There comes a time in the year it can be put off no longer. The other plants have been potted on, the other garden jobs have been finished, nothing left to do but face the white plants. This year is particularly difficult as the echeverias have flowered so well.I raised my E. Laui up to allow the flowers to hang down more and it is still flowering now. The plant itself is now almost totally white and doesn't have a mark on it. This one can wait another year year before being repotted, but I'm already dreading it.
Other plants needed it this year, so onto the job at hand. The hybrid E. subrigida x E. peacocki is still flowering as well. This one has a great flower in which the nectar from the flowers seeps out and makes it look like the flowers are wearing lipstick.
Thankfully there was enough space to allow the plant to removed from the old pot and placed into the new one, without having to touch it too much.
Next up was E. mexican giant. There was not choice but to carefull tease this one out of it's pot and into the new one. Thankfully not much damage to the powder covering on the leaves.
Finally to give myself a bit of a break, E. colorata var brandtii. This one is probaly more blue than white, but still have a thin layer of powder. Again not too many marks after re-potting.
I love the tinge this one has on the tips of the leaves.
There is still one to go, my rare E. John Catlin, but I may top cut that one so I will save it for another day.
Just stunning. That's all I can say.
ReplyDeleteI had to google your e.john catlin and funny enough most of the pics that come up are from your blog. How did all the pups turn out when you top cut it last time?
Thank you.
DeleteI am not sure what the John Catlin is, no one including the person that sold it to me really knows, I am guessing it is one of his own hybrids. The last top cut was better than the first, Two offsets which in my normal way I manged to forget in the greenhouse over winter and kill. Of the 5 leaves, 3 rooted which to me means they will never send out offsets, two produced offsets.
Those are all really nice. Can you please cross them with rosea? I have a gibbiflora that I grew from seed, but when it bloomed the flowers were yellow. I suspect that it's a cross with rosea. Recently I sowed the seeds. When it was blooming I had placed it closely together with a couple coccineas and a rosea that were also in bloom. I was hoping that the hummingbirds would do all the work of cross-pollinating them. How sad are you that you don't have any hummingbirds?
ReplyDeleteSeveral years ago I sowed a bunch of gibbiflora seeds on my tree. Wherever there was any moss a bunch of seeds germinated and quickly grew. The problem was that they ended up being victims of their success. Their stems would badly bend, no basal offshoots would be produced, and the plants would slowly deteriorate. The roseas didn't have this problem. Their issue was when I reduced watering from 3x to 2x per week during summer. So my goal is to try and have the best of both worlds.
A couple weeks ago I asked my friend what percentage of seeds from any given species would be hybrids. I can't remember what her answer was. My guess is around 20 percent.
I wish we had hummingbirds, but for the echeverias the bees do a fine job, I get a lot of seeds if I want them. I haven't produced hybrids in years now. I am so bad a seedlings that I stopped. But as you know if I do rosea is the plant. I have been bring my set back up to scratch again, as I negelected them for a while and ended up with only one small weedy plant.
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