Photos please?

Are you speaking of a schefflera?

Yes sorry i didnt give full identity.

Still need photos.

Don't water a schefflera from the bottom. Top water only.

The plant will keep growing as a single stem unless you chop it back and force it to backbud.

I have never seen any of mine ever shoot out anything from the roots.

Please disregard everything you were informed about the plant and care tips.

im not sure what you mean by "pup plants." This isn't similar to a spider plant or anything like that. It doesn't grow pup plants.

im not sure if you have the plant confused with another. Without pics I have nothing to go by.

Pls. post a pic as your description doesn't really match the plant you mention.

top view. Is this an umbrella tree or other term mentioned.

Yeah, that's a schefflera and someone definitely misinformed you about it.

It does not grow any type of pups. It'll grow straight up without branching unless you force it to branch by cutting it back.

Again, dont water from the bottom. They like a fast draining mix.

your soil looks a bit too heavy and wet.

I'd use the dowel method to check to see when it needs watering.

Can you tell me the dowel method please? Also how do i cut it back to branch?

You sharpen a wood dowel and insert in the soil all the way to the bottom. Immediately pull out.

If it's dark, damp and stained with soil, do not water.

Keep checking every couple days and water when it comes out clean and dry.

How long have you had the schefflera? What's your goal for it? And have you potted up or repotted?

Most hobby growers don't have a good understanding of how to supplement their plant's nutrition, and end up A) providing far less fertilizer than their plants require for robust growth, or B) with nutrient ratios in the soil solution that are so far out of proportion with each other it limits the plant's ability to function normally, or C) an o/a level of fertilizer so high (from watering incorrectly) that it affects the plant's ability to efficiently take up and move water.

I began by talking about fertilizer because it has a significant impact on whether or not the plant back-buds. Back-budding (or lateral breaks) is what is needed to make plants full. If your plant is healthy, getting plenty of light/air movement, plenty of fertilizer, and isn't root-bound, it will back-bud on its own without your intervention. If the influences I mentioned aren't all in the favorable zone, it might be necessary to cheat if you want more branching and a full plant. Removing the growing tip of a branch or stem changes the balance of growth regulators and can literally force a healthy plant to start back-budding immediately, but timing, health, and nutritional state of the plant all play significant roles in determining how enthusiastic the plant is about its response and how far back along the branch or stem it back-buds. Where plants other than scheffs are concerned, genetics plays a very prominent role in determining how readily plants back-bud.

Al

Dave sorry i didn't see your reply sooner. Yes i reported and it has stay alive and i do get babies once in a while but i used to see 5 to 6 or whatever at a time and now barely one at a time. What do me by plans? I want it to grow and live for as long as this absolutely cute plant will. I adore it very much and every time a baby appear in the branches i call my daughter to stare at it cause it so cute and little. I want to see it grow and stay healthy and so far it good just wondering why this plant hasn't grown in a long time.

Maybe it needs more light?

My small one in office growing Hydro almost always has a new leaf starting, too cute indeed! (See its pic at here at HP, thread called something called "Sweet little Hydro grown Schefflera").

I mean plans as in, how do you want it to look?

by pruning you can shape it how you want. Otherwise it will just keep growing straight up and will not get bushy.

The "babies" aren't babies in a sense like a spider plant. The babies are quite simply new growth on the plant.

i agree, if it's not growing very fast, more light (given there aren't other factors holding it back) will help.

Could anyone give me advice on how to clean the leaves of this plant? The leaves seem delicate and easily fall if rubbed or touch with any force at all but my leaves have water marks and white residue because my well waters nutrients or chemicals. My other leafy plants do fine in shower or wiped with soft cloth to remove the residue or dust. I don't want to harm my plant. Dave (Vermont-z5a) to answer your question about my plans is I want it to be bushy not just straight stalks as I have now. Can you explain pruning in better detail because I have never attempted such and want to do this right. Also if the method you describe can be utilized with other plants please let me know. Thanks to all on this incredible forum. My plant experiences could not be so great without you.

