Here is one of my Mangave ‘Foxy Lady’ (I have two) in its prime, a year and a half ago:
Mangave ‘Foxy Lady’ in April 2025
In the spring, this ‘Foxy Lady’ started to flower. As is the case for the vast majority of agaves, manfredas, and mangaves (hybrids between the two), flowering is the end of the road. In most cases, the pollinated flowers become seed pods, but some varieties go a different way: They make bulbils on the flower stalk — baby plants that are genetic clones of the mother. Check out this post from early July to see the flower stalk on the Mangave ‘Foxy Lady’ above. It was laden with hundreds of bulbils.
As I mentioned in my July post, I pulled off a few bulbils as an experiment. They rooted very quickly, so on August 14, I began to harvest bulbils in earnest:
Harvesting ‘Foxy Lady’ bulbils on August 14
Some bulbils are fused together like this
I filled a seedling tray with a well-draining soil mix (50% garden soil, 50% lava rock) and then stuck the bulbils into it. Straightforward and completely low-tech.
Seedling tray filled with bulbils in well-draining soil mix
Fast-forward a month to September 12, 2026. Roots coming out of the bottom of the seedling tray Kyle is holding — that’s a very good sign!
I gently removed the rooted bulbils and potted them up in 3" pots. Kyle watered them in:
Here they are, ready to spread their fledgling wings and fly:
32 potted up ‘Foxy Lady’ bulbils
That’s batch #1, 32 individually potted ‘Foxy Lady’ bulbils. The photos above were taken on Saturday, September 12, 2026.
The next day, September 13, 2026, I harvested more of the bulbils still attached to the flower stalk:
Since there were so many, I discarded the runts and stuck the larger ones in another tray filled with well-draining soil mix (essentially a repeat of what I’d done a month earlier):
Batch #2, September 13, 2026
With virtually no bulbils left on the flower stalk, I decided to dig out the ‘Foxy Lady’ clump — the bloomed-out mother plant, the offsets that flowered sympathetically and are goners (see my July post for an explanation), and the viable offsets that, together with the bulbils, form the next generation:
Mother plant
Viable offsets on the left
The bloomed-out rosettes, big and small, went in the green waste bin. Below are the pups after I cleaned them up a bit. Most have roots already:
Harvested pups
The four largest pups look ready to take off: one is in a 2-gallon pot, the other three are in 1-gallon pots:
The pups look pale because they hadn’t been getting full sun. They should color up quickly now.
There’s nothing special or difficult about what I’ve done. If you have a mangave (or agave) that flowers and produces bulbils, wait until they are a good size and then simply pop them off and stick them in soil. That’s really all there is to it. You may not want 60 or 70, but try a few.
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