Monstera Adansonii - Chapter 2, Repotting into Self-watering Pot

Hi guys, welcome to Monstera Hut!

Today, I will be sharing with you how I repot my Monstera Adansonii Veriagated Albo into a self-watering pot. I really love self-watering pot as it makes my life so much easier as my schedule is quite busy and I have so many plants to water.

So, as mentioned in Chapter 1, I normally will acclimatize it for 3 days before I repot any plants. And for this new Monstera Adansonii, after 3 days of acclimatization, the plant shows no reaction to the change of its new environment, and it's time for me to repot it. Before that, the most important thing to know about self-watering pot is that you need to set it up correctly for it to work as it should. See my drawing below, and you can also see it from the video I have made here.

So, as you can see here, the self-watering pot consists of 3 parts as listed below.

1. Outer Pot - All excess water will be kept at the bottom of the out pot, so we have a water reservoir.

2. Inner Pot - It will hold the soil so it will not have direct contact with the water at the bottom.

3. Cotton String - It will slowly absorb water from the reservoir to moisten the soil above it.

First, I will layer the bottom of the inner pot with a thin layer of sphagnum moss. Then, I will make sure the string will get in contact with the moss, as you can see in my drawing above. This setup works really well for all my Monsteras. The reason for this setup is so that the string will slowly absorb water and moisten the moss. Then, all the moss at the bottom will get all the moisture first before it slowly moistens the soil above it, EVENLY.

Then, I will layer some soil above the moss so that the roots will have no contact with the moss because I believe moss will hold too much water, and it's not good for the roots. Then, we can introduce the plant into it and keep adding soil. If you see my video, you will notice that I have made a mistake by not removing the moss that come with the plant which was used to initiate the roots. After I did that and talked to a friend, she told me to remove all the moss as it will get too wet when it is in the soil, and that will add risk to cause the roots to rot. So, please do not repeat the mistake I made here.

To remove the moss from the roots, you need to be careful and do it slowly and to ensure you remove all the moss from the plant, then introduce it to the soil and cover it slowly. Do not compact the soil too hard as we want to keep the soil nicely aerated. Instead, gently compact the soil just enough for it to hold the plant. Then, insert the inner pot into the outer pot and slowly water it as we do not want to disturb the soil. Once the water gets through the soil, the excess water will get into the outer pot. You can lift the inner pot, and you will see the water dripping. You can see this in the video I shared here too.

So, that's all, guys. I have managed to safely repot my new Monstera Adansonii Variegated Albo into this self-watering pot. I hope you guys will benefit from this article and also from the video I made. I will keep you guys updated on the status of my Monstera Adansonii on its growth progress in the next chapter.

Next, I will be sharing with you guys how I will repot my Monstera Albo into a bigger self-watering pot. Stay tuned, guys.

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