How To Repot A House Plant

Most house plants benefit from being re-potted every couple of years. Make sure that you realize that once you re-pot the plants into a larger pot, it will actually grow bigger, so you'll need a bigger space to keep it in. This is how you do it.

Select a pot that's slightly larger, one or two sizes larger, than the existing pot and put a layer of horticultural grits in the base of the pot. This helps with the drainage. Then take a piece of paper and place that over the top of the gravel, cut a little circle out, and put it over top of the gravel.

This stops the soil from being washed through the pot when you water the plant. Place some compost, I'm using just ordinary potting compost into the bottom of the pot, just firm it down slightly, take the plant and tap it out of its pot. This one's really, really grown into the pot.

It's very loose. You can see all the roots are filling the entire base of the pot. I'm just going to remove just the top bits of compost.

You can hear them actually breaking up some of the roots. Be quite gentle but nonetheless, take the top centimeter off this plant. It's actually very wet as well.

Gently tease some of the roots out from the side of this plant with your fingers and don't worry too much. Be careful not to break the plant too much but don't worry too much about damaging it. Just loosen it up so that the roots are encouraged to grow towards the outside rather than just round and round in circles.

Just make sure that the plant's going to sit correctly in its new pot. Now, I'm going to fill in round the sides of the plant with some new compost and be quite gentle with this plant, it's quite brittle and I don't want to break it off. I want to make sure that it sits in the center of the pot.

I'm firming the new soil down the sides of the plant to make sure there are no air pockets. Just cover the top of the soil surface where you removed that top one centimeter of soil before. Firm the soil in and I like to put a little bit more grits around the plant just to dress the surface.

It makes it look a bit pretty. .