Where do you live? What is your climate/zone and how are you growing this plant? Inside, window?

I would repot the plant depending on your growing conditions.

These plants like to dry out. If your pot is not draining, you will kill the whole tree. You need to move it to a pot which drains. Get rid of the rocks.

Sometimes these braided trees lose a trunk or two but unless you repot the plant you could lose the whole tree. Sounds like it is sitting in water.

Please post back with more growing information.

Jane

Hi Jane,

Thanks for your reply. The plant is never outside, I am growing it indoors. It is near a window where it gets indirect sunlight. I have removed the rocks. I have read on other blogs that the pot should be draining but that makes a mess in the house so I thought the pot that it is in would be okay if I limited the amount of water I give it (which I clearly wasn't successful at). To be honest, this is the first plant I've owned! If I repot it, do I have to remove the wrinkled arm? Or can it be left?

Hi, Danielle. Neat pot! Why Petrie? The first thing I thought of was a Petri dish.

Some people get confused about the difference between repotting and potting up or just changing pots. Unless you live in the southern hemisphere, now isn't a good time to repot, the reason being that repotting includes root pruning and a change of soil, and doing it now will significantly stress the plant and leave it much weaker than it is now. With winter just around the corner, that wouldn't be advisable. If your pot doesn't have a drain hole, you should temporarily remove the plant and drill one, or change pots. If you need direction on how to drill the hole, I can help with that - not a big deal. After the hole is drilled, you simply let it drain at the sink & then set it on/in a collection saucer. If repotting IS in the plan you have for the plant, the best time to do that is very late spring - like around Father's Day. If you live in the deep south, a week or two earlier wouldn't be unreasonable.

I would remove the dead plant. Reason: eventually all the trunks are going to fuse together via a process called inosculation. The dead trunk will force the living trunks to grow around it, which will interfere with the fusing process AND make for some unsightly lumps and bumps.

You need a drain hole in the pot for 2 reasons. 1) to allow some of the excess water that is limiting your plant's root function to drain from the pot. A healthy plant isn't possible w/o a healthy root system. 2) So when you water, you're flushing the salts from tap water and fertilizer solutions from the pot. This is important because high salt levels create conditions that limit growth, health, and appearance, all occurring as a result of the plant's reduced ability to absorb water. If you think about how curing salt literally PULLS water from the cells of meat during the curing process, you are envisioning what an excess of salt(s) does to the cells of plants.

If you like the rocks on top, there is no reason you can't keep them. They do slow evaporative water loss a little, but there are ways to make the excess water leave the pot w/o you having to nix the rocks. We can talk more about that if you like. In fact, if you're interested in a Basic Overview that will help you avoid all the common issues most new gardeners are forced to deal with at one time or another, just follow the link.

Al

My old money tree has some sort of bug infestation....eating leaves, and ants on it. I thought it was hard shell scale...I accidently removed knots on tree thinking it was hard scale did I kill it??