Occasional rains and constant watering remove the substrate from the pots and little by little they run out of nutrients. Yesterday I was serving a client at the nursery and I realized that my small succulents and cacti need a little substrate in them.
Today I’m taking the Graptopetalums, Sedums, and Dudleya greenei, to refresh their potting mix. It’s nutrient-depleted; you can tell the soil has become papery, and they’ve lost the rest of their nutrients.
This is the Graptopetalum paraguayense; when the sun is harsh and beats down on the topmost leaves, they can’t handle it. They change color, and the stem gradually loses its leaves until only the surface leaves remain. All these Graptopetalums are losing their lower leaves.
Sedum mendozae propagates very well in the potting mix. They spread far beyond the pot; it’s best to place them in baskets so they can spread out and hang over the edge.
When the plant runs low on nutrients in the pot, the leaves toward the top start to wilt and eventually fall off. This is the plant’s way of protecting the upper leaves so they can continue to grow and spread.
These are the Dudleya greenei; they also need you to add new potting mix to their pot. You can see that at the bottom, there are no new growths, just an elongated stem.
Today, they’ll get a new potting mix with worm castings, river soil, rice hulls, and some small stones to aerate the soil. I’ll add a little fine sand too; I’m always trying new ways to prevent them from suffering due to nutrient loss and compacted soil.
Now that these little ones have been restored with the added potting mix, I’ll put them back in their spots. I haven’t removed them completely from their original potting mix, so they don’t get stressed by the change. These are plants that are for sale, and I just wanted to give them a little boost so they can regain their strength and keep going.
My nursery is a garden nursery; it’s small. It’s not open to customers all the time because this is my secondary way of selling products to customers. So I open on certain days and sell to people who can see my plants on those days. The rest of the time, I focus on other activities; my plants have time to grow and thrive in the meantime.
Thanks, and see you next time.
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The photos were taken with a Samsung Galaxy S26.
