Simple Succulent Arrangement Ideas and Basic Care

Hey everybody! Are you looking for a great starter plant? Look no further than succulents. Good morning, my name is Jessica Tatro and welcome to Pleasant View Gardens. Today we're going to show you how we produce succulents, why they're such a great plant for you to grow at home, and show you how you can use some of those in different recipes. We have so many choices here today to walk you through and I can't wait to show you. Succulents are really easy and so much fun. This past spring my daughter and I were looking for something to do as a day out, a girl's day, and she said, I want to go buy some plants but I really don't know how to take care of them. What should we do? I said, well let's go on down to the store. So we went out and we found the succulent section. I said, hey honey, let's start with these. Go ahead and pick out your favorites. So we must have spent an hour there looking at all the different varieties and colors and she kept asking me, what about this one? What about this one? And she finally found her tray and we went up to the checkout and we had a wonderful friend at the checkout counter and he said, are these for you? I said, no, she's just getting started. These are her first plants. He said, don't worry about it, take them home. So she got her first succulents for free and she was so excited. The only thing he said was, you need to promise me you'll take care of them. And boy did she take that to heart. So we took them home, she looked after all of her babies. I swear she must have given them names, but she checked on them every single day. She asked me what pots to put them into and we now have a jungle in our living room. That was her starter plant and we now have so many more options in the house and it's so great to look at those. So succulents are a great starter plant. Sorry for the long story, but it's how most people get started with plants. They find one that they latch on to and then they run from there. The reason that succulents are a great starter plant is that they're very easy to take care of and there's so much variety available in these. So there's a plant for everybody, whether you're looking for a different leaf shape or a different color, there's something for everyone. So back to the care, they are very forgiving if you don't water them. That's essential when you're first starting out or even us experienced gardeners where life just gets in the way. So we water ours at the house about once a week, but if you forget, they just dry up a little bit. Sometimes the leaves get a little wrinkled, but they don't die on you. In the summertime, we put ours outside on the deck where they got a lot of bright light. If you're down in some southern regions and fortunate enough to be able to garden outdoors all year long, you can definitely still keep those outdoors. But up here in the northern climates, once the temperatures start to get into the 40s at night, we brought ours inside for the season. Make sure that they've got a bright window. If you have a plant like an Echeveria where it starts to stretch a little bit in the wintertime, that's just due to the low light levels. See if you can try to move it around your house and get a little sunnier window for it, or you can also look into getting a little grow lamp for it. But don't worry, by the time the next spring comes around, you can move it back outside and it'll be happy again. You can grow these in any size container and when it does start to get a little bit big, then you can go ahead and bump it up into another size. This is a great plant that you can have for a while. The reason I say that is we took a jade home and we put it in a little tiny pot in our kitchen window. This is about five years ago. I'll get to repotting it. Do you think I did? Nope, it's still there and we've actually kind of bonsai-ed it. So it's still like this big, but that's okay. It's right there and it's something that brings life to that area and something that we can smile at. Don't worry, we're all learning as we go. Look in front of me. We have so many succulents. This is how we produce them on a commercial level. There's thousands of plants here and probably 20 to 30 different varieties to choose from. So we propagate ours from tip cuttings. We bring them in from a stock supplier and we stick them into these little root balls and we root these in the late summer months when we have the best growing conditions. So we have warm temperatures and we have high light levels. As we get later into the season, they slow down their growth and kind of stall out for the winter. So they're just hanging out here and then in the spring time we'll go through and we'll make assorted mixed trays and ship these out to our wholesale customers. Succulents can be grown year-round, but we propagate them in the summer and the fall. Let them hibernate in the winter and then they go to the garden centers in the springtime. Succulents can also be propagated by other methods including tissue culture, which is usually for your aloes and your agaves, your higher value crops and crops that you can't replicate quite as fast in nature as you could in a lab. And then you can also do them from leaf cuttings and we had one here earlier. We'll find it and show you, but you pull a leaf off of the plant and it's so cool. The little baby just starts to grow right on the tips, so that's a great way that you can do some propagation at home, but it's a little bit too slow for us here in the commercial realm. Next up, I'm just going to take a walk through, grab some varieties, go shopping as I like to call it, and then we'll introduce you to the varieties we have and show you some guidelines for planting up mixed containers. So in front of me here are the containers that we're going to be using today. You can see that we've got some that are ceramic, we have some that are metal, we have a really cute turtle right here, and on the side is a little teacup from my house. Succulent containers, there's really no rules for them. You can use whatever you have around your house or purchase something that you think is really fun and creative