Starting again

The pot that gets the most comments, especially on here, is the large bowl of echeveria comptons carousel. It probably stood out as these are suppose to be difficult, so a bowl full is quite rare.

The mild winter meant they got a bit tatty, so I decided to start again and cut the whole thing up.  The plants are at a good stage now, so I thought I would show how to go about dead heading these in the hope that others find it useful. Having cut the heads off, they get cleaned up, all dead leaves removed and checked for any issues. Then place them on a wire shelf to dry. I tend to leave these for a couple of weeks, this not only gives them time to callus over but also for roots to start.

At this point they are ready to be planted up. No water for the first few days and then grandually over the next couple of weeks you can water a little bit more each time.  This seems to be a good rule for them in general (after re-potting, after purchasing) - start slowly with the watering.

Don't worry if you lose a few leaves, especially if you get a sudden hot spell at this stage. You will probably find a few leaves mark, but they will grow out and within a couple of months you won't notice. After a couple of weeks if you try to gently move the rosette it should hold firm showing the roots have taken and the plant is good to go.

Not sure what I am going to do with 10 pots full of these. Over the next couple of years they will each form clumps and I would guess two repots will be all that's required to get one back into the large bowl again. I guess I have some good trading material for this summer.

Echeveria laui flower

I have said it before, there are few echeverias that have the drama of echeveria laui in flower.

It's echeveria season

The garden and pots are are full of flower spikes at the moment. The best are in the echeveria elegans river, which looks amazing at this time of year.

In the evening they are backlit which adds to the drama.  The bumble bees love them

The concrete egg is full of echeveria cuspidata var zaragoza, which is one of my favourites. Sadly it isn't hardy for my garden so has to be moved inside over winter.

The flowers are are a nicer colour than the very pale elegans.

While out enjoying the evening sun, I thought I might as well plant up the aloe aristatas. I have been trying to get some to survive for the last few years and they seem fine in the main rockery. They have got to a decent size now and have properly started to spred

I have been growing on a pot to plant at the fron of the cycad rockery. The hope is they will contrast well with the echeverias.

It's back to winter and shopping

The last post was all about things warming up and starting to get the plants out of the greenhouse.  Then this week it is back to winter again and all the plants are back inside again.  Such is the joy of UK springs.

Thankfully this weekend was the first cactus mart of the year, so time for a quick trip to the Kent coast with another succulent fan. Some chapters of the British Cactus and Succulent Society hold these sales every year, and the main sellers turn up to kick their year off in style.  The trick is to arrive before they open to ensure you are at the front of the line, that way you stand more chance of picking up that one rare plant someone has brought along. Saturday was no exception and the place was packed so it was pretty much impossible to take photos while there.  Instead just some pictures of the purchases.

It is strange that there are always one or two plants that everyone has, then next year you can't find them anywhere.  This year in the succulents it was the echeveria agavoides forms that were found on every stand. You were lucky if there was one echeveria ebony in previous years, then this year not only did everyone have them, but there were hybrids, and different forms.

This one was just labelled as a cross, so we'll see how it turns out. Then there were lots of other agavoides forms including: bordeaux, red leaf, red edge, Taurus, etc. I'm torn about all the different names to the red ones, especially when they are small, but they seemed to be the plant of the show. Next year it will be something else.

There are always a few new aloes, usually from the KG stable.  I stopped buying them a few years back but thought this one was a little different, so aloe gargoyle made it into my basket.

Recently I have been adding gasteraloes as they seem to been quite cold hardy for me. You often find gasteraloe flow at these sales but no others, One of the sellers had two different ones and no one else seemed interested so I snapped them up.  First up gasteraloe de Tige.

The second is gasteraloe d' due

Much greener and slimmer leaves on this one.  I can't find the name online anywhere so not sure if it is correct or not. Both had 3 or 4 pups, so those were removed and potted up ready for trades.

The other group of plants that has been sneaking in to my greenhouse are the haworthias.  There are always a lot of haworthias at these sales, it is one of the larger groups of succulents. I tend to like either the compact forms, so limited myself to two haworthia parksiana, one normal form and one hybrid (shown below)

Then the agaves, more have been sneaking into sales in recent years, but here there were very few and they were almost all americana or something common.  There was however one that stood out, agave shrevei ssp. magna.

