Transcript:
Hey, guys, how’s it going today? I want to talk about succulents that have stretched out and look a little bit leggy. The actual term is called atole ation! I want to talk about what it is, how it can prevent it, and then how to fix a second– like this one that has started to atole 8 so the reason why a succulent starts to get leggy and stretched out is because they don’t have enough light, so what they’ll do is they’ll try to reach toward the closest light source that’s nearby and they can quickly go from a nice, tight, flat compact plant to a really tall, gangly, unsightly one, and once a succulent starts to do this, there’s no going back to the original plant. At this point, we have to deconstruct the whole plant. Propagate in different pieces of it, which? I’ll show you here in a minute and that way. You can try again so to prevent this from happening. What you need to do is just provide your plants with more light. Succulents need a minimum of 4 to 6 hours of good, strong light every day in order to maintain their health and their looks. So if your plant has done this, then you know that the spot that you have it in is not receiving enough light. You need to move it to a brighter window or a brighter area. And if you don’t have one of those then providing a girl light, some supplemental light throughout the day is a really smart idea, and I’ll throw a couple links down below for some girl lights that I think work really nicely now to fix that. I’ve got a pretty good example right here. This is an etch of area that started to stretch. It does not look horrible. Some of them start to stretch so fast and they get misshapen so fast that they don’t even have a nice rosette on the top anymore. And this one does, which is nice so. I’ll actually have a nice looking, smaller echeverria plant at the end of this plus. I’ll have a bunch of leaves to propagate, so I always assess each plant when I get ready to kind of deconstruct. This one is a pretty stiff. This is a edge of area. AG of itis. I believe very stiff leaves, and it was stretching toward the light and got so top-heavy that it started to pull itself out of the pot. So I’m just going to go ahead and finish the job here and pull it out because I think it’ll be a lot easier to manhandle here. I’m going to remove. In fact. I’ll use my pruners to remove most of the roots, right there to clean it off. Move this to the side and you can see what? I’m left with here. You can see all the nice, healthy leaves, So what I’m going to do is I’m going to start by trying to remove all these leaves, and we want to get as clean of a break from the original stem as possible so to do that. You just kind of wiggle The leaves back and forth and give them a slight twist. And that’s what you wanted to want them to look like right here. They’ll kind of have like a little curve where they attach to the stem. If your leaf tears, then it’s no good, you can get rid of it. It won’t propagate properly, so I’m just going to continue removing leaves until I get about up to here and then I’ll show you what to do at the top, alright? I’ve got all the leaves removed and I only wrecked one of them, which is pretty good. I think there’s 28 here that are really nice. And if I have really good success with propagating that means I could possibly have 28 more of these active areas here in several months and the stem turned out. Really beautiful -. Look at that right there. Super clean and what will happen is when I pop this all along the stem where leaves were attached to it. It’ll produce roots and probably along the bottom as well. Let me bring the pot and then. I’m going to be potting it in. It’s gonna accommodate the whole stem, which is really nice, so I’m not going to trim it. If your stem is too long, you want to make sure to trim it about one to two inches from the base of the plant that way you have a good anchor down into your soil if you are left with no stem at all if you accidentally popped it off, it’s no big deal. What you want to do is just put your soil level. Maybe a little bit further down in the pot, and then just nest the whole rosette down in the soil in a way that it’s not going to easily fall out, so the last piece of the deconstruction. I’m actually not going to do with this plant because it was already pulling out of the pot. But if the plant is still rooted in the original pot, you can cut the original stem off right at the soil level and a lot of times. If you just treat it normally like there is still a plant there and still water it. It’ll produce little babies around that stem so to propagate these pieces. It’s really important not to introduce water right away because what happens is if they have these open wounds right here, They can absorb excess water, and they can rot really quickly. So you can either leave them just like this. Take them inside. Put them in a spot that gets bright indirect light and let them sit for two to four days and dry out so that those ends have a chance to heal over. Especially if you cut the main stem, that’s a really large open wound. You want to make sure that’s nice and dry or you can go ahead and lay them all out on soil. Get them potted, and then you just want to wait about a week to water them. Because in that soil, there’s still oxygen. They’ll still have a chance to dry out it’ll. Just take them a little bit longer, so I’m gonna pot up the main rosette. First, I’m going to grab my cactus and succulent soil, and I’m gonna leave about a half inch lip. Then you can use a tool, but I’m just gonna use my finger to make a hole right down this Center of the soil so that it’s easy to introduce the stem right into the center there. Then I kind of shake the pot and tamp the soil in around the stem and add any extra soil If I need to, so that’s all there is to potting up the top portion. It already looks beautiful. I’ll just wait in about seven days to start giving it water, so let’s set this one aside, and then we will start with the leaves. Now you can propagate leaves in anything You can use the containers like regular containers. This is a boot tray. You can use saucers a baking pan, whatever you want. I just like to use a shallow surface, so I’m going to clear these off really quick, so I can put some of my cactus and succulents oil in the tray. So now I just need to lay out all of the leaves, and it’s really easy. They don’t need to be submerged. You just lay them right on top of the soil surface. All right, got all my leaves laid out and you can have fun with this part. You can make a design if you want to, or you can lay them out straight like this. I just like to make sure at the base of every leaf. There’s enough room for a baby. Succulent to form and again! I will wait to water these for about seven days, so that base will have a chance to heal over and dry and at that point. I will use a spray bottle to water them because this is such a shallow tray. It’s easier to do it this way so that you don’t make a mess and actually accidentally give them too much water, and I do make sure to check on these every few days. These need quite a bit more water than a regular pot is succulent. Well, just because there’s not as much of a reservoir to retain any moisture, so you’ll start to notice hair roots form in just a few weeks, and then they’ll start to push new little baby leaves, and it does usually take several months before you get an actual baby succulent. That’s big enough to pot up in a new pot, but it’s a really fun process just to see it evolve and kind of unfold in front of your eyes, and that’s 28 free, succulent plants, which I think is the most exciting, so that’s it, you guys that is how you fix a succulent that has, he told and gotten leggy? I actually have four more that I’m going to be working on today. That have just barely started to totally eight, and I wanted to make sure to get to them before they got too bad. So thank you so much for watching this video and we will see you in the next one bye.