Growing from seeds: why do I keep trying?

I have mentioned before that one thing I have never been good at is growing plants from seed. Succulents should be easy, simply scatter the seeds onto compost, cover lightly and then place in a plastic bag in a warm place. Depending on the variety you will get seedlings appearing after as little as a week.  Leave for another week, remove from the bag and place in a propagator so you can reduce the damp over a few days.  Water carefully until they are on their 2nd or 3rd leaf and split into pots.

Simple, or so it should be.  I can get to the seedling stage without problems and then it all goes wrong. I always seem to end up with 5 or 6 that survive, no matter how many I plant. A sensible person would have stopped by now but for some reason every year I continue to torment myself with a few sets of seeds.  This year it was aloe polyphylla (I'll cover that in a different post), echeveria agavoides 'ebony' and a hybrid echeveria subrigida x peacockii.

Echeveria agavoides 'ebony' was a bit of an experiment.  I have shown this picture before of a plant at a national show, it shows the darker tips to the leave this form is named for.  I am interested to see if the seeds will come true and the plants will have the dark tips, or if they will have the usual red tips.

You wont be surprised to know that out of the 100 seeds I have 5 left.  They are still small but some are already starting to show the very dark tips (you need to look very closely to notice).  Time will tell if they will stay like this.

The second set sounded like it could produce something interesting. Echeveria subrigida is one of the best echeverias and if kept pristine is a beautiful specimen plant.  Echeveria peacockii is one of the pale blue / white varieties.  Again 5 or 6 seedlings have reached the stage when I stop worrying about them, and at least one is looking very pale.

For me it is partly the search for that unusual plant I hope for; the almost white, or dark tips, or even better variegated plant. It seems there will always be an excuse to torment myself. Who knows one day I may actually crack the seedling stage.

An African interlude

I have been quiet recently as I have been in Ethiopia.  My OH is always telling me that I'm a lucky lucky man and the part of my job which lets me travel is definitely lucky.  I have been to Africa a few times, but this was my first time to East Africa and Ethiopia was somewhere I had always wanted to visit.  Sadly this was not a holiday and so I didn't get to explore and only saw Addis Ababa. I could get very carried away writing about my trips but as it's got nothing to do with plants, I will just post a few pictures of the city.

It was much greener than I expected; in fact the flight was over the most beautifully patchwork of fields with a multitude of greens not something I think of when I pictured Ethiopia.

The entire city is surrounded by mountains and is a mixture of the smaller, older, ramshackle style of building and the more modern buildings.  As with any city in the world the skyline is changing as buildings get taller. As my original degree is in civil engineering, I love looking at the different construction methods.  Many are the same, but one that is different in each country is the scaffolding materials. In some countries bamboos are used, but in Ethiopia it is local wood

 No matter how posh the building, the materials are always the local wood.

I find it a little surreal seeing these glass building surrounded by the wood like this.  The other thing that changes is the cost of labour.  Where labour is cheap, everything is done by hand; breaking up stones, mixing concrete and loading and unloading trucks:

I did not envy these guys having to fill the truck with the left over gravel.  It was quite hypnotic watching the two in the front working in perfect synchrony.

Sadly I had no time to explore, especially as Ethiopia has some lovely native aloes.  These were strangely missing from the street plantings which consisted of agave attenuata and various palms. So it looks like I will have to go back to properly see the native flora. There is probably a post on how plant addiction affects holidays.

Common does that matter?

Agave americana is probably the most common agave world wide.  In many parts of the world it is almost a weed, with the prolific offsets. Even in the UK as one of the hardy agaves it is the one you will see in peoples gardens, and the odd news paper when they flower.  The different varieties of this plant can pretty much represent the changes many succulent collections go through.

The plain plant is often the first agave you own, I know it was mine, and I remember how excited I was to get a given a few of them.  This pretty much sealed my fate, and I was soon searching more varieties of agave.  It was not long before I realised that there were far more interesting plants out there and unless you have a huge amount of space to fill, as new plants come in this one goes out.

Once you have a few agaves many people start to look at variegated plants, only slightly less common is the marginata form.  Again my first variegated agave, and it was given pride of place in the garden for a while.

The problem with obsessions though is that you are never happy with what you have,  there is always something better out there.   So having gone through the common plants, you start to look for slightly more unusual plants.  The medio picta alba plant fits perfectly into that category.  It is not so common that you see them every day , but when you start looking it is easy to find.  So out with the marginata form in with the medio-picta albas.

Where next, you have the plants that are easy to find,  so onto those that are harder to find.  Now you are slipping into obsession status; it's no longer just about seeing plants and buying them,  it changing to searching for that elusive variety that few people have.  Yet again agave americana pops up, this time in the striata (stripy variegation) and the medio-picta aurea (yellow stripe) forms. 

By now, you are probably getting fussy and each plant is worthy of a place.  This means that it is more difficult to decide what to do when space runs out.  Medio-picta alba is a lovely, too good to just bin, so it gets shifted into a less prominent place and this is the dance that happens with each new plant.

