If only it was that easy.

I mentioned in my last post that echeverias are great plants to experiment and practice on. This is especially true when it comes to propagation methods.  You can try top cutting, coring, root damage and leaves, and while not every method will work with every variety it is fun finding out what will.  Once you know the quickest and easiest method this can be used whenever you want duplicates or more plants.

E. pulvinata is a pretty little variety which has hairy leaves and in time will form a small bush.  The 'ruby' form has red edges to the leaves and is my favourite.  It is an easy plant to grow although can get leggy over time.  It also propagates easily using almost any method you want. This particular plant was damaged and in recovering threw out a few variegated leaves.  Variegation in echeverias is very rare and so whenever this happens you always find yourself hoping it will continue.

Sadly, as is usually the case, the plant reverted to normal once it was fully recovered.  It does have those few variegated leaves though, and as it will produce new plants from leaves it had to be worth a go. When taking leaves, it is always best to use younger leaves, once past their best they are more likely to die before producing the required new plant. The variegated leaves were still young and so ideal for this purpose.  In theory the new plant should be a copy of this leaf and so variegated.

Given the ease with which echeverias propagate variegated plants should be more common.  The reason they are not is that while new plants are produced without problems, the majority of the time they revert to normal. Even leaves off fully variegated and stable plants usually produce plain new plants. So there is little chance that I will get my dream variegates plant form the leaves.  It doesn't stop you trying though.

The last cross of the year

Echeverias are great succulents. They grow quickly and can go from seed to flowering within 2 years.  They can be propagated using different methods and recover quickly.  Finally different varieties flower at different times of year, so there are always some in flower. All of these make the ideal plant to hone you skills.

The first hybrids I tried were echeverias and now every year I can't help but try one or two. The selection of parents depends on what I have on the go; in quiet years I may try a few different combinations, in busier times it may just be one choice pair. This year I had planned to do my crosses at the start of the summer, but got distracted and hadn't done any until the last few weeks.  The main cross I have hopes for are two of my favourites. The first parent is one of the very white varieties e. 'john catlin'.  I get a lot of requests for this plant as it doesn't offset and is difficult to propagate.

The other parent is one of the rarer varieties e. walpoleana. This is a small clump forming plant, which has longer leaves and larger dark pink flowers.

I will be happy with any resulting cross, but a blonde (white) version of e. walpoleana would be particularly good.

Attempting an aloe hybrid

While we're on the subject of seeds, nothing shows the depth of my obsession more; I just can't help myself.  Every year I try a few seeds I have purchased and also try to create a few hybrids of my own.  Normally the hybrids are echeveria as they grow so quickly. This year I thought I would also try an aloe or two.

I wanted to try something I could not find else where; maybe more cold tolerance, or a darker colour.  This time I thought I would go with colour.  I've had this group of aloe midnight child for a while, it is a cute little plant with very dark, at times almost black leaves. The colour is amazing, but the leaves lack a little bite; they are slim and smooth with limited teeth.

This year I managed to pick up this little aloe donnie. The plant has a much nicer shape and good texture to the leaves, a trade mark of KG hybrids.  Both would enhance the aloe midnight child. 

In the US KG plants are protected by plant patents so can not be used for commercial propagation unless under license. The patent is not binding in the UK although the importers have to have a licence and my plant came from a licensed supplier. As this experiment is purely for my personal collection there wouldn't be a problem even is I was in the US.

With the parents selected, I had a couple of other aloes in flower at the same time and I cut those stems off to ensure there was no random pollination. Then using a tiny paintbrush transferred pollen from the a. donnie to the a. midnight child. 

After a week there are 4 seed pods forming and it shouldn't be too long until they open and I get to see if they contain any seed. Even if there is, there is no guarantee it is viable. So it will be a waiting game for germination and finally keeping my fingers crossed that I don't kill all the seedlings. All of this in the hope that one of the resulting plants will be something different.

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.