Transcript:
Its Lauren Eubanks have designed for serenity with your succulent tip of the day and I am in my back garden again. It is mid-february here in San Diego, California And it’s time to go after this run Amok e sedum, this Apple snapper talam is completely obscuring my view of my pond. It’s gotten way too tall now. This is not the first time. I have sized this plant and it won’t be the last, but I thought I’d show you how I do this. Now you can go ahead and take your shovel and dig it out or you can cut the branches off first and then dig out the stump. I recommend cutting the branches first so that you don’t damage the plant when you go after the root ball. So don’t really don’t worry too much about where you cut right now because we can always size this later right now. I just want to take off all the branches so that I can get a better Look at what I’m dealing with. In the way of a stump. This is pretty tough wood too. And you’ll also notice that this plant is blooming right now. I’m not going to disturb the blooms because they did just open and the bees are loving it. So I shall let that ride. You cannot screw this up. It does like I said it doesn’t matter where you cut, just get with it. Get her done already! This space can breathe, and it’s gonna be such a surprise to to see what’s down here. I don’t even know anymore. It’s been so long, all right, okay now. Some of you will invariably ask Well, you know, can’t you just leave? It like that, and the answer is absolutely. I could leave it like this. It’s pruned down hard. It’s gonna start throwing off little plantlets from the base of where I’ve cut, but that’s gonna take too long, and I don’t want to look at this ugly hacked-up stump at all. So that’s why I will be taking this out. I don’t want to look at this, but if you don’t mind the look of this, you can absolutely leave it like that. If you want, okay, let’s see what it’s gonna take here to get this out. Oh wow, okay. I think I’m gonna be taking a lot of my little senecio here with me when I do this. Yeah, okay. I’m gonna grab the shovel because I really. I don’t want to have to reset all that Senecio too, if I can help it. I just want to get the sedum out of here. Oh, my goodness! I’ve got some beautiful echeverria Sahara in here. I did not know they look great. I was gonna do this yesterday, but I was filling up the pond, and I forgot that I had the hose in there and I flooded this whole area, huh? So I had to abandon that idea when Greg and I did this garden. This used to be a lawn and we solarized the lawn, basically because we couldn’t afford to do the garden when we first moved into the house, so we just ran black plastic over it so that we felt like we were accomplishing. Something killed off. The lawn took us about a year to get the money together to start this garden. We collected a lot of project leftovers, and you know, castoffs and cuttings. Most of these plants were started from cuttings, but we would. We tried some. Dg colored DG! It was really popular back in the day like Cocoa, Brown and you know all these other different colors, and they were awful. The dark brown left. What look like sweat stains around all the plants and we hated it, so we layered upon layered upon layered of different materials until we found the ground cover that we liked which you can’t even see anymore because the plants have grown in so thickly, But my point that. I’m making with this story is that there’s a lot of really good drainage. So despite the fact that I flooded this area just yesterday, I’m not worried about resetting these cuttings into the ground because it is so porous and it drains so beautifully. No, thank goodness. I got her, okay. There it is. I’m not gonna do anything with this. Sorry, yeah, dump that. And now let’s see what we’re left with here. Oh, boy, oh, boy! Oh, boy, oh, boy, okay, now if you wanted to. You could take some dry soil and put it on here. Build the area up a little bit if you wanted. I don’t because I don’t want a lot of height right here, because that’s a whole point and pruning this plant is so that I can see my beautiful pond, so I don’t want height. I will take this opportunity to clean up around these Echeverria Sahara that were literally buried by that sedum. I’ve got a really pretty aaaghh. Avoid ease here to that. I just I don’t know what the heck. I guess I just dropped it and forgot about it because it just it was just literally laying there like that, and I don’t remember when I put that there, but I’ll go ahead and give it some love now and clean it all up. It doesn’t look any worse for the wear, remember? All of these dead leaves at the bottom. The underside of the plant are normal. That’s just age. We don’t worry about those bottom leaves dying off. What you want to concern yourself with is the health of the leaves at the crown that are just starting, and they’re perfect so. I know this is a healthy little plant. I’ll just go ahead and at this Auggie’s back in its spot. Clean up! Oh, look at this little aloe. This is a little yeah. I mean, rot is kind of a strong word, but that doesn’t look good, does it? So let’s cut until we find clean? Yeah, see the tissues. Fine, It’s not black or dark brown. It’s it’s off-white and it’s very, very healthy tissue, so yeah. These leaves are a little soggy, but the plant isn’t rotten. I’ll just pull off all that wet stuff, And then I can just stick that right back in the ground, all right now! I have the senecio little chalk fingers here. That’s, you know, it’s a little leggy, but you know. I’m not gonna worry about that because I have enough of the sedum to put back in the ground that we’re not gonna see that leg. Enos, that’s a really nice piece, You know, and if you want to size your cuttings or make the branches smaller or work with them as little rosettes, you can do whatever you want. At this point, it doesn’t matter. This piece is just, you know, a little too big so. I’ll use that somewhere else. I like I’m feeling I’m feeling that. So I want this arrangement to be appropriate into scale. I don’t want this plant completely visually overpowering everything around it, so I will have some leftovers that I can put in other areas of the garden now. If you have some garden art handy. If you’ve got a little a little piece, a little bolder or a, you know, Talavera ball or something that you could tuck in right there. That would be the place. I don’t have anything like that handy right now, so I’m just gonna keep tucking in plant material until I’ve covered up any and all ugly. Oh, I have that auger void ease. Yeah, I can move it. It’s not really doing me. Anything purrs here? I can just tuck that right here. Just set it down right there. That probably looks pretty darn good, and that’ll give this edge of area. Sahara a little more room to flush out I’ve also got. Maybe a ghostie will grab the seat. I’m here I can. It’s a nice, a very, very nice rosette, so I can take and cut this stem and set that in here and again what I’m doing right now is I’m just covering up the dirt, cuz. You know me. I don’t like dirt. Also, it’s a lisam season, Isn’t it? Alyssum isn’t a succulent, but it’s a really really sweet little flower that grows and self seeds like crazy in my garden. That’s what this stuff is when it starts to get a little leggy and stringy. I just pull it out and then I shake the seeds back and then throw it away and every year it just recedes and starts over again. It’s so cute, but it’s looking a little leggy here, so I’m gonna get rid of that and see what else I have here. I’ve got, I’ve got some crassula. I’ve got a blue elf. Oh, here’s a nice, another nice graft. Oh, you don’t even need scissors. I can tuck that in right, Shaw? There we go so there we have it. No fuss, no muss. I have reset the sedum and this plant is ready to harden off reroute and start the growing process all over again, probably in another couple of years. We’ll do this all over again until then, have a wonderful day. Get out there with your clippers and go to it friends. Oh, Greg’s pointing at me. He wanted me to show you the a luau. Dia Procera! I started this girl off as a plant. That was about this tall now. It’s probably I don’t know, what would you say? Gregg about 20 feet tall. Isn’t that so great? So if the branches start to run amok, I can just cut them off. Harden, um, and reset them, you know? I can cut or if I don’t like the height, which I do, but if I didn’t, I could cut this anywhere. I wanted on the plant or I could cut it up in segments and start them all over again in the ground. If I wanted to make it shorter, so remember, have fun with your succulents, plant things, even that have the potential to get really big, anywhere you want with the with the knowledge and the understanding and the confidence that you can manipulate and move these plants anywhere this has been. Laura Eubanks of design for serenity reporting from her backyard garden in sunny San Diego, California. With your succulent tip of the day you.