Hello! I'm not a beginner with houseplants but am with this type. I have the same problem as wild_flwr did back in 2014 and hope her Calathea's healed. I just i.d.’d my plant by looking at her photo but include a few of my own anyway. I didn't know about the roots absorption thing that one of the replies to hers mentioned, since it’s the first time in my life any of my house or outdoor plants had this problem and I'm no spring chicken. That reply was from "Al," and was:
---------------------------------
A) The soil is appropriate and allows me to water correctly w/o being concerned about impaired root function or root rot. (If the roots can't function efficiently, they can't move water to distal plant parts, so leaf tips and margins die.)
-----------------------------------
I just repotted the Calathea for the 2nd time since buying it a few months ago, thinking it was stifled by its 2nd pot but it's apparently stifled by its own roots! It seems that it was ridiculously rootbound in its original pot, which I bought from a farmer's market seller who probably got it wholesale, which means it might have been stored a long time. At the time of 1st repot I hadn't analyzed that part since I thought it would improve in a larger pot. So I tried to separate some of the roots so they could grow but they were so intertwined it was almost like tight cloth and I felt I would have to cut them with a scissors and torture them, so I tried to break it up gently by hand and still heard a few snap. I didn’t know what the boundaries were and still don’t but apparently it wasn’t enough. Today when I transplanted it into a 3rd pot because I thought the roots were still trapped, the rootball was dry though the soil around it was comfortably moist because I’d been watering it regularly. (The drainage is balanced, btw, so soil was moist but there was and never is any excess in the dish. Water may be flouride-polluted but I run it through a Brita pitcher first, for what that's worth. Cannot afford a filtration system of the type Al advises, at least not yet!)
So I broke up the rootball a bit more this time but the same textile effect remained in most of it. I didn’t want to leave it out to dry further or soak it in a bucket while I ran errands, so finished re-repotting it. That might have been misguided. I know there's life in the plant for it keeps putting out beautiful new leaves. They come up and unfurl so optimistically, I hate to disappoint them, but in a short time they start turning papery and brown on an edge or two and get worse and worse. Seen from the side, the plant has a little forest of old, cut stems and a nice canopy over them of new leaves (see middle photo), but I want to stop this cycle and let it just have its leaves! Must I dig it up again and cut the rootball up with a scissor? I feel sympathetic pain for the plant! Am I projecting? Will it appreciate surgery in the long run? I’m either answering my own question or missing something fundamental here. Thanks so much!
This message was edited Jun 25, 2015 4:05 PM
This message was edited Jun 25, 2015 4:09 PM
This message was edited Jun 25, 2015 4:14 PM