It has really dark almost black terminal spines and a great leaf shape.  Looking forward to seeing it develop. It's not hardy for me, but should be ok if kept dry, so a pot one, which will also help limit its size.

I didn't manage to get the main plant I was after; an aloe erincaea. No one had them this year, having been one of the big plants last year. I already have a nice one I want to top cut, which should work, but just in case I want to find a reserve. Apart from that quite a successful day and a good way to take my mind of the return to cold weather.

Plants are waking up

It's that time of year again, alternating between the joy of plants waking up and the fear of them rotting. The UK has had a very mild winter so hopefully this will reduce the amount of end of winter damage.  We just need spring to be not too wet and just for once to move smoothly from winter - spring - summer.

Anyway it's time to start waking the plants up and getting back into the garden and greenhouse.  This is about checking how the plants have done, removing any signs of rot and checking for bugs.  The greenhouse is looking good.

The manfreda / mangave bench is looking the best it ever has. I kept a closer eye on these this year having learnt that they do not like to totally dry out even over winter.  This made a big difference and even the small manfreda guttata offsets that I removed at the end of last summer, are not looking bad.  The mangave fans may spot some surprises / future posts in there.

The echeveria agavoides 'ebony' in the black bowl has formed a really good shape. It's lost some of the colour as expected, but will colour up as soon as it can be moved outside.  The large bowl is more established.

This year they seem to have held their colour much better than previous years.  Hopefully this will mean an even darker colour when they go back into their summer spot.  The bowl is now full, so it's going to be interesting to see what happens as they start to push up against each other.

It's good to be back in the greenhouse again and thinking about projects for the year. Lots in the pipeline, so hopefully we'll have a good summer.

Echeveria agavoides forms

The plan at the start of the summer, was to bring my echeveria agavoides forms together into a standard plant pot for display.  Finally after 3 months of failed pot deliveries, don't get me started, the pots arrived and the planting could begin.

One of the most common echeveria, agavoides is prolific not just in offsets but in the number of named forms / cultivars.  I have some, but by no means all and there are more appearing on the market all the time. There seems to have to two main shapes; the more structured forms such as Ebony and Lipstick / Red edge, and the flater slightly looser corderoyi forms like Romeo and Sirius.

Starting with the structural forms one of the most common is Red edge. There are lots of plants out there with different names, Lipstick being the most common, which I believe are so similar it is not worth splitting up. This is a prolific offsetter and you will end up with a clump in no time at all.

It's a simple step to the next form Ebony.  Basically keep selecting the darkest leaf tips, until you get an almost black one.  Without doubt my favourite form Ebony is probably the one everyone wants.  It is big, bold and very structural.

In the UK this is the form you get when you buy Ebony, the darkness of the leaftips depends on the light and water levels.  If you are in the US there is a form from Huntington botanic gardens, where the area of black is bigger than on these. Normally I am not big on variations and think it doesn't matter, but in this case if you can get the Huntington clone, do.

I grew a few of these from seed and have another large bowl of them, the largest is easily over 30cm now.

One of the seedlings in the batch decided not to develope any black tips at all. At first it started looking exactly the same as the other seedlings, just with no black tips,  but slowly became more blue and the black appeared in spots.

The other strange thing about this seedling, is that it offsets freely. Unlike normal Ebony, which doesn't seem to offset that freely.

I definitely prefer the more structural forms, but there are a few of the corderoyi forms that have snuck in. The most common is Romeo. I guess the method of selecting plants works just as well for colour as form.

Romeo was one of the first of this form available and still the most common in the UK. About a year later Sirius started to appear, which has a more blue tinge to the colour.  Mine has gone a very strange set of colours.  I'm not sure if it's the sun, soil or what.

These forms seem to be smaller, or at least slower than the other forms, but still suffer the same lack of offsets. I swore that would be it, but this year a new one turned up Bordeaux. The colour is the darkest I've seen.

As mentioned at the start there are a lot more of these out there. Obviously there is always one more, and Miranda turned up recently. This looks interesting in the photos, so time will tell. I guess I'll be needing another pot at some point.

