#succulent tips

Perhaps you’re new to growing plants, or you just don’t have a good windowsill to put your sun-loving succulent in, and now it looks sad and long and nothing like the insta #aesthetic photos of succulents in cute pots.

If you found this by searching out succulent tips, I’m sure you’ve seen the main one, which is to put your plant in more light. It will help your plant have a better future, but what about fixing how it looks now? Well, here’s a (not secret tip): Plant your succulent in a bigger pot to hide the legginess!

How should you do this, you might ask? Well, I did this myself, so let me tell you. I had some succulents I grew from leaves, but because light wasn’t ideal, they got leggy. For an example, here’s some I still need to re-pot when I have more pots.

[Image description: succulents in a concrete planter that have grown long and tall because of low light levels.]

These little ones are a bit wild, way taller than they should be, shooting roots out above soil (all the stringy things). So how did I combat this? I simply planted my succulents deeper, burying the long stems that had grown up.

First, clean off the stem so it’s bare: remove those dead leaves, and if needed, pull off some lower leaves that have spaced out more than the top leaves. If you pull live leaves off, let the plant sit a few days to callous where the leaves were. This prevents infection. (Also, save those leaves and grow more succulents!)

Next, get a larger pot, one that’s more than deep enough to submerge that stem, and bury the succulent so that the younger portion on the top of the plant is right at the soil line. Now, your wild succulents will look like you just bought them from the garden center!

[Image description: A line of several plant pots on a sunny window sill. The two closest pots have small succulents that sit close to the soil line.]

Now, if you do this, but don’t fix the lighting issue, your succulents will just get leggy again. So it’s vital that you get your succulents the bright light they need! Sunny windowsills work great, just make sure to rotate your succulents regularly to prevent leaning. My method is to give the pot a quarter turn every week or so.

If you don’t have a window that gets some sun during the day, grow lights can help. Just make sure to keep the light within 5-8 inches of your plants, otherwise they still get leggy trying to reach for the light.

If you’re wondering, you can put your plants outside too, but there are two important things to consider. First, it needs to be a bit above freezing, otherwise it gets too cold for plants to even use the sun. Second, you should slowly transition your plants to full sun by doing two hour increments over a week or so. Plants can get sunburn too, and without your window blocking UV, they aren’t ready for 8-10 hours of sun! Also, putting your plants outside greatly increases the risk that you bring bugs or other pests into your home and infect other plants, so be sure to check plants when you bring inside from outdoors.

Hello! you know, a lot of people say succulents are the easiest plants to take care of, but that hasn’t been my experience lol too much water and they rot, too little water and they whither, too little sun and they stretch out and become leggy FOREVER and you can’t undo it without cutting/repotting the whole thing.  

1. make sure your pot has a draining hole. A lot of stores sell succulents in pots without holes because of how little you have to water them, but if you are new it’s a good idea to get one with holes while you get used to how much water they need 

2. Succulent soil is like regular soil mixed is with something sandy/porous, something well-draining so the roots don’t rot. It can look like a peat moss+soil+perlite, or peat+rocks+soil, or a sand+soil mix. Like these: 

If you have a baby succulent, and it is planted in regular potting soil, that’s actually fine. Baby succulents need more water than they do when they are bigger. So if you have a babe, don’t worry about it. Some nurseries have sick soil- soil with fungus or bugs. If you got it from somewhere like the garden section of Walmart, it’s more likely. BUT plants can get really stressed when you change their environment quickly (new area/sun exposure, new pot, new soil) it’s better to just leave them in the pot you bought them in for a while and use home-made solutions for bugs/fungus if that even shows up. 

3. Make sure your succulent is somewhere nice and sunny. If it isn’t sunny enough, your succulent will start to grow tall/lanky and stretch/bend towards the light. This is irreversible. They’ll continue to grow, but they won’t look as nice. If you notice this happening, do NOT move it to full sunlight suddenly. They will die. You need to increase the sunlight little by little, day by day.

 4. Succulents thrive in dry climates, you have to recreate sort of dessert environments for them. In the dessert, it doesn’t rain for a Long Time, and when it does rain, it pours. So that’s what you give them. Let the soil dry out, and when it’s super dry give them a good soak. I just put them under the sink and let the water go through the soil and out the drain hole. How often they need this will depend on the soil and the succulent type/size, so it is safer to just go by how dry the soil is. (This is why it’s important to have a draining hole- without one, the water can pile up at the bottom and although the top looks dry the bottom is actually rotting.) 

The dragon fruit seedlings are still alive and well (and overcrowded!)

I’m devastated, this is my newest succulent and it’s just falling apart😭

Whenever I water it the leaves shrivel up or turn splotchy

Whenever I don’t water it the leaves STILL shrivel up and now are falling off ;-;

So I never really post my own stuff here but I figured I’d share some knowledge with y’all! I live in Texas about two hours away from New Orleans so I’m in Swamp Land right? It’s springtime, which pretty much means monsoon season, it’s raining HEAVILY pretty much every other day and the frogs are going NUTS, Anyway, as you can imagine this isn’t exactly the ideal living situation for succulents, they’re picky as hell and they like things to be DRY, which is a problem when the air is so humid that it’s like soup where you live. Still, those of us who love and specialize in succulents (Like myself) still want to keep the plants we’re passionate about, but if we’re not careful that can just lead to a lot of rot and heartbreak no matter how much effort we put into it. Still, succulents are my favorites, and after moving into swamplands I was determined to find a way to make it work. I bought extra perlite and cactus soil, I tried using layers of rocks and perlite at the bottoms of my pots and extra perlite mixed into the soil, I ran them in when it rained but as monsoon season approached I was running out of options, and I already had a few casualties that left me feeling panicked, so I did what I always do when under pressure, I did research. Clearly it wasn’t just the fact that the soil wasn’t able to drain, it was simply the humidity in the air, and I remembered something. Y’know those little packets of silica gel beads you find in your shoeboxes and such? Generally they’re known as a minor inconvenience, but they have a purpose: They suck the humidity from the air to keep your product intact. They have all KINDS of uses, you can use them to help dry flowers herbs and seeds, you can put them in your shoes to absorb moisture in them, you can even save a ziplock bag of them to throw your phone in if it gets wet (Generally better than rice), and with this knowledge, I thought... why not plants? I looked around, but no-one had ever tried it, or at least no-one told if they had, but at this point I had all of my succulents in an overturned fishtank as a makeshift mini greenhouse, while it kept them safe from the rain, every morning I had to take a washcloth and wipe condensation from the insides and the plants were still Not Happy, so I figured, fuck it right? But then, I didn’t have a shit-ton of silica gel packets laying around that I could just tear open for the beads, but I found a solution: Silica Cat Litter. Crystal cat litter is legit just silica crystals, I’d never used it for cats because it’s more expensive generally, but lots of folks had mentioned how it can be used to fill a sock and placed in humid rooms to dry them out.. So in my little makeshift greenhouse, I filled the bottom with a generous layer of silica cat gel and y’know what? No more condensation. No more rot. The soil dries out quickly after waters, and even when it’s raining the inside of that fishtank doesn’t collect droplets on the inside of the glass, I Finally found the perfect solution.