cactuswatcher: (icon2013)
( Feb. 23rd, 2015 10:09 am)
Not for me. Maybe I should call it removing day. Agave like the bluish one in this icon spread something like grass, both by flowering and by underground shoots. Flowering is a bit extreme since they send up a big stalk, exhaust themselves and die. In fact old age seems to make agave a bit delicate even before they bloom. Both the agave in this photo from a couple years ago and the similar looking one in the icon I used back when I first started on LJ grew to a similar size and died before flowering. But offspring from the shoots from both of them live on. One from the plant in the icon is growing where it sprung up just out of the picture to the left. A second unfortunately grew up right next to the flowers in this icon, where would have become a real problem by next year. So I dug it up and moved to a bare spot in the backyard. Unlike older agave, the young ones are quite tough and will take a lot of abuse in transplanting them. These particular agave are called agave parryi var. truncata and are obviously among my favorites.

Another agave I like is the agave americana, better known as the century plant. I have a popular decorative variety, the marginata, named for the yellow stripes that appear on the edges of the plants. You can see good examples - here. The agave parryi from above only have a few shoots in their life time. The americana in good conditions (as in somebody's yard) will have two or three dozen making them a messy looking tangle if you don't pull most of them out. You can save most of the agave parryi shoots, but keeping every agave americana shoot you get is just impossible. The plants get to be four foot tall and nearly eight feet wide. They can take over just about any size yard if you keep transplanting them. I've got one out front that I transplanted years ago that had about eight offspring that needed to be removed this spring. I kept one to go in the only empty spot big enough in the backyard and the others went in the trash.

Last week I attempted moving a sprout from seed from one of my senna bushes. See examples - here. These things root deeply quickly. I tried digging up a sprout that had grown up in the wrong place, but it was too big and rooted too well. I just had to cut it out. I found other smaller sprouts under one of my bushes and dug one up to transplant. I don't know if it will live but I hope it will.
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