Start Doing This Now For Awesome Succulents

Succulents can become leggy, untamed and a bit of a mess if you don't know the things to look out for. They're often misunderstood but once you know how they want to grow and the things they like they're not that hard at all. Well I've got some great tips to get your succulents firing on all cylinders as well as a great way you can elevate your succulents into a centerpiece for a super simple terrarium setup that doesn't involve 500 different ingredients and today's video is Sedums are a very popular type of succulent but chances are you're not allowing them to grow the way they want. They're actually a ground cover type of plant meaning they want to grow horizontally and spread over a low area. For the longest time I didn't understand this and I'm kicking myself for it. I just didn't do the research on the plant and kept wondering why I was constantly wanting to leave the pot. I'd end up cutting it back and trying to force it to grow vertically by tying it on bamboo sticks. What an absolute mess. I've now got one that I've left to do its thing with loving life taking over my windowsill in my bedroom suffocating all my other plants. So let your Sedum crawl and sprawl. You'll notice that it will grow long stems horizontally and the new stems will pop up along the way. I must say I'm digging its style much more these days now that I'm not so ignorant to its needs. For happy and thriving succulents you should be watering them infrequently but deeply. It tends to be something that flummoxes a lot of people if you just follow a couple of basic principles you should be fine. It's best to think about plants in a natural habitat and consider what they would normally experience and then replicate this as much as possible in our homes. This is how we get thriving plants. Succulents are native to arid and semi-arid regions around the world such as deserts and dry mountainous areas. They've adapted to survive in harsh conditions with limited water availability. They've developed fleshy stems and leaves that store lots of water allowing them to survive periods of drought. So they experience long periods of drought followed by heavy rain that replenishes them with the water they need. The heavy rain part is the bit that lots of folks forget. You may be great at letting your succulent dry out for weeks or even months and if you're not giving it a heavy rain it's not going to be happy. You see a light shower on top of the soil just isn't going to do the job particularly because the soil has probably become a little bit hydrophobic since the last time you gave it a drink. It's surprising just how much water you need to give your succulent to fully saturate it. It takes a lot of drenches. You want the center of the root ball to receive water. It can take some effort to get water in there due to the dense matter roots and this is I like bottom watering my succulents. Add water to the cash pot they live in. Allow the water to wick up the soil slowly hydrating the whole root ball. I've got a video all about bottom watering that I'll link to at the end of this video. The other part of watering your succulent is letting them dry out fully in between watering just like they dry out in the wild. Just because the soil is dry doesn't mean that it's ready for a drink. I do like to probe my succulents with my trusty moisture meter and wait for the soil to be at its lowest driest point and I then look at the leaves and try to see if they're starting to wrinkle. This is a good sign they need a top up of water. If they are still very firm and plump then I'll leave it another few days and then check again. But don't worry about it too much. As long as you keep your plant in a nice free draining potting mix you can't really go that wrong. They won't be sat in water for long so the leaves shouldn't go mushy. So even if you're a little early with your watering it shouldn't die. A quick tip when it comes to buying succulents in the store is to carefully inspect the leaves. Many folks, and I'm not naming names, are a little too close and personal when it comes to inspecting plants in the store and become a bit too touchy-feely. Touching the farina on the leaves of succulents, the powdery coating that you can see, can cause big problems for the plant with the leaves turning mushy. They don't like to have their protective coating taken off so pick plants that have their coating more or less intact. You probably also want to think twice about signing up for a loyalty card while you're at checkout too. Have you ever signed up to a loyalty card at the garden centre or big box store and started receiving spam emails or random phone calls? This has happened to me lots of times. You see my spam folder in my email account. Well planty friend, it's time to take control of your personal information and protect your privacy. Imagine your personal data as a precious houseplant thriving in a digital world. The problem is there are thousands of shifty data brokers out there ready to sell your information to the highest bidder without you even knowing about it. It's like an army of invisible pests invading your virtual indoor jungle and this is where today's video sponsor Incogni comes in. Incogni is like having a team of plant-loving superheroes fighting on your behalf. They reach out to those data brokers and request that they delete any information they have about you and just like a self-watering pot, Incogni does all the messy work for you Imagine this, you sign up for a free newsletter and suddenly spam starts flooding your inbox like weeds taking over your garden. With Incogni those weeds don't stand a chance. It's like having your own personal gardener who keeps your garden pristine protecting you from invasive intrusions. Now here's the cool part, the first 100 people to use the code Sheffield Made Plant at the link below will get a very juicy 60% off Incogni. So don't mess about and head over to the link below to claim your discount. Just like your houseplants, your personal data deserves to thrive in a safe and secure environment. Echeverias get leggy, there's not much you can do to prevent this. It's the way they grow. Echeveria, Echeveria, Echeveria, Echeveria. The central stem slowly creeps up and as they age they lose