allow the plant some room to grow. In many cases, plants become top heavy and they'll be damaged as they hit the ground repeatedly so lets repot this one.