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Does anyone else have succulents?
Spent yesterday afternoon re-potting my little collection of succulents, and it got me wondering whether other people on here might have some. Curious if people want to share their favorites or tips/tricks, etc.
I don't personally, but "we" have probably over a hundred. They don't really interest me but I know a bit about root rot, fighting bugs, and how someone can buy a $120 succulent and have it come with pretty significant root rot, get a refund, and then propagate all the leaves and end up with a whole bunch of that same type of succulent.
I don't know why anyone would buy a $120 succulent, but here we are.
I love succulents! I was gifted a jade at the beginning of the pandemic and it's huge now (but also ugly because I only prune for weight, not looks).
After lots of trial and error with various types, the most important thing I've learned was to mix soil to fit the watering routine you can handle. For example, I'm using a 2:1 ratio of Jacks Bonsai Mix and normal potting soil and I only water them once every 1-2 weeks, but this is entirely dependent on how warm/sunny your home is.
I have what I'm 99% sure is a jade that started out tiny and just keeps on growing! I like it, but it's going to need its own pot soon. While re-potting mine I discovered its roots had pretty much taken over the whole pot it was sharing.
They're also super easy to propagate if you choose to prune them!
I have too many! Succulents are the only kind of plant that will survive in one of my windows (a west-facing window that gets intense direct sun exposure). But even most succulents scald and shrivel in that window. In the summer, I have to water most of them a couple times a week (more than I water my ferns!) and they still dehydrate.
So if anyone has any suggestions for extra heat-tolerant succulents, I would be very grateful! My succulent collection has grown way bigger than I ever intended due my hunt for especially robust succulents.
So far, I have had the best success with Lithops and, to a somewhat lesser extent, with Haworthia cooperi var. truncata (the other H. cooperi I have, var. picturata really struggles, however). What I find really fascinating about var. truncata is that, in the summer, it recedes down into the soil so that only the little windows show and turns a pretty salmon color. When autumn rolls around, it sticks back up and turns green like this photo.
I have so far also had some success growing Faucaria tigrina in this window, but I haven't gone through a full summer with it yet, so I'm not quite ready to declare it a certain success.
Succulents that I grow in other (less heat-intensive) windows, where they do better: Curio rowleyanus (string of pearls), Sedum morganianum (donkey tail), Ceropegia woodii (chain of hearts), Aloe vera, Gonialoe variegata (tiger aloe), Beaucarnea recurvata (ponytail palm), Haworthiopsis attenuata (zebra haworthia), Tacitus bellus (Chihuahua flower), Huernia schneideriana (red dragon flower), Crassula rupestris var. 'contorta' (string of buttons), and Dracaena 'Boncel' (starfish snake plant)
Outside, I grow Crassula ovata (jade plant; however, I do bring this inside during winter because I have shaped mine into a big, chunky bonsai over the years and I would be heartbroken if frost nipped it back), assorted Echeverias, Portulaca oleracea (purslane), Lampranthus glaucus (pigface), Sedum rubrotinctum (jelly beans), and probably a few others I'm forgetting.
I love your collection! I know those are links you found online, but I can imagine your windowsills and outdoor space are beautiful with them. At the rate I'm going right now, I'm probably going to end up with a similar quantity before too many more years go by. The lithops and the haworthia cooperi var. truncata both look so cool.
I have to ask, how'd you figure out exactly what yours are? I've tried figuring mine out via comparison on r/succulents and the PlantNet plant identification app, but it seems like so many look so similar that I can't be confident of anything.
It can be very hard to identify a lot of them, especially because hybrids are so common. In some cases, they may not even necessarily be officially described by scientists yet (there is a huge backlog of undescribed species).
Fortunately, I live in a place where most succulents on the market are supplied by this nursery, which is run by some very nerdy people who are exacting about labeling all their plants correctly (and also info-dumping interesting facts about them on their tags), even for their super cheap under-$5 plants.
I didn't get all my plants through them (many are props from friends), but most of them ultimately originated from there, and so it's not too hard to ID them. You can even visit the nursery directly, and they have hundreds of different well-labeled succulents on displays that you can compare with directly.
Ah, makes sense. That's really cool that they're so good about labeling them and providing information. It's so fun to interact with people who clearly are really interested in something and want to share their knowledge. Wish I lived anywhere even remotely nearby so I could stop in sometime!
I have more or less three, all of which I proplifted:
Carpobrotus edulis aka magic carpet, small pink flowers, loves sun, grows pretty readily, invasive to CA. I started a couple patches on my front lawn, with the intention to replace the entire lawn with it, but that's a lot of work, and it seems to prefer to grow over rocks (including the driveway concrete) rather than into the dirt area. Swiped from Pacific Grove coastline.
The other one I'm not sure what it is, it may be a Graptosedum or Echeveria. It's in a bowl and I think it's probably getting too much sun since none of them have grown very large. Swiped from a Greek restaurant.
Also have a couple of jade plants. They don't need much care (honestly none of them do, that's kinda how I roll with plants) and they flower every year. Swiped from my mom's house.
YES!
I have a very lassez-faire approach to gardening (i.e. if it does't grow without minimal intervention from my part, then it wasn't meant to be). So over the years I have learned what plants work and don't work for my specific location (zone 9), soil chemistry, level of sunlight, amount of rainfall, and most importantly, without any help from me. I might water them if it hasn't rained in a couple weeks, and throw some extra mulch and food scraps whenever convenient for me, but for the most part I just let nature take its course. Let's just say that if there's an afterlife, and if that afterlife is ruled by plants, then I'm definitely not getting in on the count of wanton plant neglect.
