 Zooming recording and opening the room. We're definitely live. Welcome friends. We'll get started in just a moment as we keep getting folks in the zoom room. I'm going to put in the chat box. The links to today's event and that will contain library information, as well as information about today's event. And I'll be trying to keep up with notes as it goes on if book recommendations come up. I'll try to keep those in. And we'll give it right at the hour is when we'll start. Get some more folks in here. You can see we have such a nice robust attendance for today's event on a beautiful Saturday in San Francisco. All right, it's 11 o'clock let's get started. Thank you all for being here again we welcome you here. And it is summer stride 2021, our second virtual summer stride. I'd love to hear, you know, from you how you think virtual library programming is going. My email will be in that document that I share, or any feedback, or any programs you'd like to see this is actually a program that somebody emailed and requested succulents and drought gardening, it's coming. And as I mentioned we are here today for succulent gardening with kip. Thank you, kip. We want to welcome you to the unceded land of the aloney tribal people and acknowledge the mini ramy tush aloney tribal groups as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we reside in the Bay Area. The library is committed to uplifting the names of these lands and community members. We also learn more about first person culture and land rights. You can check out our YouTube for the many programs we've posted. And there's also a reading list in that document. I'll refer to the document a lot has a lot of info, a lot of great info. It's also pride, June, I love June pride month. So we have a couple of events coming up we kicked it off on Tuesday with Brontes pernell who is our on the same page author for June on the same page is when we try to get all of San Francisco to read the same book. So everybody read 100 boyfriends. And you can catch that Brontes and Alvin Orloff interview on our YouTube channel it was super fun. I laughed and I blushed. So good times. Coming up some pride programs. And these are all next week. Lots of great stuff, not next week but coming up. I can't wait for Tom on me on a kiss my gay ass what a great title. And then we'll have a book club featuring Brontes will not be there. I must repeat Brontes will not be the book club, but we will discuss 100 boyfriends. It's a fun book. And next week's we have next week summer stride we're going to feature an organization called ABO comics who works with LGBTQ plus prisoners whoops I'm going the wrong way. And they do art is their vehicle so they raise funds, they support the artists and support incarcerated or incarcerated community. So this is a big issue of San Francisco we have a jail and reentry services department in our library. We are so proud of the work that they do and helping reentry folks in our incarcerated community. Get books, get materials, get information. So really proud of their work. Today we have Jenny Worley talking about her book me on girls. And she was very instrumental in unionizing the lusty lady, San Francisco history. And the Asian Art Museum will join us again. Saturday, a Saturday program so I hope all will come out for this one I know Saturdays can get beautiful and warm and everybody wants to be outside. But if you know photographer Danny lion he's amazing photographer and he's shot some of the most iconic photos, you probably don't even realize, but he will be speaking will do a film film of SNCC. Everyone can stay muted helpful. Thank you. So come out for this one. And he'll be in conversation with Lewis Watts who is also a famous photographer here in the Bay Area, and was behind the book Harlem of the West. So you can all make this one definitely pushing and then just some highlights from summer. We have the amazing key see LeMonde and Tonga Weiss and Martin our poet laureate in conversation with Marlin Peterson, his book bird uncaged, an abolitionist freedom song has just been released. So check out the books, Long Division by Casey LeMonde has also just been republished. And he also wrote the book heavy which is amazing. Amazing. I cannot say enough about Casey LeMonde's writing. And some gardening programs coming up late June we have children's gardening with the California native plant society. And then in September as I promise we'll have a drought program a gardening for drought resistant. I can't exactly remember the title, but it's coming. All right. So today we are here about learning about gardening with succulents with Kip McMichael. Kip is a professional web developer and amateur naturalist with several degrees, none of them plant related. But don't tell about to his overly large plant collection. He grows native plants succulents and far too many bulbs in his home garden in Berkeley. Also a lonely land. All right, I'm going to turn it over to Kip. Welcome Kip. Thank you for being here. All right. Thank you. Welcome everybody. So let me share my screen. Right. So, today's talk is about succulents in small spaces, obviously for almost every one of us gardening in San Francisco in the Bay Area more broadly we are probably gardening a small space. A little bit more room than some over in Berkeley, but not very much about 5000 square feet on a whole lot. Good bit of that is house. The rest of that is backyard that I don't get to dominate with succulents, but I do front yard succulents. All right. So three parts to