Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 14 is this one — Copper Spooning — from October 2014. I just had to include at least one post about succulents, which Pammy and I both love, and I guess our favourite, if we had to choose just one, is the beautiful Kalanchoe 'Copper Spoons'.
The whole magical business of propagating succulents is one little by-way of gardening that never ceases to beguile me. Right now a pot full of leaves from our Kalanchoe'Copper Spoons' is producing babies, but it has taken a few months for it all to happen.
This is the parent plant in question, Kalanchoe
orgyalis 'Copper Spoons', a beautiful succulent
shrub which, so far, has reached about two
and a half feet tall (75cm). While it's named for
its superb, lightly furry, copper-coloured leaves,
its foliage color is more complicated than
that, as you can see in the photo above.
And here are the babies, pale bluey-green and already lightly
furry, emerging from the ends of the leaf cuttings which I
simply laid on top of a lightly moist, sandy propagating mix
a couple of months ago.
This is the pot in all its 30cm wide glory. I wasn't sure which
method of propagation worked best, so I added some stem
cuttings to the pot, but largely populated it with the leaves,
as this is what seemed to be the go when I searched online.
The pot then spent its first couple of months in my garden
shed, raised up on a little spot just under the window, so
it copped plenty of natural light, but no rainfall.
It's a little forest of copper spoons babies we have here. Almost
all the stem cuttings were duds, and about two-thirds of the
leaf cuttings have produced babies, so leaf cuttings it is!
Later on, once they've grown a bit more, I'll pot each one up and hopefully will have some pretty young Kalanchoe 'Copper Spoons' kids to give to gardening friends.
