 Hi, I'm Alan with the plant farm and I wanted to demonstrate to you how to propagate our maranta or prayer plant cuttings. Maranta is one of the plants that's remotely related to the Calaithia family but we find that the maranas are a lot easier to propagate. They're still going to for the most part require that we use a root hormone and so I think probably all of you if you're interested in propagation particularly a foliage plants should make an investment in a small bottle of this. It goes a long way but it's miraculous in what it does as far as helping you root a plant. So real simply we we're gonna just take this cutting and they actually do if you look you'll see right here the just the beginning of a root known here we call that an adventurous root that's beginning to form. And so that's a relatively easy plant but we're gonna give it just a little bit of root tone right on that area and then insert it in a moist soil down well past that root or that that little root node. Now this is a little bit bigger cutting I could take this and probably divide it but I'm not going to it's a it's again it's a variegated you notice the variegation in the leaf. Typically we have about three different kinds of prayer plant sometimes five but the variegated one the red one there's a green one that's very similar with no variegation and then we've got a little baby prayer plant as well as sometimes you'll see the one with the black stripes right in the leaves. That's a little more uncommon and I do have some of that in the greenhouse we will be making that available on Etsy before too long but relatively neat plant and hard to find used to be around all the time but it's kind of cycled out and now it's coming back in. We'll just go ahead step this back in give a little bit more root tone on that and insert it right there in our pot stick it down in there quite a ways. If you're ordering cuttings you typically are going to get five of our prayer plant or marana cuttings so that right now I think we've got three in there so we'll go ahead and put two more in and you'll see that you legitimately can form a very nice six inch hanging basket using the five maranas I've got three on the outside and then I'll put two basically right in the center so the three gold kind of in a triangle pattern. One of the things that we do commercially in the back greenhouse where we grow this stuff all the time. We actually have a pattern for every different type of plant and particularly when you look at the maranta you can see in five cuttings when presented in the pot makes a very nice looking pot. It's going to take about three weeks for that plant to root in your home. Now this might be a little bit more difficult for you to use that small Ziploc bag but if you have some of the large gallon Ziploc bags that would work quite well you're going to want to water this pot again and then close it up set it on your wind to seal and monitor it make sure that the pot soil itself does not begin to dry out. Very critical in all of our propagation that we maintain a fairly high moisture all of these plants that we've been talking about all our foliage plants they're from the tropics and so they really do prefer to have a IE-men in the environment which you can do simply by putting them in a Ziploc bag until they've rooted up at which point they're no longer going to require that. I would suspect those three weeks possibly for you to be able to take that plant out of the bag and really enjoy it for years to come. Maranta plants are awesome easy to care for they're not picky for light and they just give you years and years of enjoyment. One of the things you might find if you focus in right here on a larger plant like this if I've got a large plant I don't necessarily want it to get that big. What I would really like to do is come back underneath and you see the underneath side a little bit of rangey looking but I'm just gonna take my stem and instead of hacking the top I'm really just gonna come back in here with my my snippers and I'm gonna snip a few limbs right off the low end here and I can do that I could take those cuttings or throw them away or whatever but in so doing if my plant is getting a little bit too big I can pretty carefully make it smaller without a day we're looking like it got a haircut. So that's just a little tip one of the things that you do want to focus in on all of your houseplants are gonna require that you feed them regularly with a well-balanced all-purpose fertilizer. Typically right here at the greenhouse we're using a Peters blend fertilizer. Sometimes that's jacks fertilizer depending on what one we really do like that for a lot of different applications but generally for our houseplants we just use an all-purpose fertilizer that gives us a fairly high amount of ammonyacled nitrogen and when you look on a fertilizer bottle you're going to look at the nitrogen side and say well how much fertilizer how much nitrogen is in this mix is it lots of ammonyacled or is it lots of nitrator is in a blend of the tube and what we use here is a blend of the tube and it gives us a good strong healthy well-branched green plant. There's a few tips for you on how to take care of your houseplants and how to propagate your prayer plant. I'm Alan with the plant farm and I really hope that you enjoy your time as you spend propagating a plant material.