Blood, sweat, and bromeliads: tackling an overgrown dyckia clump

One of the plants Kyle and I got from San Marcos Growers on our recent Santa Barbara trip is Dyckia platyphylla. This terrestrial bromeliad is attractive, easy to grow, hardy for a dyckia (15-20°F), and yet hard to find. I don’t know why. Maybe because dyckias in general don’t get much love? Both Kyle and I think it would make a great landscape plant in zone 8b and up.

We bought three 2-gallon pots of Dyckia platyphylla at San Marcos, intending to divide the clumps into individual plants for future sales.

Three dense clumps of Dyckia platyphylla

I decided to tackle one of the clumps to see how easy (or hard) it is to divide:

Many individual rosettes...

...packed together tightly

Below is the unpotted clump. I had recently watered it, but you wouldn’t know looking at the root ball. It was so dense that water wasn’t able to penetrate it to any meaningful degree.

Since the root ball was so dry, I soaked it overnight:

Better.

The next step was to assemble the tools: my Root Slayer soil knife (by the same company that makes my trusty Root Slayer shovel) and a generic bread knife.

Root Slayer soil knife and bread knife

The most important item, though, was protection for my hands. Dyckias are fiercely armed and quickly draw blood. For the last year or so, I’ve been using ThornArmor 3092 gloves made by HexArmor. They’re specially made for handling cacti and other thorny plants, and I’ve been using them a lot when working around poky succulents. In fact, I can pick up and carry a cactus using nothing else but these gloves. 

When I bought my gloves, they were in the $40 range; now they’re a little over $60. Yikes. But even at $60, I would consider them essential.

ThornArmor 3092 gloves

I first cut away the fibrous root mass that had encircled the root ball using the bread knife. This sounds easier than it was. I had to use quite a bit of elbow grease because the roots were tough.

Initially I’d thought I could simply pull off entire rosettes, one at a time. That works with some plants (see below), but definitely not with this one. The rosettes were so firmly attached that I had to push my soil knife deep into the clump and use quite a bit of force to pry off the rosettes. In hindsight, a small folding saw like this might have been a better choice. Or better yet, a reciprocating saw (Sawzall). Lesson learned for next time.

After I had freed the individual rosettes, I pulled off most of the dried leaves. I didn’t want to go too far, so I left some that had dried tips but were otherwise still functional, i.e. capable of performing photosynthesis.

After an hour of sweat and tears (no blood, thanks to the ThornArmor gloves), this is what I ended up with: 13 pots — 12 with individual plants, one with a small cluster. All the pieces I pulled/pried off had at least some roots, so they should establish pretty quickly, especially in this heat.

Remember how I said I thought that it would be easy to pull rosettes off the Dyckia platyphylla clump, but that it wasn’t? 

Here’s a succulent where it was easy: Agave oteroi ‘Filigree’.

Agave oteroi ‘Filigree’ was selected at San Marcos “for its tight growth and long eyelash like spines on the margin. It originated as a seedling from seed we collected in February 2005 from an Agave oteroi ... that bloomed in Santa Barbara succulent enthusiast Dr. David Tufenkian’s north Goleta, California garden in 2004. San Marcos Growers named and introduced this plant in 2010.”

The typical form of Agave oteroi ‘Filigree‘ is solitary. San Marcos also discovered a variety they call ‘Filigree Devil‘, “a small tight mounding agave with 3 inch wide tightly clustered rosettes.” What you see below is in between the two: tightly clustered rosettes, but larger than the typical ‘Filigree Devil’.

It was difficult watering the clump efficiently, as evidenced by the many dead leaves, so pulling it apart was the only logical thing to do. And it was soooooo much easier than the Dyckia platyphylla clump above!

It was so easy pulling individual rosettes off the clump

When I was done, I had 11 one-gallon pots, most with one rosette per pot, a few with multiples:

If all things go as planned, some of these will be available at our upcoming fall plant sale, both Dyckia platyphylla and Agave oteroi ‘Filigree’ (ish).

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