and expresses your personality. A couple of years ago I was giving a talk at a garden club for putting succulent arrangements together and I was like, oh no, I don't have any clay pots, I don't have any containers, what am I going to do? I went to the dollar store in Goodwill that night and bought some containers there. We used an old flower sifter, just lined it with a coffee filter to keep the soil in and we had an instant container. Be creative, you can use anything that you want. The one thing to keep in mind is if you are using a container that does not have any drain holes in the bottom, one of two things, you can either put a small layer of rocks or stones in the bottom to provide a drainage reservoir or just be conscientious and aware of how much water you're putting on the container and not to over water that container. Remember, succulents do not like wet feet. Which leads me into the next point of soil. So what do we use for our containers? As I just mentioned, succulents don't like to stay overly wet, they prefer to be on the moderate to dry side. So what we have in here is the same mix that we use for all of our annual plantings. It's a peat perlite mix, you can also get one that has a tiny bit of bark in it, you can even have something that has a little bit of sand in it. Any general indoor potting mix will work fine or any type of cactus mix. Just make sure that you're not using a soil that stays too, as I call it, mucky and heavy. This is what it looks like, nice and fluffy. As I mentioned earlier, the plant in my kitchen window is actually this jade plant. The scientific name here is Crassula, if you want to impress your friends. And this is a variegated jade versus your common jade. So it's really cool, it has some pink highlights and some cream highlights coming through the back. One other jade that I really like, this one is called Hobbit and you can see the curled leaves on it. And the reason for that is it's supposed to look like little elf ears or little creature ears. This little guy here is called Princess Pine and it also is a Crassula. If you can believe it, these guys are related to each other. This was one of my daughter's favorites because as it gets older, it starts to get these nice gentle arches to the branches and it just feels so soft and fluffy and she wants to go through and pet it every day. These are some of the Crassulas. These do really well for indoor plantings. They're very easy to take care of and they're very forgiving. So if you're looking for a starter succulent, these are one of the ways to go. Another easy to grow succulent, whoops, I'm throwing plants, is Sedum. This is a low-growing plant with some smaller leaves on it and you can see here just the variety of colors that you can add into the container. So your standard green, this one is called John Creech. Then we have tricolor with the cream and the pink on it. And then this one is called Dragon's Blood. Some people might buy it just for the name, but it gives a nice, in the low light it will turn more green, but as you get higher light levels you get the red coming through. So just some fun colors on Sedums and it's a plant that trails down. And then the last two I want to highlight because I use them a lot in mixed recipes is this is an Echeveria and these come in a wide range of leaf colors and plant sizes. We grow one in the springtime called Dick's Pink, which has huge ruffled leaves on it so it really makes a statement piece. But some of my other favorite varieties that are common on the market is Topsy Turvy, which is a silver leaf, kind of a crinkle to the edge of it, so it's really cool texture. And then there's a purple one called Pearly Von Nurnberg. This one is just regular old elegans. It's a gray-green color. And lastly this is a Senecio and this one, the fun name for this is Blue Chalk Fingers. So if you look on the back side it almost looks like chalk on it. And then they're long fingers and I love using these for heights and recipes. Now to the design element. As I like to say with these, if you love it that's all that matters. But some of the things that you can consider when you're making the recipes is playing with different colors, playing with different leaf sizes, and playing with different leaf textures. And these are the same design principles that apply to when you're planting out into the landscape and when you're doing your annual planters out on the back deck, those types of things and hanging baskets. You're always looking for different sizes of flowers so you get a nice range of textures going through there. And then playing with the colors whether it's shades of a color or having contrasting colors. So you want something that's going to create some excitement there. The one last thing with succulents is people always ask how long can you keep them in the container. It depends on the variety and it depends on how many plants you plant into the planter. For instance today in the teacup I'm going to do three plants in this one but I wanted it really full for an instant gift for somebody. If you have a little bit of time to wait and you don't mind then you can just put one in there and it can probably stay in there 6 to 12 months. Same with these. So we're going to show you some planters at the end where we really packed them in because I want that instant color and the instant fill and others we've spread out because I want to give them a little bit of time to stretch their arms in there. One last point is if you don't like the look of the soil when you're finished planting then you can just go to the craft store or to the pet store and just get some small rocks or some aquarium gravel and then you can top dress on the top to get kind of that desert look. That's a lot of background for the recipes here but we're going to get started planting. I think some of these are going to be Christmas presents they came out so well. Thank you for joining us today and good luck gardening this season. If you would like to keep up to date with our videos please hit the subscribe button above and if you want to be notified of when our videos come out just remember to click on the bell. Thanks guys!