If the leaves easily fall off when touched the plant was about to shed that leaf anyway.

They shouldn't easily fall off like that.

Can you take a photo of the leaves that have white stuff on them?

yes I will upload another photo

it's not so easy to make it branch - it will only branch once the trunk/branch is old enough - a couple of years maybe old. If you do tip cutting (from the growing tip 4-6" long) it throws a new shoot, but only single.

if you do it on central trunk that is still young green and flexible - it'll result in twisting uneven trunk.

i know 'cause i tried to make mine branch for 2 years..- it bluntly refused :). finally it did when i cut it hard at the semi-wooded portion almost by half. But i also had many lower leaves below the cut.

my cuttings did not take on top of that..but finally i have 2 Branches ;) on mama plant !

A picture story about some considerable backbudding.

Al

yep, those trunks are wooded - sev years old, prolly, if not more.

i wonder, how long it took for them to grow those new leaves on top in the last pic?

they start very slow at first, so you'll need some patience. i see that the new growth is nice and dense - must be in good light then.

very often indoors it's too dim for them and they grow out very leggy.

but that plant in the first pic? wow! do i see 2 branches like 6 ' long? not bad for a pot that size - must've been a water guzzler :).

too funny to put 2 pics together: before and after! great courage is required ;).

Just wanted to stress that your plant is really struggling if even normal looking leaves fall off that easily. That's the symptom that drove me here to learn how to properly take care of mine. They stopped dropping leaves almost immediately after I started watering the way Dave described, fertilized regularly, and gave them supplemental light, but it took a while to get new growth because they'd been stressed for so long and had very poor root systems. It was worth the wait--both are growing two or three new leaves at a time from the end of every stem.

Good luck with your schefflera. It's a nice little tree and will look even better once it's healthy again!

i hope everyone on this feed replies cause you all were exceptional in the advise given. yesterday I decided to look at The plants root system and found that is was much smaller and I probably need to replace the "soil" in pot as well as size down the pot itself. I started to look at The plant more closely and noticed some stuff on trunk and central branch that concerns me because I am unsure if this is normal. please see pictures and let me know what is happening and advise. it has created baby leaves so the growth is not the issue but some fresh leaves have fallen still and that was mentioned above. thank you to all who answer.

The first image immediately above is callus forming over a mechanical injury, like a scab on a skinned knee. The cambium under the injury will continue to produce xylem and phloem cells, and the outer layer of the periderm (bark) will die/dry/turn flakey; so, your 'scab' will soon be a part of the tree's mature bark. IOW - nothing to worry about.

More of the same for the 3rd image immediately above. It's a wound caused by a leaf being torn from it's connection to sapwood. As buds form, their anchor points are just below the outer surface of the periderm. As the tree thickens, the attachment point remains the same and the newly forming wood forms a collar around the leaf. Pulling on the leaf (or a branch) can tear it from it's anchor point, especially if the force is along the axis of the branch it's attached to and the force is from distal to proximal. IOW, if you pull on a leaf in the same direction it's growing - toward the tip of the branch it's attached to, it will withstand a lot of tension. If you tug on the leaf so you're pulling it back toward the trunk, you'll get a tear like you see in your 3rd image. The wound never actually heals; it will be a part of your trees unique anatomy for ever; but I can already see callus tissue at the edges of the wound that will soon close the wound. Eventually (2-3 years if your tree stays healthy and grows well), you'll never know it was damaged there unless you were to do an autopsy at some point. Then, exactly what occurred could plainly be 'read' in the deadwood. Nothing to worry about. When I chop some of my trees, the wounds are horrendously large; but, by the time the tree is ready to start training as a bonsai, they'll be pretty much closed and on the way to being undetectable.

This tree ^^^ was at least 8 ft tall when I dug it and chopped it as a future candidate for bonsai. ..... doesn't look like much, does it? 2 years later, 2-3 weeks ago, I pruned/wired it for the second time, and have it started on it's way to a twin-trunk style tree. I haven't, but I can snap a pic if you're curious to see how it's progressed.

