Welcome to the plant category of this blog. If you don’t like plants you can unsubscribe from just this one topic by hitting the link at the bottom of this email! I’ve got like maybe a hundred perennials in my yard and maybe 20 houseplants. Today’s post is about cloning one of my favorite (but most space consuming) houseplants, the appropriately named Monstera.
It’s funny how content farms have kind of taken over everything on the internet and made search and finding answers for things hard. The quality of content seems to have gone down a lot - product reviews are the worst, but who would have thought it would have infected plant tips?
Ok, so, I have two Monstera plants, the oldest was about 3 years old and because the moss pole in the middle of it broke, I needed to do something with some limbs that were getting kind of leggy and were too difficult to train.
I googled how to propagate a Monstera and got several similarly-structured but very long articles that made it seem to be a really complicated process. These pages discussed air layering, rooting hormones, looking for nodes, and for hydroponic methods, the need to change the water multiple times and make sure your cuttings weren’t too big.
It’s all way more complicated than it actually is. I’m sad for how the internet has been so easily corrupted by advertising oriented websites - unless something is cooperative extension knowledge, it’s probably generated for cheap by people who are trying to make long articles (with more room for ads), and the information is often incorrect. Then people repeat what they read and assume it is true.
Anyway, cloning a monstera is stupid easy and I’ll share my steps.
First, wait until there are aerial roots. It doesn’t matter how long they are, when you see the little brown aerial roots coming out of the plant, you are good.
Cut the plant off about two inches below the aerial root and put it in a 5-gallon bucket of water. Each of my cuttings had either one or two really big leaves on them and they were able to drink from the bucket just fine.
Leave it for like a month until it generates a decent amount of roots. I decided to leave it for a month and half. I changed the water once because the internet articles mentioned it, but I think this was also unimportant, I just needed to make sure the roots stayed wet. I put the bucket on my porch but out of the sun, if the leaves were going to get full sun it would have been good inside.
Put it in some dirt.
I used some Fox Farm soil this time because I think the Miracle Gro garden soil (not potting soil!) I get at Lowes hardware has a slighter higher chance of having fungus gnats. I’m not sure. I also used some extra perlite for drainage. I suspect using the good soil was a mistake as now the plant will grow huge and try to eat me. Which it will do anyway, but more slowly.
That’s it!
No rooting hormones, aerial roots, looking for nodes, measuring stems, waiting for something to callous over, worrying about leaving it in water too long, or blah blah blah anything. The internet advertising cabal really should stop making things complicated.
If you want a Monstera and don’t have one, you can usually find one for $40 at a Lowes or Home Depot or something. You don’t have to overpay for a bigger one as if some store is selling a bigger one for $80 or $100 it will be that big in a year. They will soon grow to be like 5 feet wide and threaten to take over your house. If you want a real shock, look at some of the mature monstera photos on Reddit, like the ones growing 40+ feet tall and taking over buildings and stuff.
There are definitely ways people are cloning these by not waiting for aerial roots, but this was stupid easy, and look, I have all the leafs from the original plant! In fact, I’ve made like 4 separate plants, but they are all in the same pot.
Congratulations, you are now a professional Monstera breeder, can make at least $40 a year now, and can now quit your frustrating software development career.