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Hi,

I recently started to grow plants, beginning with an Aechmea bromeliad. It's a hybrid cultivar called "haiku". Since I got it, it has grown a little more roots, and a few leaves.
I made some mistakes with it like putting an osmocote granule into its cup for a few months. only recently have i rinsed it out of there due to reading that it was bad!

I have some concerns - 1st the leaf tips on the older leaves are getting necrotic/brown/scorched/dry. i don't know how to describe it. 2nd the older leaves are quickly drying out and dying, so i have been cutting them off. idk where to cut, am i doing the right thing? 3rd i don't know how much to water it - i always keep distilled water in it's central cup, mist it whenever i remember, and i watered the pot like a month ago and the soil is still moist? that strikes me as odd, shouldn't it dry out? or is water escaping the cup and running down into the soil? 4th is fertilizing, since now i can't keep the fert granule in the cup, i put about 4-5 of the little granules in the pot around the plant. is that enough? Soil is mixed from 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 perlite, and 1/3 orchid bark. seems to work.

Lastly the plant has been growing on a window sill that get nice full sun for a few hours a day in the summer. but now that it's cold and fall season is starting, I moved all of my indoor plants that were outside in doors, and placed them under one 20W LED fixture (a fixture that was previously on a planted aquarium). one of the plants is a hibiscus bush, and i placed the bromeliad in the branches so that i could get the light from the fixture. there is also some light from the windows, but it's not on a windowsill so it much less than before. Is the lighting ok? how can i tell?

I'll post some pics of the plant shortly to explain what i mean.

I also got a Guzmania hybrid from Home Depot 3 months ago! I'll get a pic of that too. that one has it's own set of problems and concerns.
Any help is greatly appreciated! sorry for the essay :blahblah9xm:
 
Ok here are the promised pictures.

Aechmea on the Hibiscus bush:
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Aechmea overhead pic:
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Nothing is rotting in the cup right? Looks healthy to me:
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Side:
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Necrotic leaf tip (what's causing this?) compared to healthy leaf. the black coloration is natural:
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Base. Is it normal to have old leaves dry up fast and then should they be cut off like this or even more so?
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Also here is my Guzmania.
Some of the same issues.

Whole plant.(There is some yellow light in this photo, so that's not the plant's leaves that are yellow, its just the lighting) It has 7 pups so far:
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Oldest leaves are turning yellow and then drying out and rotting off at the base. I pull on them and they come off without any force. what is causing this? is it normal?
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Oldest leaves are changing color from dark green to very dark green-blue and feel wilted to the touch right before they start to yellow out and die. of course there are smoe necrotic leaf tips on some older leaves too:
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This plant has flowered for a long time, and its inflorescence is starting to dry up now.
Any tips with this Guzmania? i also put osmocote granules in the central cup of this one. i don't remember if i was able to wash those out. it gets distilled water same as the other one. should i fertilize the soil around it with more granules? or mix liquid fertilizer in a bottle and spray with that sometimes? I have some aquatic plant fertilizer from my keeping of planted tanks.

Thanks for any help guys!
 
also let me know if the photos are not showing for any reason...
 
Nice looking Aechmea, not sure what is causing the tips to die, I've never experienced that before. It is normal fortune old leaves to die and dry up though, I usually wait for them to dry off completely and then just pull them off.

The Guzmania is dying, pretty much all bromeliads will die after flowering, they will start to produce pups though like ours has so you can propagate it and continue to grow it, it's normal for it to begin deteriorating now.
 
ah ok, i see about the Guzmania. i though that it might not have enough light or something and was yellowing leaves because of that and maybe overwatering. but it sounds like it's behaving normally.
yeah I am going to try and leave the Guzmania pups alone as long as I can so that they grow in quicker.

How would i know if I overwatered my plant? or over fertilized it?

you would say that everything so far looks ok on these broms?
 
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I'm not sure what an over watered brom would look like, I assume it would start to die from the center? I have never had a problem with overwatering, the soil looks very loose and well draining so it shouldn't be a problem anyway unless you have them sitting in water. The one time I had an over fertilized brom I had a heap of cook manure accidentky dropped in the cup and the new growth got burnt.

They both look fairly healthy to me, you could remove all of the pups but one on the Guzmania and that one should mature faster and grow larger than the rest or if they had all been left on.
 
So you're saying it may be time to divide out some of the pups? the larger ones i assume. or should i wait until the mother plant dies completely and cut her off and then divide the pups up?
 
Some of them look to small to remove. But what I do is I leave the oldest pup on and remove the rest when they are large enough to grow well on their own. It allows the mother to use all of her energy on that one pup only rather than 3 or 4.
 
  • #10
or 7 haha.
I think 7 might be too much for one plant. maybe not all will make it. one of the newest pups is tiny and looks nothing like the rest. very thin leaves like Tillandsia.
 
  • #11
They're very hardy, I would think they should all make it, they just may grow a fair bit slower.
That should be a grass pup, they take a while longer to achieve maturity that the others.
 
  • #12
o so there is even a term for those? what makes them different from the normal broad leafed pups? why are their leaves so narrow?
 
  • #13
So my Guzmania mother plant is almost all gone, but all of the pups except for one dried up too?
did i make a mistake when i put in water into the cups of the pups? I won't do that anymore if that is why they are dying. It looked like half of the pups started to rot from the center and half dried up in the center. really confusing.
One of the large pups is still alive and well.
 
  • #14

The above is all that I did to separate my bromeliad pups from their mother plant. The mother is starting to turn yellow, but all the pups are still living. If you did what I showed in the video (the really basic way to do it), then how much water/light were yours getting? Many bromeliads can take full sun and like warm temperatures. I grow all of mine on the floor of my greenhouse where it gets down to near the outside air temperature on winter nights (30 degree range) and they're fine. They're usually quite a hardy plant.

Could you detail your exact growing conditions for us?
 
  • #15
maybe they were not getting enough light. i am overwintering my plants indoors in a room with East facing windows. not too much light. i also setup a small LED light above them(not really above them, its above a large hibiscus plant so the guzmania and all my other plants only get side light) to help out but it doesn't cover a large area. (the LED fixture used to be on an aquarium before. it's 20W 7000K.)
I water their soil anytime it gets too dry. and i used to put water in the cups every week because it would evaporate out in a bout a week. i only use distilled water with my bromeliads. I used to even rinse out the cup but i neglected doing that for maybe 2 months. perhaps another problem. I also mist them with DI water every few days.
soil is orchid bark mixed with peat and perlite. very well draining. 1:1:1 ratio.

they were doing great up until maybe 3 weeks ago when i first noticed the pups turning brown. i stopped putting water into the cups, so hopefully one of them will survive. the surviving pup still looks green in the center.

haha nice vid!
 
  • #16

The above is all that I did to separate my bromeliad pups from their mother plant. The mother is starting to turn yellow, but all the pups are still living. If you did what I showed in the video (the really basic way to do it), then how much water/light were yours getting? Many bromeliads can take full sun and like warm temperatures. I grow all of mine on the floor of my greenhouse where it gets down to near the outside air temperature on winter nights (30 degree range) and they're fine. They're usually quite a hardy plant.

Could you detail your exact growing conditions for us?

Great video~
I'm going to try to take my pups off the mother plant today since I saw this!
 
  • #17
as an update i still have the one surviving guzmania pup. it's barely doing anything. i moved it to a west facing window. some leaves turned red from more light.
The Aechmea is still doing ok. i moved it from that Hibiscus bush into the west window along with the Gusmania and Nepenthes.
 
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