Sprucing Up Our Succulents

We are obsessed with succulents at our house. I’m always scouring the garden stores looking for new, unique varieties. I love ones with different colors, ones that flower, and ones that have unusual leaves and shapes. I’m not always sure of the names and their origins, but I love them anyway. We aren’t able to grow them in the ground because of our wet Louisiana clay, but we can definitely grow them in pots. Every year around this time, we always try to do a little sprucing up of some of our plants, and the succulents definitely needed a little help.

We’ve had really good luck growing them on our patio. Our patio is kind of a microclimate. It’s surrounded on three sides by the outside walls of our house and almost everything grows like crazy. The succulents are not an exception. We get plenty of sunshine and we only have to move them inside when the temperature falls below freezing, but that’s only a few times a year here in Louisiana.

Several of the plants have gotten really large, but we decided that we would keep them for one more year before replacing them. This year we decided to just remove some of the dead plants and add in a few small varieties and new rocks for drainage. We have four different pots of succulents, all with different plants. Each pot is very different and all have at least 1-2 large plants to anchor the pot.

We added a few new plants to some of the pots including a String of Pearls, a String of Bananas, a Burro’s Tail, a Zebra Haworthia, and a few other Hens and Chicks.

The succulents use a special type of soil specifically made for cactus and citrus that helps with drainage. Adding rocks to the top of the pot helps with drainage and also looks great.

Removing the dead and overgrown plants is a careful process. We use a gardening knife made for measuring, weeding, and cultivating. These kinds of knives are perfect because you can get into a small area without difficulty.

I’m so looking forward to seeing how these succulent pots grow over the summer. Look closely at the picture and you can see lots of baby plants growing. I’m hoping that all of these fill in this container over the warm growing months.