the talk. Just an intro, some talking about designing with succulents and then a more focused talk about succulents in small spaces and what you can do to fill in the space that you have. All right, so to start off with kind of an intro to succulents. So, succulents live everywhere. There are all kinds of succulents and they can grow in all kinds of places, especially in the Bay Area. Being in the Bay Area, we are blessed with a climate that is very conducive to all kinds of succulents. Succulents tend to be plants that are very hydrated, they're plump with water. That's one of the reasons that they are succulent. That's what gets them through the harder times in their natural habitats. That makes them prone to being sensitive to cold. So if you have hard freezes like we do further inland, that can definitely be an issue for succulents. So we're especially blessed in the Bay Area to be able to grow almost any succulent that we can see. So, you know, there are succulents that handle shade well. This is the dark plant here is an Ionium. It's called Schwartzkopf. The plant lower down here is probably an Echeveria species. These are Sempervivum, it's also called henna chicks. This happens to be a photo of a roof. You know, in their natural range, I believe in Europe and like the Mediterranean, they often grow in stonework, roofs and walls and things like that. And you know, succulents can be large. So this is an aloe veinsii. This is a tree aloe. This is probably a fairly old aloe veinsii, but certainly an aloe like this. You could get an aloe tree like this in the span of like 20 years that they grow fairly fast. Succulents can also be ground peppers. This is a little zoom in of a succulent pot that I had some years ago. Nice color and form here. This is a shot of my garden. Just a little bit of rock work here. This is a somewhat shadier spot underneath the tree. It gets a good bit of sun early in the morning, but it is shadier most of the day. So there's some nice plants here. A string of pearls. Cinesio rallyonis is a nice one here. This is a bromeliad. Echemia ricarbata. So well draining and mineral based soils are going to be good for all the succulents that you might want to grow. Being that we live in San Francisco and in the Bay Area more generally, we have a kind of a large mix of soils. If you're in western San Francisco, you probably have a good bit of sand in your soil. If you live in any of the mountains or the slopes, you probably have a good bit of rock in your soil and otherwise play. So generally speaking, if you have hard clay soils, you want to do a little bit of mixing in of some coarser material. Pumice is a great amendment. Lava rock is a good amendment. Coarse sand can be helpful. If you do have thick clay, just even a mixing and compost can also help open that up a little bit. It's good to add other coarser materials like the sand or the lava or the pumice. If you're going to be adding fine compost as well, because that will soak up a lot of water. What you don't want to add is wood. This is somewhat surprising sometimes because the soils that you find succulents in when you buy them from a lot of places will often have a good bit of organic material in them. And that is more for the purpose of industrial growing that needs to take place. Mineral based soils with lots of rock and pumice are heavy. And so you want lighter soils if you're producing commercial plants that they ship more cheaply and they're easier to ground, etc. But when you're making your own soil for pots and for beds and stuff, it's good to leave out things like coarse wood. So no need to have wood mulch, for instance. Alright, succulents are not necessarily full sun growers. So not every succulent grows in the sun. These are some photos from just natural habitat. So these are, you can see here, this is a desert area, and this is probably some kind of mesquite. And underneath that we have mammal area growing. This is a shot from Arizona where you can see saguaros have started all underneath the shade of like a palover day. This is a shot from Arizona, but this slope is actually a northward facing slope. So this side of the rock doesn't get sun until later in the day. This is just to show that even if plants, you know, even if you have succulents and cacti of various kinds, they're not always something that grows in full sun. So San Francisco garden that isn't fully exposed as many of them aren't. You can definitely still grow lots of succulents. Now bright color will definitely, rather bright sun will definitely help with the color of the succulents and also keeping them on the dry side. So for instance, this is an aloe, a great aloe for gardening, alanabilis. This is one that's grown with more water and then a shadier spot. And this is one that's grown with less water and a sunner spot. And sometimes this could be the same plant just over the course of the season, for instance. Winter when it's shadier and wetter, the plants make it green. And then in summer with the drier conditions in the wider sunlight, they tend red again. This is just a shot of some succulents growing under a tree. These don't look too bad, but the colors have definitely faded out from being in the shade of the tree. Likewise, these are some indoor succulents. These succulents are what they look like after they've been grown indoors for a long time and the light isn't bright enough. And so these plants have kind of lost the tight shape, the tight rosettes and the short fat leaves. They're trying to expand out and sort of