Dennis,

You have nice plants. They should be in a quick draining soil mix. Your Yellowing leaves 'could' be from water retention in the soil and the browning, crispy tips can be related to fertilizer.

There are a few people here that live closer to you. Willeke is in the Netherlands and also got some plants from Sundaram. Would be nice to touch base w here.

Martin is not from Noraway, but has extensive knowledge and his plants are unbelieveable. He will chime in and assist you.

Then, Gill from the UK. She is very helpful and has vast knowledge also. She will help out when she is able.

For myself, I do not use anything with Peat Moss in it for soil. I use Coconut husk chunks (can use Fir Bark) / Perlite / either (Turface, grit or horticulture Pumice) equal proportions of each.

Sundaram is a wonderful gentleman and has always been so helpful to myself. Truly remarkable and a wealth of knowledge.

Rick

Welcome Dennis!! Good luck now that you have the bug...

Thanks Rick for your info hope i will get in contact with Willeke for some soil ingredients and where to get them so i can hold the Adeniums nice and healty and never have to lose one like the big one.

Greetings Dennis

Welcome to the group. There are some very knowledgeable members and are always happy to assist others. I have my plants in a very stony mix I do not get the lush growth as others but then again there is no root rot. We do get temperatures down to 4 degrees C in Winter (nowhere near as cold as yours) and the medium is kept dry during this time.

Thank you Marlene ! Keeping them dry during the winter period is one thing i learned from wen i lost the big one now im searching for the best ingredients for my soil and thats not easy because i have to do it with what they are selling here ate the gardencenters.

Greetings Dennis

Thanks Spacecoast !

i would attempt to give you advice but you are better off listening the the more knowledgeable people in this group... and there are a lot of them!!!

Dry leaf tips is the Catch-22 of adeniums. They get it when both over-watered and under-watered.

When these plants are under-watered, the tips of the leaves dry up because the available moisture can only go so far. When over-watered, the roots start to get over-saturated, cells burst and die so water uptake is low even if the soil is wet. The result is the same---dry tips. Ultimately though, over-watering is fatal but under-watering just triggers the plant to slow way down while feeding on its reserves.

You're clearly not over-watering so what's going on, right? It's probably your soil.

1. What is the temp on that window sill, on top of the radiator? If over 28C, they need more water than you're giving them. They need to be watered at least once a week but you can not do that with the soil you are using because it will stay soggy too long, which brings me to #2

2. You have to amend your substrate drastically if they are going to stay mainly indoors. It has to be really fast-draining because indoor conditions will not allow water to be absorbed fast while evaporating the rest quickly enough so that the plant does not sit in wet soil too long. I recommend getting perlite, pumice or scoria and mixing it in so that soil is only about 25 percent of the substrate.

Here's the thing though. If, on that radiator, soil temperature is over 30C, you might just be able to make that soil work. But that is IFF the soil gets that hot. Then all you need to do is water more often. And move your smaller plants into smaller pots. Disproportionately large pots dry out slower and the small plants in them are not able to use up the moisture fast enough. The result is that they sit on wet soil too long.

After reading all these, though, another point to consider is this: if you just repotted your plants, it's normal for them to look freaked out for a couple of months.

Hope this helps.

Pagan

Hello Dennis and welcome to the forum.

It's sad that you lost the big plant to rot, hopefully with everyone's help we can prevent that from happening again. It's a struggle to keep these plants looking pristine and mine have been through some really tough times believe me! I started growing them in 2004, from seeds off eBay and this year I have witnessed my first flowers to form properly and not drop off in the early bud stages like in previous years....though it would never happen! Now my second plant is about to produce blooms in the next week or so. The first plant is pink, the common colour and this second one is well on its way to be a white or some other very pale colour. I gave 8 from seed, 3 obesums and 3 Arabicums, plus two gifts, both obesums....but I've lost count of the ones I've lost, these 8 are now doing the best of all :-))

