Echevarias Galore (September Succulent Sweep #026-#038)

I don’t historically have good luck with echevarias. If I have a plant die on me, it’s probably an echeveria. They’re relativly common, though, mostly because they seem to grow at a pretty fast rate compared to other succulents, and they’re relatively easy to propagate. I’ve made a switch from trying to grow them in gritty mixes (I save that for haworthias and other things in the aloe family, mostly) to a peat based mix with extra perlite, and mostly I’ve switched to using square plastic pots similar to 4″ nursery pots with extra drainage holes… and that seems to be doing a bit better for me.

My ridiculously frilly echeveria “Neon Breakers”.

My small Perle Von Nurenburg.

Here are both halves of an echeveria ‘Lolo’, one of my first orders. Its a very dense plant, even when it gets a bit etoliated it still seems to pump out a lot of leaves. At one point it had stretched enough that I decided to behead – I left the rooted stump, which is currently sprouting two new rosettes; the main part of the plant rerooted and continued growing quite happily, and a few of the leaves from the middle of the plant seem to be doing okay in my propagation tray although compared to other echeverias, they’re a bit slower to propagate from a leaf.

Around the same time I did a similar thing to my echeveria ‘chroma’; I was started that within the first two weeks of cutting the top of the plant off, it started a flower spike – and still kept growing enough to keep right on stretching while I had it out of direct sunlight since it had no roots. I don’t know how it kept managing to grow that fast with no roots – unless it pumped out a whole new set that quickly. I’ll likely have to repeat the experience sometime this winter, or at the very least spring.

When I beheaded the Chroma, I also cut off two small brancing rosettes and rooted those as well; they were doing quite fine for a long time, but shortly after picture day one succumbed to rot mid stem- and the other quickly followed. Supposedly this variety is very prone to branching, so it’s likely I’ll have a chance to repeat this experience shortly.

Two views of the same plant – echeveria moranii.  It has a new rosette coming in from the soil line.

Echeveria Purpusorum – a strange, pointed – and slow growing variety.

My echeveria nodulosa.  Around here, these are ridiculously common, and they seem to be very large hardy branching plants – but I hardly ever see them not etoliated in this area.

One of the first two plants I had die was an echeveria ‘black prince’ – but I managed to salvage a few leaves from it, and these are two of my first successful attempts to grow a new plant from pieces of one that died. “Black Prince” so far is the easiest and fastest plant I’ve tried to grow from a leaf.  I have several other leaves with smaller rosettes growing in my propagation tray.

Thinking back, this is how the perle, original black prince, and nodulosa looked when I first got them in February.

And here was the state of the chroma, moranii, purpusorum, and neon breakers when I first got them back in March.