Then you have the hybrids, which I even have some of my own, but the one I would recomend is E. agavoides x E. cuspidata var. zaragoza, which you sometimes see sold as E. 'Arrow' due to the black leaf tips.

There you have the echeveria agavoides collection.  The black pots are 30cm diamter to give you an idea of the size. They just about still fit on the wall.

So those are the ones that have made it into my colection, which ones do you have?

Potting up the white echeverias

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.

Taming the echeveria stream

The stream of echeveria elegans has grown slightly since it was first planted.

When is was planted back in 2014 it was almost just individual plants.  Then the great things about echeveria are the rate the spred.

It now takes up the whole space, and come spring it flowers more each year.  The plants also change colour over winter to add a bit more colour.

While the stream is now overflowing, it does mean all the rocks have been obscured.  So it was time to do a bit of clean up.  Here is is before:

The nice things about echeveria, is to sculpt the shape require, simply pull the unwanted plants away form the clump.

I would love to have another echeveria on the lower level, but the E. agavoides keeps rotting as this area is not covered at all.  I am toying filling it with aloe aristata. there would be some variation in colour and the flower season would be extended as just as the echeverias finish the aloes start.

Then there is the bonus of one or two spare plants.

I mayhave to extend the clump in the front to create a new stream where there is more space.

The succulent rockeries are getting starting to put on a show

It is going to be a year of firsts flower wise around the garden, the aloe polyphylla flower is getting bigger

As is the plant itself.

The variegated aloe saponaria is also showing what a mild winter it was.

I may dig these up this year and replant just the main variegated one, the others are a bit more green.

The aloes in pots don't want to miss out. This one, apparently called aloe Tiki Tahi, got in early. 

There are lots of others in flower as well, but as they don't stay outside all year, I will limit this post to the really tough plants. Strangely the more common plants are being really slow; no sign of flowers on aloe aristrata, or striatula. 

The big question is going to be what to do with the polyphylla flower; do I try and polinate it?  Apart from the aloes in the garden, a friend has just found theirs is flowering as well. So there is a chance to swap some pollen.  Sadly she's not in the closest of locations, but it would be an excuse to drive over to see her garden and she lives around the corner from two great nurseries.

The echeverias after also flowering away, the echeveria elegans stream gets better every year.

There are a few gaps where plants didn't make it, but they are fillig out quickly and by the end of this year it is going to be overflowing.  The echeveria agavoides in the front should also have filled out. They are not as wet tolerant, so next winter I may have to bite the bullet and cover them. 

I know I said it was plants that live outside only this post, but my agavoides bowls are just looking too good.

Lots of offsets in the mixed pot, but pretty hard to get past the ebonys!

They are still getting darker having been in the unheated greenhouse all winter. I'm torn if I want to keep them together or give one it's own pot just to see how big it will get.  As you know, I tend to over fuss my plants, so maybe this time I'll just let them get on with it and see what happens.

I'll save the agaves and greenhouse for another post, but it feels like we have got past the dangerous time of year and everything is into growth and can just be enjoyed.

Echeveria John Catlin

This is a strange one: a beautiful white echeveria, but I know very little about it and have not see it anywhere else.  It was purchased at the BCSS national show 8 years ago, from Eau Brink cactus nursery, so a really good source and I would have expected to find more out there.

This was it back in 2011, as you can see it has more pointed leaves than Lauii but is just a white and attention grabbing.

It is one that never offsets, and despite all my efforts, none of my tricks have worked to get that first pup.  Then I tried top cutting  and again nothing.  The top rooted, thankfully, but the base did nothing.  At that point I sort of gave up trying at least in the short erm.

In one last effort I have been letting it grow, forming that perfect trunk.

So a few weeks back I took the plunge and top cut it again, the top was planted up and I was pretty certain it would root without too much problems.

The big question would a few extra years of experience top cutting pay off with offsets forming on the base trunk.

Yep three precious little babies on that trunk today. You can imagine how pleased I am, even if it isn't the best time for them to have formed. You can guarantee that this is one plant that will be watched very carefully over winter.

Obviously this success has gone to my head and I am now picturing a greenhouse full of them in a couple of years. To be honest I'm not going to push my luck, I'll be happy if these offsets make it to rooted established plants.