Succulents and More™

Six weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit Micro Paradox, a tissue culture lab in the Sacramento area. They propagate a wide variety of plants — everything from fruit and shade trees to shrubs, perennials, house plants, and succulents. Check out my post from early August to find out more about tissue culture and Micro Paradox and to see photos from our tour. Aerial view of Micro Paradox facility (image © 2026 Micro Paradox) The bulk of Micro Paradox’s sales is wholesale to other growers and retail nurseries; a selection of their plants are available to consumers through their Etsy store and their MicroStarts retail website . In other words, you can’t just drive up to their facility and buy plants right then and there. Except on Friday, September 25, you can. Micro Paradox will have a plant sale from 3:00 to 6:30 pm. The sale will feature some of Micro Paradox’s unique agaves, houseplants, fruit trees, and more, as well as overgrown stock. There’ll also be a “fill-a-tray” promotio...

As you may know, quite a few of the plants we love and have growing in our gardens aren’t propagated vegetatively, through seeds or offsets, but start life in a lab. This includes not only many of my beloved agaves and mangaves, but also most commercially grown perennials and even the orchids you find in grocery stores and garden centers. And if you think plant tissue culture (micropropagation) is a relatively new thing, you might be surprised to find out that orchids have been tissue cultured on a large scale since the 1960s. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to go on a field trip with my volunteer group from the UC Davis Arboretum Teaching Nursery to visit a plant tissue culture lab in the Sacramento area. I already had a high-level understanding of what tissue culture is and how it’s done, but I had never seen a lab in operation, so I was stoked to go. I read somewhere that a tissue culture lab is essentially a plant factory combined with a surgical operating room. That’s a ...