You may feel that agave americana is too common, so lets change to the plants that have come out recently.  Starting with agave blue glow,  soon you're moving on to the variegates snow glow and sun glow.  What's that a new one just about to be released! The plants may have changed but the story is always the same. I wonder what we would think if agave americana wasn't on every street, if it was a hybrid just coming onto the market?

Winter protection part 1: Who's made the cut

A selection of the smaller pots.

Sadly there is now no denying that winter is about to arrive, and it is time to pack up the plants and decide which get the pampering and which get the tough love or worse.

First stage was to gather the smaller plants together, it seems my OH may be right after all and I have too many pots.  Actually the small pots are fine, no matter how many, they fit on shelves, in gaps, anywhere with a bit of a rain cover.  The problems are the larger pots that are too heavy for shelves, but need to given more protection than a simple rain cover. More about that in the next post.

First in the rain shelter were the medium sized pots.
Many of the plants in here are considered tender by many people, but seem to scrape through for me every year.  Admittedly I doubt I would have tried some of them if it wasn't for lack of space.

This year along side the usual experiments with echeverias, the big trial is of agave utahensis. I was lucky enough to rescue a set of mature plants at the start of the summer (they are painfully slow, so to get to this size I would guess they were over ten years old).  I posted about them at the time, here, and always had in mind to try some with different levels of protection.  In theory they should be hardy down to silly temperatures if kept dry, so time to put it to the test.

With the bottom layer full, the small table goes in for the smaller pots.  Amazingly I had judged it about right and there is still a little space on this for the odd pot I am bound to find somewhere.

 

The cold frame is a step up from the various cloches and plastic rain covers that many plants have. I'm not sure I'd like to be a plant in my collection.  I am sure that when the real cold arrives I will be wondering if I made the correct choices, especially if the winter is anything last last year. 

One final taste of summer

Outside today, putting the last couple of plants away and found these.  The last strawberries of the year, they are tasty in summer when the main crop is, but to find some at this time of year was pure delight.

Update on the work garden

A while back I posted about the garden in the courtyard at work.  Now it has had its first summer I thought I would post an update.  Here it is back in May and again today:

In my last post on the garden I mentioned how I was torn between design verses use.  I still feel that way, but everyone loves it; the tables are still in use even in October and the I get regular emails about the joy of being able to go out and pick veg in lunch breaks.

The tree ferns in the fernery have filled out as have most other things.  Sadly the shuttlecock ferns, that were suppose to give a bit of height in the middle of the bed, are not looking so good.  Hopefully they will get going next year.

The most dramatic changes though are in some of the other beds, here was the bamboo when it was planted.

And then today

The banana has grown into a great plant and because of the sheltered position the leaves have not been shredded like they usually are.  Next to it is a colocasia, another plant that was purely planted as summer bedding until the bamboo filled out.   As they both look so well, it seems a shame to let them die, so we have decided to dig them up and put them into large pots. Bringing them in, to sit on the inside of the glass wall.

 These brugmansias were planted as small cuttings and have totally taken over this bed.  I am going to have to decide what to do with them, as again they wont survive the winter if left where they are.  We don't have space for both, besides their growth this year shows how big they can get in just one season.  It is more likely that I will take a couple of large cuttings and over winter those.  By next spring they will be rooted and can be re-planted to once again take over the bed.  It's a great trick if you are short of space, so long as you are willing to mist every now and then and keep a keen eye out for spider mites!

I couldn't end without showing at least one photo of the rockery.  Most of the plants seem to have settled in, with the echeverias showing the most growth.  There have been a pleasing amount of comments about it, with most people un-aware that you can plant directly in gravel like this. Some of the plants are trials, having shown they are marginal in my garden, I am hoping the warmer inner city location may just be enough to get them through. This is the main agave section, I am going to have to decide if I provide any protection to plants I don't have spares of.

I am always going to look at certain beds and think they are wasted, but as long it at continues to be used like it was this year, I can just about turn a blind eye to them.  Besides who knows what opportunities next year holds.  I have my eye on all the flat roofs for some green planting!

Echeveria flowers, third wave.

The late summer echeverias are in full flower now.  It seems these late ones are often the best,  I'm not sure if it's that there is less about, or that any flowers give you a last hope that summer is still with us. Quite a few of the ones flowering at the moment are red and it is unusual to get a really strong colour in echeveria flowers. Echeverias blue prince and black prince are both doing well.  They seemed to have flowered a bit earlier this year which means we get to admire them more.

A first for me is e. walpleana.  This plant was new last year and has grown well.  I got it for the unusual leaves which are more long and thin than most forms.  It seems to clump nicely which is good especially if it is going to flower like this.  The flowers themselves are big and a nice strong red.  It is just a shame that they are on such long stalks, but can't complain too much when the heads look like this:

Most of these will carry on until the first frosts and will then be replaced by few winter flowering varieties which are kept inside (if I can sneak them past my OH). For now though, I will hold onto the last of summer.