Lovable Lithops

My instant lithops collection purchased from Ebay

  
  Lithops are a type of Mesembryanthemum (try saying that five times fast) found in Namibia and South Africa. Mesembryanthemums are a family of succulents with an interesting characteristic. They look like rocks.

  Lithops are characterized by a two-part plant body. With a yearly growth cycle they reproduce themselves, a new plant emerging from between the two plant halves (which aren't exactly halves, one is slightly larger). Sometimes a lithops will produce two new plant bodies, like the plant in the top right corner of the first photo. A lithops can expand like this over many years, creating a plant body of many lithops joined in a cluster.

  Lithops, apparently, are known as difficult to care for. This is far from true. I think lithops must be the easiest houseplant one can find.

A four-headed lithops I found on clearance at Home Depot.

  Lithops are rarely in need of water. In fact for at least half of the year they want nothing to do with it! After growing a new plant body a lithops will absorb the nutrients from the old plant body, eventually leaving a husk that can be pulled off with care. The four-headed lithops in the above photo still has the desiccated leaves attached. It is essential during this time that you DO NOT WATER! Lithops are from extremely arid areas, and only experience rainfall a few months out of the year. Overwatering can easily lead to the death of the plant!

After potting the plants. Old plant bodies are visible on a few.

  In the spring the old plant bodies are husks, and you can water your plant(s). Only water them about every two weeks, and STOP WATERING when summer hits. The plant is resting, and too much water can overwhelm it. Towards the middle/end of August start watering again, and water well, letting the soil dry completely in between waterings. In a month or two a lithops will produce a single yellow or white flower, which emerges from the center just like the new plant body eventually will. Stop watering when the flower begins to wither. After the flower dies a new plant emerges. At the end of winter, in late spring you can start watering again.

I usually don't name plants, but this is Audrey!

  I'm looking forward to my plants blooming this fall, but not all of them will. Lithops won't produce a bloom until they are at least a couple of years old. With that in mind I am pretty confident my "four-headed" lithops will bloom in September. It has to be at least a few years old, as a lithops only doubles (if that) during a single growth season. This also means that my two-headed lithops could be old enough to bloom as well. As far as I can determine, the only way to know a plant is older than a year is if it contains more than one plant body, and plants do not necessarily double every growth cycle.
  

Lithops a few months later. The old leaves have withered away.

  I've watered my lithops only a few times. I watered the four-headed plant when I planted it because one of the plant bodies was slightly wrinkled, indicating a need for water, as well as the fact that the soil it was in was sand-dry. I'm guessing that's why they were on clearance. Home Depot probably only sells lithops and other mesembryanthemums seasonally and has a "no watering" rule.

  When it comes to placing your pot of lithops, make sure it's in a location where it can get four to five hours of direct sun each day. More than that can lead to sunburn, as you can see the lithops on the 

left in the above picture. Without enough sunlight a lithops will grow long and thin, trying to reach whatever light they can. Mine are all in an indoor windowbox facing the north. I don't have good east and west windows, so it was a choice between north and south, and I'm definitely more Yankee than Union.

  Most of my lithops were an eBay lot purchase with which I'm very pleased. Lithops seeds are inexpensive, and apparently grow well. Having no patience for seedlings, I went straight for the adult plants, which one should be able to find for less than $5.00 for an individual plant. If you hurry now (date of post) to Home Depot you might find some on clearance for a couple of dollars. Good luck! 

Creating a Succulent Collection: Ordering Succulents Online

   When I decided to dedicate my garden to succulents I wanted to plant as many different succulent plants as I could. To that end, I ordered sixty-four mixed succulents, sort of a "grab bag" of plants, from The Succulent Source. I have a terrible history of this sort of purchase; I think I like the gamble! When my plants arrived however, I had been sent the wrong ones! Instead of a random variety I received eight each of eight types of plants, a "wedding" assortment. Yes, succulents are wedding-trendy! They're used as place card holders/favors.

My first order arrived incorrect.

  I was very determined to get my variety, even willing to go through a return process, and after a few emails the store sent me a mix of thirty plants to make up for the error. My newer new plants were everything I could ask for, and now I had nearly ninety to play with! After sharing some with a friend, I started planting.

My "make up" shipment of 30 plants

  

  As can be seen from the photos, the plants arrived in excellent condition, and every one of them is still thriving! I would highly recommend The Succulent Source. The plants are fantastic and their customer service is as well. Should I want more plants for the garden or ever get married (ha!) I will definitely patronize their site! I was quite happy with my first online plant purchase, and it solidified my love for succulents!

