Hello all....

I've been "indoor gardening" for a number of years, but I just inherited sixteen plants from a neighbour who moved away pretty suddenly, and some of them are in need of a bit of rehab and recovery. She neglected them a bit over the last couple of months, but most should survive. However, many of them seem to be, well, overgrown, overpotted, and/or under-attended. One (slightly scraggly) spider plant is in a pot that I'm sure was meant for a tree! And speaking of trees, I have never seen a croton in tree form before....

So my first question is: is it a good or bad idea to downsize a plant into a smaller pot? I am not sure how established the root systems are, but there is no way this spider should be living in a pot this big! Several others seem quite overpotted as well - a couple more spiders, a peace lily (which is really withered and sad-looking), a grape ivy, and one that I think is a dieffenbachia although it has very small, plain leaves. Usually if I want my plants to live in a big pot without it spending all it's energy growing roots, I just stick it (in it's pot) inside a bigger cache pot and fill that up with rocks...so I really don't know what to do!

My second question is...does anyone know if you can air layer a croton? This particular croton has 2 branching tree trunks with clumps of leaves at the end of the branches...the trunks and branches themselves curl around instead of growing straight up, so the tree is about five feet in diameter. I mean, this thing is incredibly unwieldy, and since the only place for it was the bedroom, that means climbing over one another to get out of bed in the night, because the darn thing has taken up so much room!! If I do air layer it, will it sprout new leaves from the chopped down trunks? I had a croton years ago, but I remember it as a little bush, which got killed when the pipes burst one winter....

There is also a rubber plant growing about a foot and a half tall on a single trunk. Do these ever branch out? Does pinching or pruning the tip encourage branching, or is this a no-no with a rubber plant? I have the same question about a Norfolk Island Pine.

Sooooooo....can anyone help? Oh please and thank you in advance! I'm pretty good with the plants I have, but I raised them from babies, and I know all their quirks (and they mine!). Now I feel like a mom who's been put in charge of sixteen foster babies with no medical records!

Thanks for that! If my mother wasn't coming to visit tomorrow, I'd be doing that repotting instead of cleaning! (Come to think of it, what the heck am I doing online??)

I am going to post in your plant whore thread....LOL, that's me!

Oh, by the way, do you know if I can do the same thing to the N. Island Pine as the rubber plant?

It's perfectly ok to downsize a plant, most will respond quite well.
You got a good answer on the jade and I don't know about the other.

Ugh, I have to tackle my monster spider plant, one of these days. It could use a bigger pot, but that's not an option, I can barly lift the thing, as is. You don't even want to know what I do to that plant! LOL. It's always thrived, though.

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