Back in the early days of my succulent adventures which stretch back, ooh, six weeks or more, I was young, idealistic and up for experimentation. (1) Thus I ended up setting my assortment of newly-purchased plants into two containers. One, a wide, flat bowl, had eight of my new acquisitions in it, while the other was a more artistic affair. I'd seen in a book, a 'planting suggestion' whereby some old broken pots were stacked together to make a sort of ad-hoc rockery affair. I thought it looked great and a few pots were 'modified' to allow me to create my own version.
When posting about my new creations online, some wiser heads, who have clearly been in the succulent game longer than me, pointed out that these plants quite often have different requirements in terms of light, water and so forth, and so putting them all in together my not be the *best* idea.
This may have been good advice.
An Aeonium (Cornish Pixie) which I'd put in the large flat bowl was a tiny plant (2) and as the rest of it's bowl-mates got settled in, the little Pixie began to get lost between and Aloe and a Delosperma. So it got rescued and put into its own small pot where it seems to be much happier. (3).
As for the 'artistic rockery', while I loved the look of it, it did lose soil and grit every time I picked it up and at least one plant, the Crassula Sarcocaulis, had started to look decidedly unhappy. I'm not sure what it's supposed to do over winter, but it looks to my untrained eye a bit like Rosemary, and this particular example had gone from looking healthy to having all it's lower leaves turn a yellowy-brown and start to fall off. The upper ones still looked ok.
So I decided to cut my losses, picked up some small pots and, making up a small batch of soil / grit / perlite, repotted the four plants a couple of days ago. The Crassula, along with Aeonium 'Barbatum' and Sedum 'Red Carpet' all went happily into new pots. However, when I lifted the last of the four, Crassula 'Minima' I was a bit concerned.
The plant - at least the bit above soil level that I could see, appeared to be fine. Glossy, plump leaves, nothing falling off or turning an alarming colour, no signs or rot or bugs. But when I lifted it, there didn't seem to be any roots at all. For a plant the size of...
/searches for a suitable comparison
...about the size of a lemon, I was expecting a fair sized root ball, but there was hardly anything there at all. My wife, she of the green fingers and considerably more gardening experience, said that some of these plants don't, in many cases, have a huge root system and not to worry about it too much.
All four were repotted. The soil they had come out of was bone dry (though no sign of wrinkling on the leaves), so I gave them a drink and a few days on, they all seem fairly happy. We shall see how they fare over the coming weeks and months.
I was going to see how I got on with my small collection before buying anything else. When asking for advice in the early days, plenty of people had said "Don't go crazy - you can't buy everything!", but even so I'd created a 'Want list" after browsing a few plant and nursery websites. And then Corseside Nursery popped a post up on Facebook saying that they were going to have a sale of plants in a few days. These were, mostly, larger plants than they'd typically sell, but given that many seemed to be in one litre posts, they weren't going to be huge, and you just knew that they'd be top quality.
Be silly not to just have a look.
The sale worked thus: Rosie and her Mum would post pictures of everything for sale at 7pm, and the first person to comment on a particular picture would be able to buy that plant. I had a quick whip through, saw three that leapt out at me (two of which were on my Wanted list, and started commenting.
A few days later, the nice man from DHL turned up with a box containing a Crassula Ovata (the Money tree), an Aeonium Haworthii and an Aloe Nobilis. They've all been repotted, labelled up and are, if I do say so myself, looking splendid.
Right, Now, no more buying. For a while, anyway,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
(1) Well. Two of these things, anyway.
(2) I guess the clue is in the name.
(3) At least until about half an hour ago, when I knocked the pot over and had to do some hasty repotting. I think it'll survive.
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