  One note: should you purchase from this site, be sure not to open your package in the outdoors, especially if it's windy. There was a plethora of packing peanuts. Strange to see them after getting so used to Amazon's air-bags and crumpled paper. Anyway, I'm still plucking pink peanuts out of the flower beds! I suggest opening them in the garage or kitchen if possible.

Creating a Succulent Collection: Keeping Records

  I'm not a naturally-organized person. I really do have difficulty with planning and homemaking, and it's something I'm working on daily. There are a few tips and tricks I've picked up or "discovered" myself, and I use these few tools/methods to keep track of my succulent collection.

  Identifying succulents is probably one of the most difficult aspects of cultivating the plants as a pastime. Since my record-keeping skills are limited, one trick I use is taking photos of newly-acquired plants while still in their plastic pots. Now, the labels are not always accurate, and most are rather generic, but at the very least a name on a label gives you a point of reference to base a search on.

  

  This plant is labelled as a "hybrid," which is, in fact, what many store-bought succulents are. Hybrids are usually created by plant fanciers (people who raise show plants like others raise show dogs). Hybrids are a combination of different parent plants to create a new breed (again, like dogs). My favorite hybrids are all echeverias, like the "Lola" in the first photo. Echeveria hybrids can resemble funky rainbow cabbages, delicate roses, or even monstrous mutants from an H.P. Lovecraft story. 

   

  Groundcover is essential. That's it. You need to cover the exposed dirt in your garden. The simplest reason is weeds. If they can't break through the soil to eat the sunshine, weeds can't grow. Another reason to cover the ground around specific plants (like those tarty agaves) is to prevent pups from growing around the plant base. I have seen agave grown so that they are surrounded by offspring like happy Buddha with children, but this will make the plant much harder to prune and eventually remove after it flowers.

  Your groundcover can be plants. Ice plants, which I always have thought of as "freeway plants," are very fast-growing and can cover the bare earth in a matter of months. There are many types of sedum that make excellent groundcover, in fact, a well-stocked nursery should have several different types of ground covering succulents. The problem with plants, however, is that YOU CAN'T WALK ON THEM! Personally, I like being able to move my feet into the small spaces between some plants to prune them, and I've learned plants as groundcover is asking too much if myself as a gardener!  

The black DOES bring out the color, though in these sunny pics are rather washed out. I don't really want sand, so I'm really hoping this stuff will be okay. I'll probably have to invest in decomposed granite someday. Then, no more weeds, ever!

It looks sophisticated, though I think the black color will leech out of the wood like it's leeching under my nails. Maybe I could use a variety of bark colors? Make a pattern like those bottles filled with layers of colored sand made by kids and housewives on Pinterest! To make sure I can get matching cover in the future, I cut out and save the label from the bag the bark came in. The strong plastic folds easily and can be filed in a folder.

Adorable Surprise in the Climbing Aloe

  At least twice a day I inspect the garden for new growth, damage to plants, and the effectiveness of the drip system. I peruse the place before leaving for work and again when I return home in the evening. If I'm very lucky I'll run into one of the many-legged denizens of my yard. This particular morning I was lucky enough to find, in the climbing aloe of all places, a monarch caterpillar preparing to cocoon!

  One of the nonsucculents I grow is a tenacious and twiggy milkweed. Monarch butterflies drink the nectar and lay their eggs on the leaves. The eggs hatch and the caterpillars use the plant as a nursery and kitchen, chomping away until they grow large enough for their metamorphosis. At this point the caterpillar leaves mama milkweed and finds a hanging structure with some height to install itself in cocoon form. Usually this happens along the flagstone section of wall closest to the milkweed, or occasionally the woody lavender bush. Somehow, this little larvae crawled all the way across the yard to wind up in the aloe!

  It was pretty obvious from the pose that it was time to spin. Yes, those black lumps on the spiderweb ARE caterpillar poops!

  The insect wasn't quite ready to spin yet, and started a curl-up when I got too close. This afternoon I arrived home to find:

 

 Aw! I missed the action! If I keep the milkweed I'm sure I'll have another chance!

Segway From Succulents: Hidden Mickey Cactus

When I first moved into my house my brother brought over a lot of plants he had literally pinched from larger plants and then grown from the cuttings. One of the pieces he brought over was a cactus, but I'd completely forgotten about it until finding it this morning while cleaning out a large planter where I'd had a large amount of ground cover choking the other plants.

This cute little guy is rotting away.

