The Trailing Jade Tragedy

Here is my Trailing Jade plant. Isn’t it gorgeous?

Last week, my husband accidentally knocked it off of the piano where it was sitting. For the record, it was an accident, but no one bothered to tell me about it. I discovered my plant in a pile of sad broken pieces while going around the house watering my plants.

Don’t worry, friends, we are still married. Ha. We didn’t even have an argument actually (but there may have been some strong words about trying to hide the disaster from me.) You see, this really isn’t a difficult fix for my plant.

Unfortunately, my plant isn’t going to be a glorious Rapunzel beauty for at least another couple of years. (Sigh.)

As a matter of fact, I don’t know how old this plant is. I do know that it made the move with us from our former house and so it is, at minimum, three years old. (We moved at the beginning of the 2018 growing season and it is currently the end of the 2020 growing season.) It’s possible that I’ve had it even a year or two longer than that, but I can’t be sure.

Let’s just get out the scissors. Because that’s how we’re going to fix this issue.

I am not using just any old scissors here, these are actually bonsai scissors that I use when I’m cutting up plants that have a small internodal space. If you look carefully at the photo above, you can see that I have removed a leaf just to the left of where I am cutting. It just looks like a green bump. I am carefully cutting below that “node” and right above a leaf. So each of my new cuttings will have three leaves and a node (where there had been a leaf, but I snapped it off. So that roots could grow from it.) Does that make sense to you? I hope so! It’s terribly simple really. Succulent plants are just so easy to propagate.

To answer your question, no, not all of the stems of my plant were broken. But I am going to cut back all of the super long stems so that my plant doesn’t look awkward or unbalanced. Also, I figure that since I’m going to be making new baby Trailing Jade plants, I may as well make several new baby Trailing Jade plants.

Here is what the original plant looks like now.

I have placed my cuttings directly in a succulent potting mix. I did not use any rooting hormone or cinnamon on the cut ends. I also did not wait for the ends to callous over first. Because I’m a mom. And I have things to do. But you can use those things if you’d like. I’ve been doing this for years and truly, they really don’t make a whole lot of difference. I’d tell you if they did, I promise I would!

My new little plants will root in pretty quickly and before you know it, I’ll have loads of new baby plants. So here are the pieces of my plant that I started with…

And here are all the new baby plants that I’ve made from those pieces…

They already look pretty good. Once they begin growing and filling out? They’re gonna look amazing. I can’t wait. If you follow me on Instagram (here’s my Instagram page) I’ll post in my stories when these babies are for sale. Here’s the link to my Etsy store (Matilda and Clementine) if you’d like to see what planty goodies I currently have listed for sale.

If you’d be interested, I could write a blog about how to care for a Trailing Jade plant. If that sounds like content that you’d enjoy, make sure to comment below this blog.

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Thanks so much for reading. And lastly, take care of each other. And take care of yourselves too.

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Mercy, peace and love be multiplied to you.