Soooooo, here we go again.
When I thought I sorted out the problem with the mealybugs and one half-dead plant and all is going to be ok and fine with my plants, a new thing ruined my day when I found out the little surprise. A rotten plant.
And what can be worse than one rotten plant?
Two rotten plants!
One was the Echeveria runyonii, probably overwatered after a longer period of being dry. Well, more than a month of me not being around my plants, although I had a friend who was coming to check on them. She said that it was very hot and two weeks passed before she could come and water them. Later, when I came back from my journey, I also watered them generously. Seems it was a bit of too much love shown through the watering can...
Consequences? a completely crooked plant. I took it out of the ground because I sensed a problem.
The sad thing is that this Echeveria was going to bloom. It had two long stems, and I was waiting to see the flowers. I didn't even know what colour they would be, but luckily someone published exactly the same day the post about the blooming Echeveria runyonii topsy turvy when I performed the taking the plant out of the pot show.
It can be clearly seen that its stem is rotten. Still, I didn't know how bad the situation is... until I checked it a bit better.
Let's take a closer look at this terrible sight:
Call me plant killer if you want (where's my plant killer badge?) but I was not very happy to see this. Maybe I was even shocked by the scene. The questions about why and how it happened were cruelly occupying my mind, but then I just found a cutter. And I made it. I chopped off everything that was bad and left the healthy part of the plant.
I also trimmed off the two stalks with the buds. It was better to leave the plant without them so that healing can be the main focus of the plant. I let the freshly cut plant for about a week or so without planting it in the soil. The same I did with the babies that were growing from the bottom of the mother Echeveria. No water, no direct sunlight, no potting it until the "wounds" dry.
When that week passed and I just "potted" them in the soil, I didn't water them for a few days. It was yesterday I gave them a bit of water for the first time. The big one went again to the same pot (though I am thinking now was it a good idea to pot it again there) and the babies got a glass house (a small glass jar I now like to use for the small cuttings).
Let's have hopes that they will recover. They should be ok if I don't mess up again something. But time will tell.
The other plant that had a similar fate was also chopped, the parts that were really bad were cut off and I got some smaller pieces of an ex-plant. The same process of letting the cuttings dry and later potting them without giving water immediately was repeated.
I am still an optimist, something will remain of them and survive!