My plants are grown hard, they don't have any great size to them, but are short, stout and rather leafy with good hard caudexes. My mix is small bark chips, alpine gravel, seived perlite and general purpose bagged potting compost in roughly equal amounts. I can't get the turface,scoria and other ingredients a lot of the US growers use, so I have to adapt. I use Chempak 8 fertiliser once a week having been advised its a good alternative to the Dynagrow foliage pro that again, a lot of our American growers favour. If it's particularly sunny and they look/feel dry as in the past few weeks I use just plain water in between. The trick is to keep them on the dry side in winter as cold and wet=rot, (but sadly you know about that bit), and treat them as tropicals in the summer by watering more frequently. They can take a fair amount if water.....if they drain fast and properly, that is vital.

Your pots are very attractive but I'm wondering as they fit rather tight, how do you water them? Do you water from a ve and then lift them out each time to drain fully ......as they certainly won't appreciate sitting in the run off?

Others have mentioned that the small ones are over potted and yes I also agree. They will be far happier in a smaller pot. The other info you gave been given is good sound advise, please do come back again if you are unsure or need any more info, we like to help if we can. Goodness knows, I've asked for plenty of help in my time here!

Gill.

Dennis, further thoughts if you are struggling to find ingredients......chicken grit, horticultural or alpine grit/gravel, or even aquarium gravel are all useful alternatives to add to your faster draining mix. Please don't use sand of any kind, even if you are told it will do....it won't! Please also seive the perlite, kitchen seive will do...but downwind, use only the largest stuff, bark chips can be either orchid bark or repti bark from pet stores, shake the bag, smaller bits will go to the bottom, this is what I use, big bits rise to the top and can be used for other plants. Aim is to get ingredients of roughly the same size as far as you can....oh yes finally.........don't put rocks or other stuff in a layer at the bottom of the pot.....as that's another gardening myth!

Gill

Thank you so mutch Pagan, Gill and the rest for your good help and knowledge !!

So I went shopping today to see what I can find here in the Netherlands and I found this:

Perlite

Bark

and to make the Gill-soil I need alpine grid or maybe I can Olso use pumice or scoria for that ?

Pagan-soil :

37,5% perlite

37,5% pumice or scoria how big pieces i need ?

25 % soil if the cactus soil is ok ?

Gill-soil :

25% sieved perlite (big pieces)

25% bark or one of the other like kokos pieces or the orchid substance ?

25% soil if the cactus soil is ok ?

25% alpine grind or maybe pumice or scoria and how big pieces i need ?

Am I going in the right direction ?

And I need to find fertiliser and that is not going to be easy but I just saw Amazon can deliver me Chempak nr8, problem solved !

Dennis,

First of all, this need not be complicated. As I said earlier, you can make your current soil work, if that plant shelf of yours gets hot enough. But your excitement over mixing your own substrate is understandable. Just remember that there is no such thing as universally perfect soil or substrate. Only the perfect soil for you, based on your habits and growing conditions.

On the ingredients:

If you can find pumice or scoria, use that. Perlite is
typically easier to find here but it may be different where you are. I
try to avoid perlite because they float. I hate that. If you don't mind the floating bit, you're fine with perlite, as long as you do what Gill suggested and sieve it to get the powdery stuff out.

Gill is also absolutely correct about cactus mix with sand. Why people keep selling this sandy crap is beyond me. You'll have to be growing tropical cacti somewhere very very hot and very very dry for this stuff to work.

Bark is good. Shake out the dusty bits.

On Proportions:

So my typical
adenium mix are varying proportions of pumice, bark and soil. For example, my
seedlings less than 2 years old are in 50 percent pumice and 50 percent
potting soil because they need a lot more water than adult plants do. My older trees are in soil-free substrate composed of
varying proportions of bark and pumice.

