Oh Babies!

If you go as far back with me as my second blog posting (I'll be surprised if you do), you might remember a couple of Bromeliads that I featured from my garden. These flowers are beautiful, exotic-looking, and easy to maintain, but best of all is that once you buy one, you never have to buy another one AGAIN. That's a good deal if I ever heard one! The reason for this is that as time goes by, the flowers begin to produce offshoots of themselves, also called baby bromeliads (hijitos in Spanish).

The next step, once the baby bromeliads are big enough, is to separate them from their mom and plant them in their own pot (or in the ground if you prefer). I thought the babies were free-standing (and now that I think about it, I'm not sure why??)... I didn't realize they were still attached so I wasn't sure what the best way to separate them was. To yank or not to yank? Google time! You'd be surprised how many sites are dedicated to bromeliads. The Answer: Definitely NOT to yank. All you have to do is take a pair of garden scissors and cut the baby bromeliad at the very base where it attaches to the mom. It's okay if there are no or minimal roots attached; baby bromeliads don't need roots to live. Then transplant the babies into a new pot (I used one pot for each).

Bromeliads prefer to be planted in material that provides good drainage. I went with what I had available in my shed which was a mixture of perlite, sphagnum peat moss, and gardening soil. You can also use river gravel, coarse granite, fir bark, treefern fiber, cork bark, or sand.

Here they are, the whole new, happy family of bromeliads, resting on their new home on the tree in my backyard.