1.) Propagate: Suspend clippings or new blossoms over wet soil (keep it very wet). After a week or two, roots will grow out from the clipping towards the damp soil. When the roots have grown for a little while you can plant it entirely in the soil.
2.) Water: Allow soil to dry between thorough waterings.
3.) Light: Full sun.
4.) Fertilize: Not necessary.
5.) Soil:
After just 3 months, this plant seemed to double in size. Here you can see a September 2013 photo where the leaves are now draping over the edge of the pot.
Now, the tag that came with the plant said that it would only grow 4" high and 8-10" wide. I liked the idea of a short stout plant. However, this puppy kept climbing as you can see in the photo below from January 2014. At this point, the trunk had grown so high that it could no longer keep itself upright, I had to lean it against the cabinet to keep it vertical for the photo.
It was at this point that I decided something must be done to prune this bad boy. I read that you can "behead" or "decapitate" the echeveria once a year (or something like that). So I cut off the top portion of it and teetered above some moist soil to get new roots to grow. I hadn't anticipated that the leaves would become less rigid, which caused the clipped trunk to plunge into the wet soil. However, this didn't really seem to inhibit the rooting process, because it is now established in its own pot quite nicely.
I hadn't anticipated that the trunk would sprout all these new little rosettes, in spite of being beheaded. Here's a photo from early April 2014 where you can see some well-along rosettes coming out of the main trunk.
I decided that in addition to re-establishing the "head" portion of the plant, that I should try some other propagating methods, like yanking off these new rosettes and hovering them over moist soil. To experiment, I also ripped off some leaves and stuck them in wet soil too. Initially I tried to keep the raw areas very close to but not quite touching the moist soil, but ultimately I got lazy and just let them sink in. After a couple weeks, some of the leaves weren't really sprouting any kind of recognizable roots. So I shoved them in further and tried extra hard to remember to keep the soil moist every day. Here you can see I have potted each little propagation experiment in a small terra cotta pot over a basin of water, to help keep it moist and humid.
I think my patience with this paid off (this was a few weeks, longer than I had expected from what I'd read on the subject!).
I figured they had enough roots started to be given a more permanent home, so I potted the lot of them in this new self-draining pot with a mix of new and reused standard potting soil.
I cannibalized the remaining leaves and rosettes that again started to form on the original trunk. They are now rooting in the 4 small terra cotta pots. Hopefully in a week or so I will have photos to post of their new roots.
I'd like to create a potting arrangement with a sampling of all the different succulents I have. I will try to follow up with that some time this summer.
One last photo. This is the remains of the original plant which I decided I'd just throw into the compost pile.
EDIT
Here is a cross section of what it looks like to "suspend" your plant over the moist soil, at least using the strategy that I did.
How do you suspend the plant above the soil?
ReplyDeleteI would place the plant in a pot that has a smaller diameter than the lowest spread of leaves. The pot would only have enough soil in it so that it is just below the stem of the plant when it is resting on the rim of the pot. The problem with this was that my plant lost its rigor as it dangled over the pot, and ended up dipping into the soil. I have found that the plants form roots quicker when you just set them on the wet soil anyway. I added a sketch of this suspension idea to the post above.
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