Tuesday 17 April 2012

The hardy succulent garden: Climate

What with digging up the dry bed allowing me to closely examine the plants and hoping the next house will have a larger garden, I have been thinking about the hardy succulent garden. With this in mind I thought I would do a series of posts on the topic. A lot of it will be in planing for the next garden; thinking how to build the beds, what to plant and what winter protection (if any) to use.



So what do I mean by a hardy succulent garden?  Firstly the majority of plants have to be planted all year, not just sunk and dug up before winter.  For me the plants will mainly fit into the groups of agaves, aloes, echeverias, yuccas, with a few other plants both as features and as fillers. Finally winter protection should be kept to a minimum and should be about keeping plants in pristine condition not about survival.


For this first post it seems sensible to look at my climate. Living on the edge of London my winters are not that bad, -10C (14F) would be my absolute minimum. Although we do get 2 - 3 snow events a year, they usually only last a day or so and it is very unusual for snow to stay around for a week. Sadly when this snow is wet and is prone to melt and re-freeze and this does more damage than the drier snow other areas of Europe gets. Perhaps as important are the summers, you can get away with a lot more if you have long hot summers.  Our summers are often neither of these and it can seem to rain as much in summer as in winter. While that is not the case, we do not get the extended hot periods that these plants would really like.

I'm not sure exactly how the series will pan out.  I'm thinking of a post on the planting material / bed structure. Then one on each group of plants and finally one on winter protection. I have no idea if it will be useful for me or others, but it will at least give me something to do until I can actually get on with the new garden.

9 comments:

  1. I for one am very interested. Ps is that an Aloe plicatillis in the first shot?

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    1. Thank you. It is an aloe plicatillis. Sadly my experiment showed that they wont survive below -5 planted out. So short of summer planting, they will not be featuring in my hardy bed. Kept dry though they seem fine down to -7 and I now keep it in the shed over winter.

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    2. I'm trying to grow these from seed, no germination yet I'm afraid.

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    3. Not one I have tried from seed. Do you have them in a heated prop? Aloes do tend to germinate better with heat. If you do, you could try turning the heat off at night and then on again in the morning. That has worked for me in the past. That and re-using the compost for something else is normally a cert to have seedlings coming up in unusual places.

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    4. Thanks for the tip. They are on top of the radiator so get plenty of bottom heat. It has only been 2 weeks so I'll be patient.

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  2. I want to make a larger garden this year in my front yard. We would have to cut some yard away. And I am realizing this year that succulents are hardier than I thought and by putting them in the garage I am sometimes doing them more harm than good.

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    1. I do think we tend to spoil them. Very exciting about the larger garden in your front yard. I had to dig up the concrete to put mine in. Hopefully some of the further posts will be useful should you go ahead.

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  3. looking forward to reading your posts

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