These factors are applicable to a lot of plants in general. There is a specific factor, applicable to Haworthias, which has to do with its root. Haworthia have a biological cycle of fattening up its roots with stored nutrition during growing season, and then consuming its roots during hibernation. This leaves a small bunch of roots hollowed out at the end of the year. It is considered good practice to remove these hollowed out roots, as it promotes vigorous plant and root growth for the oncoming season. This activity goes hand-in-hand with the act of re-potting.
Re-potting is taking healthy plants out of their existing potting setup and placing them in new ones. As plants grow over a period of time, several things happen to it, which make re-potting a recommended exercise for their proper upkeep. First and most basic is the tendency of plants to grow. As they get larger, they need bigger pots for proper growth. Second is the degradation that happens to the nutritional quality of the plant’s media, as it gets used up over time. Next comes the issue of pups and offsets, as they may need to be removed. All these factors suggest the need for periodic re-potting.
Re-potting is happiness
Re-potting this year was special for us for a few reasons. A pleasant one among them is that many of our specimen sized plants finally out-grew their 2-3 year old pots. It is splendid to see them all at their fantastic new size. Another one was that the past year had been good for propagation and there were many pups ready for offsetting, some that we had put off last year. Though the most important reason this year around was that we were changing the composition of the media quite fundamentally. This year saw us removing most of the organic components from plant media and switching over to a pumice/akadama and osmocote composition. This promises several improvements over our past growth regime, both for foliar and root growth.
As we switch over the thousands of individual Haworthias over to this new regime, the experience has been a crescendo of therapeutic leading ultimately to pure joy. Mostly from handling the plants in their barest form, planting them in better media, and taking stock of their situation at the end of the year, we can’t help but notice that they had had a good spell!