Strawberries? Lettuce? Spinach? Petunias? Daisies? Bananas? Nope, RIP.
Rosemary? Cayenne peppers? Green peppers? Oregano? Tomatoes? Green Onions? Blue-my-mind flowers? Hell yeah. All thriving despite minimal effort on my part.
And succulents, oh boy do my succulents thrive. Those masochists seem to enjoy my willful disregard for their well-being. I have some that get direct sunlight all day and have grown too much for their tiny box. I have another that sits in a covered porch and doesn't even know what sunlight feels like but has outgrown multiple pots in the last 4 years. Some are fully exposed to the elements and get massive amounts of rain every summer afternoon for like 4 whole months. While others are indoors and get watered when I realize 'oh shit when was the last time I watered this guy?'
3 of my favorites are:
The classic aloe vera that we use all the time when someone gets a burn or sunburn (seriously all of ours have the tips of their 'leaves' cut off from burns over the years). I have three pots of these and they've grown like ten new offshoots between them. They're cramped and begging to be replanted but that would just fill those pots up as well. We got these from my wife's grandmother who has them scattered all over her yard like very beautiful and useful weeds.
This ghost plant is in a small wooden box that I made with our house numbers on top. It's maybe a 3x10 inch box that faces the sun all day and this fucker has grown so large that he's both covering the giant numbers above him and also drooping down way below the bottom of the sign/box. Recently bloomed for the first time in two years and that was pretty gorgeous. Some of those flower stalk things were over a foot long!
Some jelly-bean-looking thing like this one that my wife got as a gift many years ago. For the longest time it was just in a red solo cup waiting for it to grow and develop. But we eventually did plant it in a (slightly) larger ceramic pot where he has lived without fuss for a few years now. Super polite plant. Never asks for anything. Stays roughly the same size unlike a lot of its neighbors that grow well past their pot sizes. I've seen these plants before close to saltwater that actually take on the salt in their leaves, so they taste very salty. But I haven't tried my little guy out yet to see if he's salty. I suspect he wouldn't be, given that there's no saltwater anywhere near his little pot.
10/10 plants, would recommend them to everyone.
I have a Gasteria that lives on my desk, and it turns out having a plant or two in your working space is good for your mental health. If you are under the impression that plants purify the air, that'd be another reason to consider one.
The mental health thing is for sure beneficial, I love having plants in the house. The air purification claim is not something I have found to be verifiable. I really want to be because that means I can justify more plants. If anyone has any scientific sources on actual effective air purification I would love to read them.
I think in hermetically-sealed spaces plants purify a substantial amount of the air (e.g., on spacecraft). However in most places like your house air transfer likely happens faster than plants can purify.
From what I have read, researchers the 70s found that a large number of plants could improve air quality in offices. Modern researchers were not able to replicate the same effect in modern offices due to HVAC improvements over the proceeding decades.
Basically, it sounds like plants can help if the air quality is very poor to start with, but it is dwarfed by the effects of just letting some fresh air in.
No succulents here, but we do have a three year old avocado tree and a ? year old hibiscus that survive our zone 3b winters indoors and thrive during the summer when they get to live outside with the produce crops! Also an orchid cactus and a spider plant that stay indoors year round.
My wife grew up with lots of tropical house plants and it's an aspect of our union I've really grown to enjoy. The cat I think enjoys them too, much to our chagrin as most of the day is spent yelling at him attacking one of the plants :D
I never really had houseplants growing up, but I've definitely grown to love them over the last few years. The little pop of green on my windowsill is great, and it feels good to take care of something alive that doesn't need pet levels of care. My collection is growing worryingly quickly, though!
No, but I'd like to pick some up and brighten up my windowsill with them. The room gets steady sunlight for most of the morning and afternoon. I just don't know dip about plantcare.
Fair warning, they're addictive! I went from one that I adopted from my mom to having a bunch over the course of the last two years.
Although I'm no expert, I've learned a bit about caring for them over time, and it's not too difficult. Being evolved for arid environments means that succulents handle abuse pretty well. My understanding is that the keys are well-draining soil and not over-watering (once every 2w is usually good, or go by when the leaves start to get a little squishy). As long as they get decent sunlight, they should do okay.
Two little tips I've learned:
Glad to hear this as I’m also looking at getting a few. I live in Vegas and see them all over the stores, but recall reading somewhere that you probably need to do some work if you want them to live long. Seems like a good starting point
Yeah, I get the impression that they're often mistreated in the stores. In service of them being low-effort for buyers, they also tend to put them in non-draining pots with a plastic spacer, which seems to inevitably lead to root rot.
You can find pretty inexpensive cute pots that do have drainage holes on Amazon, and, for soil starting out, an $8 bag of anything labeled for succulents/cacti at Home Depot or your local garden store should work fine.
Hm, okay. Sounds doable enough. About how long would you roughly keep one before re-planting it in your garden?
I've kept all of mine in a couple little pots dotted around my windowsill. Probably every six months or so I like to take stock of how they're all doing and think about re-potting them. If any have gotten too big or misshapen reaching for sunlight, I've just lopped the tops off, let the wound callus over for a few days, and then replanted the top. They'll happily put down new roots and keep growing.
To be honest, it seems like it's mostly a taste thing whether to do anything other than water them every few weeks as needed. I like the little activity of reorganizing them and maybe letting a few leaves that have fallen off root and turn into baby plants, but it seems like plenty of people just leave a few in a pot for years and they stay happy.
I think most people generally keep them potted forever, even including those who put them in their gardens. It seems a lot of people never put them in the ground, even when they keep them outside.