  After removing a very large patch of applejack, I found quite a few little plants that had been nearly overwhelmed by the dense groundcover. This cactus appeared this morning, and I have no idea how it was not only still alive, but it hadn't been squashed when I pulled out the oppressive applejack. It was, however, quite rotted from sitting in mud.

With a sharp knife I sliced off the rotting tissue.

  The convenient bit was that I had just read an article on how to potentially save a cactus in such condition. The only chance was to deadhead the cactus, slicing off the top portion of healthy tissue and treating it as a cutting. With a cactus, however, one can't really give them time to callous, so the next step is to place the plant top on some soil and leaving it to develop roots. This truly is an experiment; so little healthy tissue was left it seems unlikely the remaining body can produce more plant.

Here's the plant sitting atop the soil in my cuttings nursery.

  I've also read that a cactus should be placed in soil low on organic material, so my window box nursery with its groundcover of mineral and glass beads should keep it fairly clean. The cactus is barely an inch wide, so it fits perfectly with the other small plants around it. It's like a dangerous teddy bear head right next to the 1:12 baby cradle!

Mystery Plant from Cutting

  An amazing and rewarding aspect of growing succulents is their ability to "reverse" growth to create entire new plants from cuttings of leaves and stems. Not every piece of a succulent plant will turn into a new plant. Some will simply rot, some will dry out. Sometimes, however, the little cutting gets just enough warmth and water to turn itself into an entirely new plant.

The tiny plant is hiding under the white senecio.

  Every time I put new plants in the ground I take iPhone photos so I can monitor the plants' growth. When looking through some photos, I noticed that there was a little succulent hiding under one of the Senecio herrianus, or white senecios. I didn't notice the plant when I put the senecio in the ground, but when I saw it in the photo I went out and plucked it.

The plant after removing it from its original location.

It's adorable! It also needs to get a break from all of that sun. The plant is "stressed" from the sun, and has turned itself red as a sort of sunblock. Not sure what sort of succulent it was, I brought it inside to a window-box nursery where I keep my small cuttings until they root enough to plant. If the plant continued to thrive, I would be able to identify it eventually. It's like a lottery.

About 2-3 weeks later. 

  Obviously less stressed, the plant has turned green, and the original leaf is almost completely desiccated, as the baby plant has "sucked out" all of the nutrients. The red shiny threads are the roots, and they are NOT very sturdy ones! Some succulents seem to grow red/pink roots, and some grow white roots. The white roots seem to be "sturdier" than the red ones.

One month after bringing inside to "nursery."

   The plant is now completely green and much larger. I've left the desiccated leaf attached to use as a sort of grip, as the plant is still very small and the roots quite delicate. I'm thinking it's a type of graptoleum. One of the biggest problems with succulents is identification. Very few nurseries seem to label their plants correctly, and most home store nursery plants have useless labels that don't even provide a colloquial name.

One month later.

  I have no idea what this is. Well, I know it isn't an aeonium, and it isn't a euphorbia, and it's definitely not an aloe or agave... that only leaves thousands of possibilities! If you want to know exactly what you're growing, purchase your plants from a succulent/cactus nursery. They are much more likely to be able to give you the correct name of whatever specimen you purchase. There are very few books on succulents that identify them in a way helpful to the home gardener.

Floribunda in Abundance

The blooms glow.

  There are a few succulent plants I've inadvertently fallen in love with as I've watched them thrive in my first household garden. Surprisingly I've grown attached to a plant that doesn't seem to be quite as well-known as many other fast-growing succulents.

The glowing fuschia spheres behind the blooming aeonium are calandrinia floribunda.

  A few pieces of calandrinia floribunda my brother scrounged while walking his dog were stuck in the dirt at my house. One year later...

The plant grows in chunky clusters.

As the stem extends, old leaves create a bit of extra protection.

   Floribunda gives you a lot of plant with a very little flower, but that flower packs a punch. Not quite ground cover, the plant grows stems which remain bare. This is the only detraction from the plant's beauty, but it can be a big one. The stems look sturdy, but they break easily, and the plant itself is low-growing, except for the flowers which are three feet above the plant body.
 The plant grows so quickly its name is easy to understand, and is great for filling in space, though again, the stems can be a drawback.

The tip of a former bare stick.

  The bare stems don't always display so clearly, as new growth hides the unsightly bits. Since I've been harvesting pieces of my two plants to grow in other parts of the garden. This leaves the stems more exposed than they usually would be.

