Wednesday, January 14, 2015

My succulent problem

My name is Katina and I have a succulent/cacti problem.

I purchase succulents and cacti (and collect them from other gardeners) and I never plant them anywhere. I'm so terrible.

They eventually end up in various pots. Unfortunately, I can never remember which ones are hardy and which ones aren't, though I'd guess that about 90% of them are hardy. To be safe when it gets cold outside, I just bring them ALL inside. Eventually, when I don't remember how much I paid for the ones I actually did buy, I'll probably just leave them all outside and if I lose some, I lose some.  But, like I said, that won't happen until I don't remember how much money I spent.


This year I purchased a shelving unit to try to organize stuff a little better.  Obviously I should have bought a bigger unit.

This year, it's gotten so bad that I've even expanded into the extra bedroom.  The plants in the bedroom are the ones that are tropical and therefore won't even go back outside until after the last frost date in March.  The plants in here are a regular plumeria, an unscented plumeria, my ginger plant (which is dormant and forming corms), and my pineapple from a store-bought one.  I should probably really think about downsizing the plumerias or at least figure out how much I can prune them back.


So, this is my problem.  I'm a little surprised the husband hasn't said anything about it yet.  He'll probably wait until everything is potted and out in the yard and then he'll complain about how he has to do "the ministry of silly walks" to get around all of them.

5 comments:

Claude said...

Heres a tip someone i knew used with great success... when you but a plant thats hardy, put a blue plastic tag in the pot. He cut them from plastic laundry bottles.

The plumerias can be cut back quite a bit, and treated like succulent cuttings. Stems 8 to 12 inches are allowed to harden off for at least a week, but plumeria cuttings can go a couple of months probably. then planted directly in soil, they will root and begin growing. The stumps will resprout new branches.

Anna said...

Oh my! Your succulent problem sounds like it would make a great episode of that television show about hoarders!! I love it! What we don't do for our plants.

katina said...

Claude - That's a brilliant idea. Perhaps that will be my goal for 2015 - research all my succulents/cacti and figure out if they're hardy.

Unknown said...

Hey!

I wanted to let you know that I just promoted your post on the Glass garden (6/2013) over on
nxnagardentour.blogspot.com

I hope this is OK. Please let me know if you would rather not have your blog linked. FYI - I did not hotlink the photo, and I made sure it was very, very clear who owned the photo. Again, please let me know if this is not OK, or you would rather have me water-mark it.

You can email me at info@lovenorthaustin.com

-Mary R.
editor, lovenorthaustin.com

katina said...

@Mary -

Thanks for the head's up and for asking to use my photos from the NXNA garden tour last year. Please feel free to continue to use them to pimp for this year's tour (I've added it to my "events" section on the main page), and I can't wait for it this year - last year's was awesome.