Succulents and More has a new crop of Aloe babies received from a fellow collector found on facebook. Wait, you mean facebook is good for something?
While buying larger specimens provides instant gratification, there’s something even more special about young plants,barely out of seedlinghood. I think of them as the botanical equivalent of babies and toddlers—so full of life and promise, virtually all their life still ahead of them.
Click through for the pictures of the bare root baby Aloes. Fine.
The Aloe arborescens are blooming up a storm all over Berkeley. Everywhere you turn there are those signature orange spikes. The hummingbirds must be going wild.
We planted these large Succulent planters along the upper portions of University, near downtown. They don’t go all the way up to the school, yet. Maybe next year there will be enough money to extend them all the way up.
Photo has been filtered. Berkeley isn’t actually those retro colors.
Yesterday was a how to for succulent wall panels. Today we present Succulent Terrariums. But I can’t really explain all that well in words how to make them. You know, you plant some succulents in a piece of glass. Add some charcoal at the bottom, and some toys on top. Woohoo!
And a big and fancy succulent terrarium, although it’s hard to tell from the photo how much bigger it is than the others above.
If you look close, you can see a little dinosaur there, and you can compare it to the one in the top photo for size.
We make them! Right here in the Berkeley California workshop we call a Cactus Jungle.
How do we make them? Well we start with the finest of recycled wood boards and make a box! 4 sides and a back, with a wire mesh front. The material inside is green moss, i.e. sphagnum moss, with a backing of rock wool. That’s it! No soil, never no way.
So then you lay the completed box flat on a table and poke the moss with a pointy stick, or a pencil if you prefer, to generate a small hole that you can stick a succulent cutting into. Lots of succulent cuttings. Sedums, Crassulas and Sempervivums work well. An occasional Echeveria but not too many.
Make sure the cuttings are healed over by letting it dry for a few days before sticking it in the box. So this may be a multi-day process.
Then you let the box sit in a warm sunny location for 4-8 weeks until the cuttings have rooted into the boxes.
We also use greening pins to help hold the succulents in place, because we do have to transport the boxes to our greenhouse to root, and then back again, but you don’t need to use greening pins if you don’t want to. However, after the box is fully rooted and you want to hang it up on a wall, then you might want to check to see if any of the succulents have been less than fully rooted at that point at which time you may want to use some greening pins yourself to help keep the loose succulents from falling out.
We’re very excited to see that one of our large Yucca rostratas is in full bloom!
This is not really the largest we have right now, but hopefully this means the single head at the top of this 3ft. tree will start to split and then maybe it will be a 2 head Yucca! Or even a 3 head Yucca? Maybe!
