Pages

Tuesday 10 July 2012

Planting agave pups

Finally a gardening update! We had to do a spot of emergency gardening. We all woke one morning to discover one of our huge agave plants had fallen over and its terracotta pot smashed over the path. This agave came with the house and we suspect it is well over 10 years old. Lo and behold, growing along its mother stem were a handful of agave pups...... these would make lovely Christmas presents.


Off to the garden centre to buy one enormous replacement pot and some little ones for the pups. Planting the pups now will give them time to get established so by Christmas they will have new growth and be looking lovely (hopefully).

Agaves are very hardy succulents and are easy to replant. There are many types of agave – we have agave attenuata which is native to Mexico. It is a spineless variety so it is perfect for kids and grows well in pots. They are expensive to buy in garden centres because they are slow growing. Once an agave is approximately 10 years old, pups will grow off the mother stem which can be cut from the plant and potted.


Agaves like good drainage so we lined the bottom of our pots with large pebbles. We also used a special potting mix specially designed for succulents which is available from garden centres.

The kids love to help with planting and got busy shoveling soil into pots. We re-planted more than 12 pups. We gave our little agave pups some water and Cakey placed pebbles in the top of the pots. Agaves like a sunny position so we found a good place for them in the garden and now we are awaiting the new growth.



A word of warning: agaves do not tolerate frost. If you are in an area not suitable for agaves but you would like to propagate plants with the kids I recommend trying geraniums or slow-growing japanese box. If you would like to know more have a look at these links:

If this is your first visit to at home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along through our facebook page or subscribe via email or RSS. Cheers Ali

Pin It

Linked to Fun Sparks

4 comments:

  1. They look huge to begin with, how big will they get?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A large agave is approx 1.5m but they take 10 years to get there. The pups are little - approx 10-20cm. I hope that helps.

      Delete
  2. Such amazing plants, and I love how you all got in there together! We really enjoyed gardening together too :-) Thanks for sharing at Happy Family Times!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. oooh they look great! Gardening is such a great activity for kids.

    Thanks for linking to Science Sparks xx

    ReplyDelete