You should scrape the truck like you would scrape a carrot to remove old tissue and allow the new tissue to form roots. If leaves are freshly torn off, there is no need to scrape the trunk.

Nancy

To add to what Nancy said, if the trunk is too long to cover with ur soil mix, cut off some of the bottom of the root ball and then add your new soil mix to cover the bare stem.
Fred in NJ

OK..... that answers my question, also, would rootone be advisable for the scraped stem???

I also have AV's w/ lots of leaves and tall plants, is the remedy the same as the stem problem, take off leaves and redo the stem to make a shorter plant???

I need to downsize my plants,too. 3 new "begged" leaves gave me 13 plants... beautiful but take up a lot of space.

I also found a tiny bunch of new leaves at the base of a leggy stem. How to deal w/???

Vangy likes to play in the dirt

Vangy,

For the 'duplicates' that you have, hopefully you can find them a good home. If you are near an AV club, join and take them to a meeting. Share with friends, take to someone in a nursing home, invite some friends to lunch and gift them. Take one to the lady that cuts your hair. Post a message on the message board at church, grocery store, school, library. A local florist may take them off your hands. For postage, some of the forum members may like to acquire them.

For the tiny leaves on the leggy stem, that is the beginning of a sucker. You could let that get about dime-sized and then remove it and start a plant, and then you can refer back to the previous paragraph. Or you can scrape it off right now and save the plant some energy.

Barbara

AV root pretty easy so it's not necessary to use a rooting stimulator [I do use dyna-gro root gel]. Don't cut off the whole root ball just a part of it. You may want to bag the plant for a week or so if the leaves wilt. I would scrape off the baby suckers, they always grow much faster than the rest of the plant.