Low maintenance watering routine for succulents.mp4

Today is a big watering day for me. You can see I still have 36 plants that are yet to be watered but I've actually watered almost 50 of them so far today. What I want to show you is my process for watering. I also need to rearrange a few things that are getting too much light and we're going to put them in an area that's getting a little bit less light. So I'm going to show you all of that today. So let's get turned around and see what's going on. So part one here is we have the fabulous plant stand that my husband built for me with the grow lights built into it and as we get down here to the bottom you'll see we have some non-succulents growing. We don't have very many of these but we are currently growing wheat grass and then some pumpkin plants for our tortoise tiny the tortoise and then also some basil that we're trying to keep alive. I'm really bad at basil but all of these plants down here are fairly low light plants. You can see I have some aloes, some haworthias, and sansevierias, gasterias. So there's quite a few down here and these are okay but some of them are starting to get too much light and so I am going to move them somewhere else and this is not coming as a shock to me but also some haworthias that I have up here they are starting to turn a little bit too dark for my taste and again that's just from too much light and then we have a few of them hiding out up here too. So the combination of too much light and not very frequent watering, so most of these are going like three to four weeks without water, it ends up causing them to turn pretty dark and I would rather have that bright vibrant green color. So we're going to move some of these around and so here's a yeah yeah this one it's it's kind of an odd one it looks like it's stretching a little bit which it may be but that combination of being dry and then just being so close to the lights and the lights on for so long during the day is giving it that brownish hue. So we're going to move some things around I'm going to water the plants and then I will show you what it looks like when it is all done. Part two is less attractive but there's still some gorgeous plants in here. So these plants are currently in my office and they're using the same lights that are in that walnut plant stand however I am going to switch and run these for less hours in the day so that way some of these plants that don't need quite as much light can have still plenty of light they can have the grow lights but they don't have to run for quite as long. You can see though I'm still overflowing with succulents they don't all fit on the shelves so I am going to see if I can kind of squish some in a little bit better but my current plan is to add some on the floor here that really don't need as much light. I have some echeverias some ghost plant down here these do need a lot more light than they're currently getting and so those will either move to the walnut plant stand or they'll just move to a shelf in here. So again we're going to go through and water a lot of these I'll show you how I am currently doing that. Let me show you what I generally have on hand when I am watering my succulents. So first I have a big bucket full of water I have a tray that generally starts empty but as you can see it has some water in it right now and then I'll bring over succulents a few at a time or sometimes just one or two at a time depending on what I'm doing. I also have this little blower in case water gets stuck on top or in between the leaves a rag to wipe my hand or clean up spills my handy little squeeze bottle a watering can and then this is like basically just a bucket of trash and some tweezers so if I notice any dead leaves while I'm watering I'll pull them off and I'll just stick them in here it's easier than having the trash can right by me. Now I have a variety of pots all shapes and sizes and so each of them might get slightly different watering treatment but generally what I'll do is I will take a pot I will plug the hole with my finger some of my pots actually have a plug in the hole already so in that case I don't have to plug it with my finger but then I will fill it all the way up until water comes out the top which you can see here I'll let it sit for just a second to make sure that that water has really soaked through now I am using bonsai jack's gritty mix for these and it absorbs water really quickly if you are using a more organic mix like the miracle grove or like a black gold mix those generally take longer to absorb water so I do recommend holding water inside the pot for a little bit which is one of the reasons why having a plug in the bottom is great because then you can just pour water on you can let it sit for a while and come back to it another option is you can actually put your succulents in a pot of water and I still like to water from the top but the idea is that they will pull water up through the bottom of the pot into the soil and fill it all the way to the top now the goal here with true bottom watering is that you would actually have the water level up to the top of the pot and that is how water would get absorbed all the way to the top even still I like to pour a little bit of water on the top wait until it gets all the way full and then just let it sit you don't want to let it sit for too long I would say five to ten minutes is plenty generally again with a more organic mix you might want to wait a little bit longer but for the gritty mix five minutes is plenty then once they're done I will let all the water drain out the bottom and then if it has a plug I'll plug it back up right now otherwise I'll set it on top of my rag and put it back on the shelf where it belongs now sometimes you might have a smaller succulent and it's harder to get the water just on the soil so if water does get on top of the succulent especially if it's an echeveria or something like it I like to just use my little blower and blow all the water droplets off now for outdoor growing that's not super important usually the air around it will just dry it up really quickly for inside and especially under grow lights I've noticed that this can cause some edema or some bumps that will form on the skin of the succulent it doesn't happen every time but if you blow off the water then you're much less likely to experience that once this tray gets full or too full I can just dump the water back into my bucket and reuse it and I have found that watering this way instead of like taking all my plants to the sink is so much more efficient with my water I find that this bucket actually works for almost the entire plant stand I have you know the two shelves the one in our kitchen and the one in the office and usually a bucket full of water will water almost an entire stand for both of them maybe one and a half but it's so much easier and much more efficient than watering by taking everything to the sink all right after a few hours of watering and this ended up taking two days I now have everything pretty well rearranged moved some plants around that needed more lights and that needed less light and just spaced things out a little more evenly so let me show you what it all looks like starting here at the bottom we have more room now for some of our non-succulents and I've also moved a lot of the lower light succulents down here so this shelf is spaced further apart so these won't get as much light because they're not as close to the grow lights and I moved a few other plants around but everything is fitting together quite nicely and I'm excited to see how things grow over the next few months I've kind of adjusted a few things I've moved a few succulents that need more light into positions that get more light but I've also moved some that need less light over here onto the floor but you can see there are still some here like the echeverias that will need more light so I'm trying to figure out where to make room for those I might need to give away a few succulents I don't know but overall everything's looking pretty good and definitely happier now that it's been watered thanks so much for watching if you liked this video be sure to give a thumbs up hit subscribe share it with all your succulent friends and I will see you next time!