Your proportions will depend entirely on the plant's age as well as the conditions in their location (temperature, light strength and duration).
Younger plants need more water and nutrients. At Year 3, their growth
typically slows down (I read this on Dimmit's work first and confirmed
it later) and they will be more tolerant of dry conditions. At any age, they need temperatures over 25C to grow well and as much direct sunlight as it is possible to give in order to stay attractive.

As
for ingredient sizes, it really doesn't matter what size they are if you are
combining bark and pumice with soil. It becomes a deal-breaker when you
are making soil-less substrate like the 5:1:1 or the gritty mix because
then particulates can not be smaller than 3 mm.

I can't tell you any more detail since I don't know the value of the variables I listed above. But you can figure it out yourself, just search GW for the various threads discussing container soils.

Pagan

Thank you all for helping me out !! I just started to read that article about container soil water movements and retention ,some parts and words are hard to understand but Google translate is helping me out with that. @ Pagan, I already started putting the plants out of my soil because I didn't trust it and I found out that one has already root rot ,so I cut of two parts of the root till the cutting part was clean of rot. It only had 1cm what was rotten and after that I put some cinnamon on the cutting part (I read that it is good to close the wound if you don't have something else) tomorrow I'm going to get the soil ingredients but what do I have to do with the pant who had root rot ,do I wait till the cutting part is dryed out and than put it in the new soil ? Tomorrow I also going to measure the temperature by my window so i know more about the conditions.i don't have to heat up my house now during summer so the temperature is not goin under the 21 decrease and wen the sun is hot outside the temperature can reach like 28 decrease inside the house.about my radiator it's closed during Summer time so it don't heat up my shelf .Here are some pictures of the plant with the root rot after cutting the rotten parts

Dennis, welcome to the forum and very happy to read about your quick strides to change the medium. I have been growing these very recently(since May 15) and lost quite a few plants on the way too. I just want to give you some advice.

1.The higher the temps the more water they need. 35°C to 40°C is great for them and they lap up the water you give them.In your climate I would recommend heat mats as well as LED bulbs to keep them growing through the winter if you can afford it. I just keep them in a south balcony so that the pots get really hot( water evapouration in media is important), and because of high temps and nearly daily watering they now have stouter caudexes. I use cocopeat and osmocote like fertilizer( along with potash, ash, powdered egg shells, a bit of epsom salts, and some rock phosphate too which I mix well in the cocopeat.

Just keep them warm and well lit and they will grow happily for you. Wishing you the best....

Coarse mix is preferable to a mix with a lot of fines for two reasons water drains faster and when the water drains out oxygen can full those spaces. Mineral coarse particles are better in the sense they don't degrade into small fines over time so they are more stable and maintain their good drainage. Organic coarse materials are better in the sense that they hold more water and nutrients than even the best mineral particles and can provide an environment for beneficial microorganisms. However as they degrade they lose drainage and during their decomposition consume oxygen and release carbon dioxide and draw nitrogen out of solution robbing the plant. So there is the trade off. Indoor temperatures in a damp, fertile, organic substrate are the perfect conditions for all kinds of microorganisms, fungi, bacteria, water molds etc. that really aren't abundant in an adeniums natural environment. So they can rot easily. They never needed to evolve resistance to those things. They evolved to cope with extreme heat, drought, and poor soils. Anyway, its something to think about. I've gone back and forth over the years first amending organic substrates with coarse minerals, then to about half and more than half minerals and now to almost all mineral media, but..thinking about going a little bit backwards using more organic components but only the the best kinds which I get, prepare, and sieve myself. Right now I'm thinking I like the pecan shells and coconut husk products, and i think activated charcoal in a small percentage is a good idea too. but these are sometimes hard to find and it takes some work to make them the right size. And even then I wouldn't do more thay 20 or 30 percent organic for most of my plants. You can get the same lush growth in a complete sterile gravel mix as you do in an organic mix, but you will need to a lot of watering and fertilizing, almost like doing hydroponics.