My apartment currently contains six living plants.
However, I’ve also killed two plants over the past year ” first I mercy-killed a succulent that had lost all of its petals, and then I did unlicensed plant surgery on a different succulent that had etiolated into this thing that no longer looked like a rosette, and even though the internet said I could trim off all of the stretched-out parts and put the top of the plant back into the pot and wait for new roots to take hold, I tried that and the plant died.
So I am not any kind of authority on plants!
But Billfolder Meg Renninger, who sponsored this post, is.
Meg developed Crazy Keiki Cloning Paste, a mysterious plant goo that you can put on an orchid to make more orchids.
Or, to borrow Meg’s more accurate description:
BRING A BABY ORCHID TO LIFE – Apply Crazy Keiki Cloning Paste to nodes along a flowering orchid stem to trick orchid into cloning itself. Special blend of natural plant growth hormones and vitamins help stimulate mother plant to reproduce while fertilizing baby orchid and protect plant from fungus and viruses. Simple application takes minutes and a tiny baby keiki plant clone will appear on flower spike within a few weeks to a month of applying paste.
Meg and I both applied Crazy Keiki Cloning Paste to orchids at roughly the same time ” which just happened to be right before the polar vortex. It was so cold that my apartment’s heating system stopped working, but I managed to keep the space at around 65 degrees thanks to a trusty space heater. I also managed to keep my orchid (and all my other plants, which I pulled away from the windows so they could stay as warm as possible) alive. That is my accomplishment.
Meg’s orchid started growing a clone.
Crazy Keiki Cloning Paste gets results, though not during polar vortices and maybe not for notorious plant-murderers who have been known to tell their rubber plants “if you drop any more leaves, I will replace you with a pink cactus.” (My rubber plant almost immediately perked up and started putting out new growth, so it’s clear that threats work.)
But I wanted to end this Billfold Recommends column with a product created by a Billfolder ” and I am so delighted to get to share Meg’s cloning paste with all of you.
If you’ve got orchids, give it a try. If you don’t have orchids, the paste also works on the cane nodes of Dendrobium and Cattleya and the basal nodes of Vandas (I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS, ASK MEG). Plus, it helps stimulate growth on carnivorous plants and bonsai.
Crazy Keiki Cloning Paste. Because sometimes you can make more of the thing you love. Other times, you have to let it go and grow something new.