  I broke off a large piece of plant and pulled off individual rosettes with flowers to plant in other parts of the yard. I was left with a bare clump of stick, which I stuck in the ground near the hose-bib. It sprouted quite quickly, and I'm sure that in a year I will have an entire mature plant covering up that unsightly dirt!

Bees are constant visitors.

The left-over clump of stems, already sprouting leaves at every stem and crotch!

I do not possess a single succulent which grows as quickly and easily as floribunda does. It's for this reason I've spread it around, as there is plenty of space to fill and I can't buy all of the larger plants and trees I want just yet.

Agave Propagation

Succulent plants have many qualities that make them ideal plants for the brown-thumbed gardener. One great quality of succulent plants is their ability to propagate themselves from cuttings and "pup" plants. Agave Americana, otherwise known as the century plant, is practically impossible to kill, and will even try to fill your garden with its offspring.

An adult plant, about 2-3 years old.

Agave are incredibly resilient, but some of those adaptations make them difficult to place in a garden. While agave start out small, they can grow six feet in width and height! Because of this, agave should not be planted within six feet of walkways. If you do plant an agave americana nearer to a walkway than this, you will have to prune the plant to prevent the blade-like leaves from reaching the pathway.  Both of the adult agaves in my garden were planted close to walkways which means pruning to maintain safety!

When weeding one evening, I felt a sharp pain in a buttock. Turning around slowly, expecting to see a hideous insect, I saw that an agave leaf-tip had stabbed through my pants and into my skin! One amazingly easy thing to do to make your agave more people-friendly is to use garden shears, clippers, or even household scissors to nip off the needle-sharp tip of each leaf. This is simple and does not require that one get very close to the leaves, which have spikes along their edges as well.

This agave pup has already started growing its own roots.

An agave will produce pups either at the base, or if there is no access to the top of the soil near the plant, it will grow a rhizome (root stalk) until it finds a point where the new plant will be able to access sunlight. The rhizome is bulbous and "jointed" and easily "pops" apart at each joint where the leaf meets the base of the root. A way to think of it is as an umbilicus that connects the new plant to the parent plant.

Nearly hidden under a shredded leaf, this tiny pup is the only one that's grown at the plant's base.

  After being surprised by a pup from my less than one foot wide agave americana marginata, I decided to take a closer look at my blue plant, and yup, there was a pup nestled at the base under a trimmed leaf! If I hadn't pruned the plant, I probably wouldn't have given it room to grow at the base. After removing the pup I carefully placed the decorative (and functional) rocks so that the soil was covered again.   

A very young agave pup has already grown roots at its base.

  To pull out a pup, dig underneath it enough to expose the rhizome before you pull. One or two quick jerks should break the rhizome at a joint and free the pup from the parent plant. At this point you either throw away the weed-pup, or if wanted, some quick surgery will give your agave pup an independent life.

Slice as much of the rhizome away as you can. The plant's roots should be directly beneath its body, not off to the side.

The rhizome needs to be trimmed so that the roots grow properly. Surprisingly, unlike some other pups I've pulled, this tiny base pup had already grown its own roots, which made my work worry-free. When slicing a plant free you create a huge open wound, which should usually be left to heal itself closed, or callous. This prevents infection, like a scab on a flesh wound.

  I'm not sure why I sliced the rhizome at an angle; I want to say it's recommended by I'm not sure it actually matters if you want the end to callous. Because my blue agave is so prolific, I'm not worried about a pup or two dying, and haven't worried about letting the pups callous after trimming their rhizomes.

The plant is now independent.

  I put the pup immediately in the dirt after slicing the rhizome. This will make a total of six agave pups I've replanted, and four that I've thrown away.  As the agave grows older, owners might want to save some pups in order to replace the agave once it blooms. After an agave blooms it dies, and apparently the bloom itself will contain many new plants.

This pup is about 2 months old.

  The mature agave pup in the second picture has now grown quite a bit! I pulled it out of the ground to do some experimental surgery. Not only did I snip off the sharp ends, but I also "shaved" the spikes on the leaf edges. Maybe I can carefully grow a "safer" agave.

The pup after a trim.

  A final note on agaves is about the end of their lifespan. A century plant will live for about a decade before blooming and dying. As might be guessed, the colloquial name derives from the incredibly long wait until the plant flowers. Once an agave dies, you must remove it. An adult agave will have a tough, heavy trunk, and a blooming agave also has a ten to twenty foot flower stalk! When you plant an agave, do keep in mind that in a matter of a few years it will have to be dug out and discarded. This is important to keep in mind when planning which plants to surround the agave with.