Winter Sucs!

Overwintering Your Cacti and Succulents

It’s time to start thinking about winter. I not a fan of winter, but knowing what to do with your cacti and succulents during this time is imperative. So many questions: Do I let them go dormant? Should I water them over the winter? Do they need artificial light? When do I bring them inside?  Let me tell you right now that you shouldn’t let them go dormant.

Temperature: I do not allow my tropicals/succulents to go below 40 degrees. Freezing/frost is 35 degrees and lower. Some plants like the Century plant (Agave americana) can tolerate a high to low 20’s, but you need to check the species. Once you get into the later months of October and November, your weather station should be on hourly. I will leave most of my succulents outside until November unless we get an early cold snap. In Cleveland, the weather can change quickly so you need to be prepared at any time to bring them in.

Water: Once we get into the fall, the wet cool rains usually persist. If you have already allowed the succulents and cactus to go dormant or leaves are yellow and falling off, you cannot leave them wet. I let my plants keep growing no matter how slowly until it is time to bring them in. The plants can tolerate the damp as long as they are not dormant. If the plant is dormant and you leave it wet, it will rot and die. This is because the roots have shut down and the plant is no longer processing any materials.  They simply drown in their own pot. Once inside I shut my plants down (dry them out) completely and only water them if they show signs of desiccation. I only will give them enough water to swell back up to normal, not enough to grow or rot them. If you have a greenhouse, you can keep some growing throughout the winter; but in order for most succulents/cactus to bloom some kind of a dormancy period is required.

Light: Getting to know your plant is the key to its survival. A coworker calls my house’s storage area "the basement of torture" for plants.  I leave my plants in the dark, in the cool, without water until I say otherwise. You cannot do this with all plants. Some species of succulents are winter growers; others do not really go dormant and will get very stretched out growth or a limp look. So knowing what your plant’s exact requirements are is very important.  Knowing what they need leads to knowing what you don’t have to give them and, therefore, my basement of no light works out for what I grow. Fluorescent lighting can be very beneficial and give you an edge in keeping them alive over our long, dark winters. Just because I may not use fluorescent lighting at home does not mean it is incorrect for you. The best motto to live by is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

I hope you have found these tidbits helpful. They also give you a sense of plant care strategies we use to keep the Garden’s desert plant collection in the Madagascar biome flourishing through the winter months. Just because we have plants in a glasshouse doesn’t mean we can change the rules either. So just hang in there and wait until the snow melts. Just like the Cleveland Browns — there is always next year!

The Lush-est Desert in Cleveland!

Lush and desert are two words not normally together. If you haven’t seen the Madagascar exhibit at the Botanical Garden lately, you are missing out. Over the last 5 years of growth, a few care adjustments and many new plant additions have produced a biome filled with succulents.

The Spiny Desert is actually a scrub forest. Succulent plants and trees stretch above grasses and lower shrubs creating a tangled web of branch and vine. Madagascar may seem very different to a Clevelander, but in many ways it performs and acts like a forest here. Instead of snow the desert has drought. Same effect though. Plants lose their leaves, stop growing and wait for the return of rain, or in our case, the snow to melt. Once spring arrives, the plants can "grow like weeds." People believe it takes a tremendous amount of time for succulents to grow. This may be true of some species, but add lots of heat and water and you can achieve substantial growth in a short period of time.

How does this happen in the Madagascar biome? The answer is Monsoon Joe. October represents the end of the growing cycle in the Glasshouse. I stop watering plants until April. Come April/May I act like the monsoons that drench the island of Madagascar. The array of hoses, sprinklers and watering cans soak the forest for weeks. Dry soil (our mix is coir, pine fines and Hydrocks) actually repels water, so it takes a tremendous amount of water to re-saturate it. It takes over a month to get the soil moist to a proper depth in the garden after the dry winter. Plants, such as the Uncarinas, can grow over three feet in a season during this time, and the rain brings on a whole host of blooms. The plants have many ways of dealing with this change from water to drought. Underground tubers, lack of leaves, spines, and water-retaining stems help them to survive the harsh desert regions of Madagascar. So, I hope everyone, especially my fellow succulent growers, stop by and see the lush flush.

Enjoy the garden

Who among you has ever taken care of a houseplant? Let’s see a show of hands. Ok, nice. Now, who among you has ever KILLED a houseplant? All of those hands should have stayed up, and if you put your hand down, you’re lying. I blame my mom, Nijole, for my borderline obsession with houseplants. I say borderline, because I strongly feel that if I don’t continually check myself, my house would have no room for guests, my dogs, or my husband. And thinking about it right now, I want to go find new succulents for my porch – I MUST NOT GIVE IN!!  Growing up, we always had a house full of plants and they always looked fabulous. When I left for college I felt something was lacking and immediately started collecting my own plants. And most of them died. I blame those losses on college life and taking Genetics three times. But once I had my own apartment my plants started thriving. And growing in number. I was either dividing my own plants, buying new ones or getting some from friends and family, such that my tiny collection started looking like a jungle. Happy times! And yes I had learned some key points on plant care from my mom, and by trial and error (see above), and sometimes you need a good reference book to get you through. I’m very visual so the ideal book came in the form of the Ortho’s All About Houseplants, which has a new version printed in 2007. It is very easy to read and understand, contains lots of pictures to identify plants and their pests, steps on repotting and propagation, plus the skinny on pots, soil and light requirements. What makes this book great and worth the price is that a beginner can glean so much worth from its pages, and so can someone who’s taken care of plants for decades. When I get a new plant, one I haven’t necessarily had before, this is the first book I turn to for its general care. And when I notice some brown spots, or yellowing leaves, I read through the troubleshooting section in search of answers.

This isn’t going to have every plant you might possibly have in your house, but it sure is a good start. Enjoy!

Mother Earth and her Children: A Quilted Fairy Tale
By Sibylle Von Olfers

I’m not a quilter. I don’t get excited about quilts. I would never, ever, EVER go to a quilt show. But I sure can appreciate the skill and work that goes into making a quilt. And this is half the reason this book is pretty cool – the illustrations are close-ups of an actual, incredibly detailed quilts. The other reason is why the illustrator worked on this 2007 book in the first place. This story is translated from the German tale first published in 1906. The author wrote this poem, originally named Something About the Root Children, while she was a member of the Catholic order of the sister of Holy Elizabeth. The illustrator, Sieglinde Schoen Smith, created the central quilt upon which this poem unfolds in response to the untimely death of her young son. The quilt, shown in its entirety at the end of the book, graphically depicts the entire poem. Each page spread shows just a small part of the quilt, as a photograph. I keep looking at each page, fascinated by the detail of the quilt and amazed that someone in this world had that much patience to complete it. In addition to the what-I-can-only-imagine intricate stitching, she uses much color representation. The whole scene is split almost horizontally showing underground and above. The children undergoing spring awakening are in bold, bright colors; those still underground are in browns and grays.  Details continue as she shows spring blooms such as purple columbine, white lily of the valley, blue bachelor button, and yellow dandelions. Available in our Library and in our Gift Shop.