How to Propagate Succulents

g'day welcome to like cultivate my name's Steve most succulents are an incredibly easy plant to propagate and with our recent move we've been looking at ways that we can inexpensively plant out our garden so let's have a look at ways of propagating succulents you can see in front of me a range of succulents that I've actually salvaged from a friend's garden these were in many instances just simply growing in cracks between rocks and just growing out of pebbles and literally in most instances they had just simply fallen there and taken root and started to grow but let's have a look at what we've got here this this first one which actually wasn't growing in a in a crack or something but was on in a plant was what we refer to as often known as flapjack or paddle plant it belongs to the culantro group of succulents but you can see it is a it is quite a beautiful large paddle shaped leaf to this particular succulent now I can propagate this particular succulent by simply removing a leaf carefully from the base of the leaf from the plant and then leaving it for a number of days and you can see that that is what I've done here and the end of the leaf here has actually calloused over now what we need to do is to take this leaf and plant it literally so to plant out our petal plant leaf it's just a matter of borrowing a hole within our potting mixture placing the leaf into that hole and then firming it down now we will need to keep this this potting mixture nice and moist for a number of weeks but apart from that that's as difficult I think that we'll have a look at how we actually propagate these rosettes of succulents which I salvaged from that friend's backyard firstly these ones here you can see have still got roots on them and we can just simply pop those straight into some soil and I'll do that in a minute but you know not all succulents can be propagated as simply and straight from leaves one way in which you can tell whether or not you can propagate directly from a leaf is by just simply taking a leaf and pulling gently and if the leaf detaches like that one did well then that is most likely going to be able to be propagated directly from the leaf an example of where that might not occur is say for example with an aloe vera plant if you were to detach a leaf there all that's probably going to end up is that it's going to rot and not actually propagate you can propagate aloe vera another way I'm going to leave that for another video but let's have a look at these and how we go about propagating these first of all this here is an example of one of these rosettes style succulents having been left or the leaf I should say just having been left and you can see how new plants new rosettes have developed at the base of this leaf in order to get that growth it is simply nothing more than taking this leaf and just laying it down onto a dirt surface and you will get that growth beginning within a matter of days certainly within a week or two but with these sorts of succulents where we've already got that full rosette development and we've got some roots it is nothing more complicated than just simply taking that a small hole in our potting mixture and then just simply placing firming around like so small hole placing it into the potting mixture firm around and there we go the last succulent that we look at is this one here which actually has quite a long growth habit once it actually approaches maturity in order to propagate this you'll notice that I've just simply broken off but it has been laying for about a week and you can see the end of this succulent has calloused over again as was the case with the paddle plant cutting that we did a little bit earlier now that we've got it to this point it is just with these rosettes it's just no more complicated than just taking this cutting and placing it into the soil and then ensuring that we keep water up to this over the coming weeks it will only be a matter of a few weeks before they start to strike roots and once established in this little container I will then move them over into either a larger container or in fact into the ground some particular conditions for us to consider for our succulent growth firstly the soil mixture that you grow it in you can buy especially prepared succulent mixture or alternatively what you can do is just get some normal potting mix and mix some sand through it the reason for this is because irrespective of the type of succulent they all prefer and grow best in well-drained soil they definitely cannot have wet feet and so therefore it is critical that whatever medium you use to grow your succulents in is well draining so normal potting mixture with a bit of sand mix through it or alternatively by one of the pre-mixed succulent mixtures with regards to where they grow let's firstly talk about the Sun succulents will need to be in a location where they get full Sun you'll have trouble growing succulents full-time inside you're going to have to find a place inside where they do get at least a good amount of Sun if you wish to grow inside so outside is best in a place where they have full sir in terms of temperature they like it to be warm but there is a misconception around that succulents will only grow and really hot dry arid conditions not quite true there are some that will grow in quite cool conditions but generally speaking it basically warmish now hope you've enjoyed this video can I please ask you to go down to the thumbs up and give us a thumbs up subscribe to this channel and go to our website I cultivate dotnet become a member of the community it's there that you can continue and be a part of the gardening conversation thanks for watching