their lower leaves. Pull those lower leaves off and you end up with a lanky plant that can look a bit silly like one of those inflatable tube men. This happens to mine every single year even though I have it on a nice bright west-facing windowsill in my bedroom. If you don't mind the look then leave them be of course, but if you want that full look again just simply cut the stalk and replant it into fresh soil. Echeverias root surprisingly easily. Grab a clean set of pruners and cut the stalk just above the soil line. Remove any leaves at the bottom that are starting to dry out. They'll only continue to dry off so we might as well remove them now. At this point you can let the cut end callous over for a few hours or overnight to prevent the stalk taking on too much water and motting. Because I'm a risk taker I always go straight into the soil and I've not had any problems with rot before but that's entirely up to you. And don't throw away the plant you just cut either. It should sprout a new shoot or two within a few weeks if you give it the right care. Grab a brand new pot suitable for the size of cutting and fill it with your favourite succulent mix. I use pots with drainage holes unless I'm making a terrarium. It makes looking after succulents so much easier. It means that the plant doesn't sit in soggy soil after watering. For the soil I use a simple mix I make myself of about three parts compost to two parts perlite. The compost will provide the water retention and nutrient value and the high amount of perlite will make sure it's free draining to avoid the succulent sitting in soggy soil. Feel free to add bits of bark or whatever you want though. Succulents plus soggy soil equals a mushy mess. To make things a little easier I like to moisten the soil just a little bit to firm it up so that everything stays in place when I'm planting it in. Plant the stalk deep enough so the leaves are just above the soil line but not touching. Give it a nice deep drink of water making sure that all the excess has come out of the drainage holes. Give it a good few minutes to allow all the water to flow out. I now like to top dress with some small decorative stones. This is something I've started doing in the last few months to really smarten the appearance of my succulents. It also stops the leaves touching the wet soil which is a bonus. If leaves sit on wet soil it tends to turn them mushy and mutton which is not what you want. Place it somewhere nice and bright and watch as it becomes leggy all over again in the next few months and you have to do the whole thing again next year. You might be thinking why go through all of the palaver of doing this when you can just repot the plant and bury the stem deeper into the soil. This isn't really a good idea though because the stem will most likely rot from being buried in wet soil and your Echeveria will just die. Making a succulent terrarium can be a wonderful thing to really elevate your plant collection in your home. It doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as big, small, simple or complicated as you want. I see lots of tutorials online where they're using an array of stones, pebbles, moss, peat, soil, charcoal and all the rest and I'm just thinking why not just keep it nice and simple. Lots of tutorials tell you to put a layer of stones or gravel at the bottom of the terrarium to act as a drainage layer primarily because we don't have drainage holes to work with. This drainage layer just doesn't work though. What tends to happen is we keep a layer of stones at the bottom with a layer of soil on top hoping that the water will run through the soil safely and collect at the bottom where the stones are away from the roots. In reality though the only thing that is going to happen is the soil is going to act like a sponge and soak up all the water and then only release the water to the drainage layer when it's fully saturated. You're moving the saturated layer nearer to the roots. You're much better off just having soil with some decorative stones on top and being careful with your watering. By all means have layers with pebbles and soil for aesthetic reasons but don't do it for drainage reasons. Now grab yourself a nice glass bowl to make your display. Open terrariums are great for succulents because they don't need the high humidity of closed terrariums and are generally easier to set up and maintain. You don't need to be adding springtails to your succulent terrarium to keep everything nice and clean. Like I say you can keep your terrarium as small or as big as you want. You can have a bunch of succulents in a large bowl or a single one in a little jar, the choice is yours. In fact if you're unsure of the process then a small jar might be the best approach to take when you're just starting out. Add a base layer of your favourite succulent potting soil to the bowl and then add your plants. The world is your oyster when it comes to the succulents to add. Just make sure they're a similar size and grow at a similar rate. You don't want a fast growing sedum outgrowing a bunch of Echeverias and taking over the whole bowl. I like choosing Echeverias of different colours but you can add Haworthias and little cacti too. Take the plants out of their pots, remove most of the soil and then plant them into the soil of the terrarium. Once you're happy with the placement it's now time to have some fun and decorate the top. Decorative pebbles are a great option to give them that rocky look and you can add other things to make it look interesting. I like to add a few large stones for contrast and you can even green it up a little with some moss. You can add a figure or two to make it even more fun. Give the terrarium some water trying to keep the water from splashing on the leaves and then place it somewhere nice and bright. You shouldn't need to maintain it too much except if the Echeverias become leggy in which case you probably want to chop them back and re-plant them as I showed earlier in this video. I mentioned earlier that I bottom water my succulents. To understand the many benefits of doing this as well as a few important things to watch out for you should watch this video here and check out my Patreon page linked in the description of this video for bonus content if you like the channel.