Al

IME, leaves that fall off at a mere touch are a sure sign that the plant is struggling, usually because enough of the root system has died off that it can't support all of its leaves. However, I've also had a schefflera that was doing the same thing suddenly stop losing leaves within days of improving its living conditions.

One thing that struck me from your post was that your water is very hard, because I have the same problem. Before discovering this forum I usually watered my plants from the bottom by refilling the saucer until the plant stopped taking up more water, and never drained out the excess. This caused mineral buildup which made it hard for the plant to take up water and damaged the roots. You'd get the same result if you watered from the top but never flushed the pot by watering until a significant amount of water came out.

I learned from tapla (Al) that the solution is to flush the pots to dissolve and remove the mineral deposits, so I bought a lot of reverse-osmosis water from a grocery store machine ($0.49/gallon) and flushed all of my plants several times the volume of their pots, which removed the minerals. I swear I could hear each one breathing a sigh of relief when I was done! Now I flush every time I water by watering until at least 10-15% of the volume of the pit has drained through. Rainwater or R/O water would be best, but being a lazy bum I just use water from my PUR faucet mounted filter, on the belief that flushing every time I water will prevent mineral buildup. So far, so good.

And I'll second Dave on using the dowel method of monitoring soil moisture. It's just the best and easiest way to know what's going on inside the pot!

I got mine to branch unintentionally when I plucked off the lower leaves out of boredom. Some branches started to sprout from where the leaves were removed.

It might be hard to tell but there are four branches coming out of the trunk here.

After a closer look, I see some more.

Thats as clear as I can get it.

Nice, CCP.

While watering my small scheff yesterday I noticed that while new leaves continue to appear in quick succession at the growing tips of the mostly bare stem and its single branch, three or four itty bitty branches have appeared low down on the stem, which has been leafless for years. I haven't done anything to the plant except snip off a few sunburned older leaves a few inches back from the meristems, but that plus some good sunlight seems to have been enough to get it all excited.

WOW! I am so grateful and thankful for you all. Al, im finally getting into your posts on how to get the right soil mixtures and i have now repotted my scheff and with the knowledge now that the damages are not fatal, i hope it thrives. I would ask wben could i feed it now that its in much better environment?

Fertilize after you see new growth. Same for direct sun--keep our in indirect light until you see new growth, then move it back into direct light.

Tapla-Al... can you link me to what is a good fertilizer. I read your post and printed it for referencing when needed about growing for beginnners and the knowledge about what plants need to thrive is understood now more then ever and my soil mixture has improved greatly as well from your awesome posts but if you or anyone of you incredibly helpful people here on this site who appreciate plants health and care, could give fertilizer advise. Thanks to all of you!

Hi Akerman,

Me again, pls remind me of your first name. Many folks here use Foliage Pro, a fertilizer which I believe can be found on Amazon.

Sorry Karen Sternberg, i forget to add my name, which is Selina, to my profile and to posts a lot. Is there a brand that is bought in local franchised stores instead of online ordering? I only do online ordering once in awhile. I have miracle grow multi plant type fertilizer that gets diluted with water. Any other brands or ideas would be appreciated.

Hi Selina,

Thx, I understand. Personally I'm the same way, don't order much online. Only have FP 'cause a local friend shared his.

I've used commercial fertilizers for yrs. I've used Miracle Grow, the blue powder you probably had, also their liquid drops (to dilute too). Also brands called Schultz & Peters, If you get one w/ even numbers like 10-10-10 or 20-20-20, those are 'balanced' fertilizers meaning you could use them most broadly w/ different plants.

Am curious what others will say.

