Succulents and More™

After a long, hot, destructive, and depressing summer, all I want is to put the misery behind me and move forward. I’ve pulled out all the aloes and agaves that rotted as a result of the heat domes we had in July and August ( some mentioned here , but there have been others as well) and I’ve done some replanting, as you’ll see later in this post. In addition, I’ve removed a few other plants that simply didn’t do it for me anymore. One of them is Agave ‘Ripple Express’, a variegated form of ‘Mr Ripple’ . I had high hopes for ‘Ripple Express’, but I was never quite satisfied with how it looked. Two years ago, maybe even a year ago, I would have simply accepted it for what it was and moved on. Not so now. When a plant doesn’t play its part, it gets replaced. Agave ‘Mr Ripple’ Agave ‘Mr Ripple’ You can guess what happened: I took advantage of our first curbside yard waste pickup of the season I replaced ‘Ripple Express’ with a Jeremy Spath hybrid, Agave bovicornuta × parrasana . It’s jus...

Winter damage is almost unavoidable. No surprise there. Last winter, we had multiple consecutive days of rain with almost no break. Some aloes developed rot from water sitting in the crown and/or in the flowers, but most grew out of it. I expect stuff like that in the winter. What I don’t expect is agaves rotting in the middle of the summer. But that’s exactly what’s been happening this year. Here are a few good, but sad, examples: Agave chazaroi The first victim was the large Agave chazaroi you see above. I noticed rot developing in the center in early July. It progressed so rapidly, there was no stopping it. All I could do was dig it up and toss it in the yard waste bin. Now there’s a large hole where the agave had been. The second example is a large Mangave ‘Mission to Mars’. I originally bought it in September 2017 in a 4" pot and it has been in the same spot in the sidewalk bed since 2020. It always looks great during the cooler months, but in the summer, the outer leaves f...