In this tutorial, Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, demonstrates how to propagate the Pilea peperomioides, commonly known as the friendship plant. She explains why the plant is called a friendship plant, then walks through the entire process: gathering pots, potting soil, and a simple tool (weed tool or kitchen knife); preparing the soil; identifying healthy baby pups with sufficient leaves and root development; carefully cutting around each pup to separate it from the mother plant while preserving roots; handling various pup sizes, including a larger one that split into two; attempting leaf propagation using rooting hormone when a leaf falls off; planting the pups into individual pots, compacting soil for good root contact, and watering them. Cheryl shares practical tips—such as using a butter or steak knife for delicate work, ensuring soil moisture before cutting, and that most propagation attempts succeed. Finally, she shows the finished pots, waters them, and encourages viewers to give the new plants to friends, emphasizing the social aspect of the plant. The video ends with a brief promotion of her website for additional sugar‑free recipes and lifestyle content.
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Hi everyone, I'm Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, and today I wanted to show you how to propagate a very cool plant. It's called a Pilea, and the full name is Pilea peperomioides, I believe. It's Pilea peperomioides. Don't quote me on that second one, but a Pilea is what most people know it to go by, or it's also called the friendship plant. The reason it's called a friendship plant is because the plant sprouts off all these little easily propagated baby babies, I call them, little baby sprouts that you can pot up and give to your friends. So just wanted to show you how to do that today so that when you get one of these, all of your friends can also have one. So I have some friends coming over this week to hang out at the pool, so I thought I'd get these potted up for them. So first you just need a few pots with some potting soil, and my potting soil is a bit clumpy right now, so I'm just gonna break that up a bit before we get started. And all you'll need for this project are the plants, potting soil, and you need some kind of tool to easily get to the plants. I'm using this weed tool, but you could also use just a butter knife from your kitchen. That should work well as well too. So once you have the soil prepped and ready to go, then you're ready to get into the pot here. And I'm hoping to do this without actually, you know, repotting the original plant. Hopefully we can just take these out of the edges and then plant them in the pots. So now you have a closer-up view of the pilea, and if you look underneath the leaves, you can see the little babies. You want to wait until there's a few leaves on these before you try to propagate them, just to make sure that they're strong enough to survive on their own and that they've got a little root system going. So again, you could use a butter knife for this too, but all you want to do is go in and see where the little baby is and then dig down underneath of it. Make sure that you've watered water your plant before you do this so that the soil is nice and moist. And then you just make some cuts around the baby so that you separate the root from the mother plant. And this one, I didn't do a super good job, but it does have a few roots and you can see the leaves there. So this one may survive, may not, but anyway, it's got a few roots, so we'll give it a go, put that in the pot. So same thing with this next one. This one's actually got quite a few leaves, so I would expect it to have a little bit more root. And make sure you get all the leaves that are associated, one kind of together before you go into it. And then starting with a cut near the mother plant, going into that root and then cutting around so that you remove some of the soil with the baby. This one might actually even be two. Um, this one we did a much better job. I got a lot of the root material with this one, and it does actually— this one's gone crazy and made two. So that one kind of wasn't attached to those other roots, so I'll go ahead and make that a separate one. It does have a couple roots there, hopefully That's enough. And then this one should be pretty good because it's got a lot of this soil and root material with it. You could break off the extra if you like. That's got quite a bit of root still there with it. You know, getting it as centered as possible. It's not always going to be perfect. Perfect, but that just saves you from having to move it later. So that one's actually the one with the really good roots there. Um, going ahead and pushing the soil down around it to make a nice tight root contact. Well, we lost one of the leaves. I think you can propagate the leaf too. Not positive about that. I'll have to look that up. Well, after some research, I didn't find any good information about rooting a Pilea leaf. It said, you know, variable success. So since this one fell off, I thought I'd just give it a go because I have rooting hormone anyway. So, and it's got a decent amount of stem that we can work with that could possibly root. So I went ahead and cut this at an angle just so that it can easily, more easily soak up water while it's still a leaf, kind of the same thing that you do with roses. And I'll give it a— the stem a dip into the water and then a dip into the rooting hormone. You can see it's covering the stem, and then we'll just put it in the soil and then just compact it a bit so that you have good contact of the soil with the stem. Definitely another one here. Again, making that cut next to the mother plant to separate it. And then getting as much of the root out with it as you can. This one has, again, a nice ball of soil with it. You can also use your weed tool to help dig a little hole in the soil. For potting the plant. And I think we have one more that I'll remove here, and then I'll maybe leave the others for another time. That one did not come off as well, but it does again have a root system here. And then we have one more here that's really on the edge. It's got several leaves, so I'll go ahead and take him since he should be pretty easy to get. Finding again that main root, and that one was actually already separated from the plant, but you can see on this one it's got a lot more roots kind of all down the stem, so that one should do just fine. So my experience with propagating and transplanting this kind of stuff is, you know, most of the time it works. Most of the time you don't need to be as super careful and gentle about it as you think you might need to be. But certainly there are times when you lose a plant and it doesn't work. But in general, it works out fine. And as you can see, I got 6 here. There's another 1 or 2 still on the plant, you know, making these little babies for future. And then you can see this main plant here mostly, mostly intact. I did lose that one leaf. You can see this one's a pretty big one here on the side. I'll go ahead and leave that one for now. But adding a little extra potting soil to the main plant if you need to and just kind of covering back down any exposed roots so that everything's nice and tight. And and you're done. So you just water the new plants and give all your plant babies to your friends. So here they all are after potting and compacting the soil. I'll just need to give each of them a good watering and then they should be on their way. So there you go, the Pilea friendship plant. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed learning how to propagate your pilea. It's pretty easy as I showed you. I think you would actually maybe even do better with a, a butter knife rather than this tool. It's the first time I have transplanted this kind of plant, and they're, you know, maybe slightly more delicate than some others I've done in the past. So maybe a little butter knife or even a steak knife might be useful in this project. So give it a try, let me know what you think. All of our content can be found on healnourishgrow.com, and I hope you'll join us for great sugar-free recipes and articles that help you live your best life. So see you again next time.