Hi, Selina. Sorry for tardy reply. I use Dyna-Gro's Foliage-Pro 9-3-6 for virtually every plant I grow, and have been using it for, I'd guess maybe 10 years or so now. I'm not sure how I stumbled on it, but when I did, I knew I was going to switch to it as soon as I read the label. Reasons I choose it:

A) The average plant uses about 6x as much N(itrogen) as P(hosphorous), and about 60% as much K (potassium) as N. 9-3-6 supplies about 7x as much N as P, and about 55% as much K as N. So, 9-3-6 and all other fertilizers with 3:1:2 RATIOS (12-4-8 and 24-8-16 are also 3:1:2 ratio fertilizers and can be used with better results than 1:1:1 ratio fertilizers like 14-14-14 or 20-20-20, which are the two most common) supply NPK in almost exactly the same ratio at which the average plant uses them. There is a distinct advantage that comes with using these fertilizers in that when using them you can fertilize at the lowest concentrations possible w/o your plants suffering deficiencies.

1:1:1 ratio fertilizers supply 2.6x as much P as the average plant can/will use, so it's impossible to supply enough N using 1:1:1 fertilizers w/o grossly over-supplying P. Similarly, 1:1:1 ratio fertilizers like 20-20-20 also supply K in excess, but the over-supply of K isn't proportionally as large or potentially as problematic as the over-supply of P.

B) Foliage-Pro 9-3-6 supplies ALL the nutrients that plants normally absorb via the root pathway, in the ratio at which the average plant uses them. We already learned that supplying nutrients in the ratio at which they are absorbed is a good thing, but it's also unusual for a soluble synthetic fertilizer to contain all nutrients essential to normal growth. Most soluble synthetic fertilizers lack Ca and Mg, or at least one of the two. Miracle-Grow's (MG) products lack both and other essential nutrients as well. Check the label with an eye toward the missing nutrients and you'll see what I mean.

C) Foliage-Pro fertilizers provide some N in ammoniacal form, but the bulk of the N is in nitrate form, which is easier on plants. Also, the urea that provides all the N in MG products tends to produce coarser growth. By coarser, I mean larger leaves and longer internodes - not exactly what we would want if we're shooting for full and compact plants in low light settings.

D) Supplying nutrients in the same ratio at which the plant actually uses them also reduces the likelihood of, say phosphorous levels rising so high in the soil that it causes antagonistic deficiencies. These deficiencies can and do regularly occur when the level of nutrient A becomes so high that it prevents uptake of nutrient B. When you're using a fertilizer, the ratio of which is badly skewed from the actual ratio of plant uptake, it requires regular flushing of the soil to prevent antagonisms and to keep the total level of dissolved solids in the soil solution from becoming too high. This often occurs when it's a struggle to provide enough N with 1:1:1 ratio fertilizers and/or when the soil isn't being flushed regularly.

It's for you to decide, but making a gallon of fertilizer solution using FP 9-3-6 costs about 2-3 cents, and it's all you need, in the way of supplemental nutrition, for extremely healthy plants. I used to use MG 12-4-8 and 24-8-16 before I started with the FP 9-3-6, but I would mix a tablespoon of Sprint 138 (an iron chelate for high-pH applications) and STEM (a micronutrient supplement) into the fertilizer bottle when I opened it, then dose from that at a little higher than recommended rates when mean temps were above 55* and below 85*, which brings me to the final point. Fertilizers that derive their N from urea shouldn't be used when soil temps are 55* or lower. This is because of ammonium toxicity, a very common but normally undiagnosed problem when using urea.

Al

Al (tapla you are amazing in your knowledge. i would not have the magnificent amount of different plants that stay pretty much healthy if it wasnt for you. nh babs, Karen, Dave VT, and everyone else who has so graciously offered the greatest advice. i know i missed a few names that have taken the time to explain in detail what i needed to be answered so thank you all so much and god bless.

Selina

Selina - I thought about this for quite a while before I could figure out how to put it into words. It's also an act of kindness when someone goes beyond the obligate and customary "Thank you for the help" to acknowledge and even invoke a blessing on the many here who make the effort to help others elevate the plane on which interactions with their leafy friends occur. Your post was an example of a kindness being repaid with a kindness. Let's hope then, that all witnesses feel compelled to run out and commit capital kindness in some form or another. No doubt, the world could tolerate a little more of that from every direction.

Al