pull in more light because they're in shadier conditions and they would prefer. And then this is a shot of more well-grown succulents in a really bright spot. So this is a nice hanging panel garden. But here you can see the bright purples, the reds, the yellows, the greens, all the leaves are nice and tight and fat. So succulents are also not zero water plants. That's probably one of the most important things to emphasize if you do start gardening the succulents. Succulents do expect water. They definitely can handle periods without water. That's why they are succulent. But in the habitats where they grow and where they're successful, they definitely experience enough water to keep them satisfied and happy. And so in your own garden, watering every two weeks or so during the summer is usually a good idea. And sometimes you don't need to water it all during the winter. Over here in Berkeley, I need to water a little bit more in later winter when it's drier and then early fall when it's drier. But I don't water it all winter and during the summer I water it most every two weeks. If we have any sort of rain in between my waters, I usually just skip a week after whatever. So succulents can definitely, you know, this is an Ionium. We saw the Schwartz Cop earlier in the images. So this is an Ionium that is not getting enough water. Ionium in particular are plants that even though they're from a Mediterranean climate, it is very dry. They do expect a decent, a reasonable amount of water. They can handle no water. They will shrivel up. They will contract their rosettes and try to wait it out. But if you give them good water, they'll be much happier. This is even a cactus. So this is called the Old Man of the Andes. One of the common names of this cactus. This is one from my own yard. Even I can fail with plants. This particular spot was drier than I expected. Maybe more sun. Maybe the spot that it was planted in the water drained away quickly or didn't build up there as much. And anyway, I only discovered this after a while. But this cactus has clearly not had enough water. You can see it's pale yellow. It's very shriveled up from what it should have been. So this is just an example that even cacti can be too little watered. And this is an echeveria species or maybe a hyper, maybe a grafted area of some kind. And this is just another example from my own garden. Plants all around it seem to be fully happy. We have some euphorbia here and some other echeveria, some other plants. And all of those are just fine. But this plant did not get quite enough water. Even with succulents, you do have to sometimes coddle certain plants, give plants more water than you might expect. All right. It's always best for succulents if they have drying periods between watering. One of the reasons they are succulent is because they have evolved to handle periods of dryness. So naturally they want to be a little bit dry in between water. So if you're the kind of person who needs to water certain parts of your garden every day, it's best if the succulents aren't in those parts of the garden. And just like with bright light, lower water encourages both good form and good color. So succulents do want plenty of water. If you overwater succulents, however, they will become too exuberant, too gregarious. They'll start to lose some of their tight form. They'll extend out their branches in ways that may not be as strong or as sturdy. So it's good to be conservative with your watering. Steady and conservative watering with good light. And you'll have nice looking succulents. This is not so much an issue here in San Francisco with cold temperatures, but we do get dips here and there. Certain spots can certainly be colder than others depending on where you are. And so succulents can certainly handle temperatures below freezing. This is an aloe from South Africa. You can see definitely the cold environment here. This is a Sonoran Desert image from Arizona. And this is just a shot from a grower's yard in the Midwest. But in all of these cases, there are certainly succulents that can handle very cold temperatures. And to the extent that San Francisco is often cool and sometimes wet, gravitating towards succulents that can handle cold conditions is usually a good strategy for providing good succulents. A drier plant, and this is the case for almost any kind of plant really, a drier plant is more cold-hearted than a wetter plant. The danger with plants and cold is that the water in their tissues will freeze and damage the plant. And so a plant that has less water in its tissues is less likely to freeze. All right, so thinking about succulents in your garden. So there's a few things that I like to think about that are a little bit different about succulents or kind of distinctive about them. So succulents are slower. There's a little asterisk there because as some of you may know who grow succulents, some succulents can be pretty fast. They can take over a bed or planting pretty quickly. But for the most part, succulents compared to a lot of other plants are much slower. And so that means they just don't fill spaces quickly. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that you want to think about that when you're planting and also be sensitive to the fact that it's because succulents are slower, they don't recover from injury of various kinds as quickly. So here's a few examples from my own garden. So this is a blue cactus. When I first planted this cactus, unfortunately, it was in a different orientation to the sun than it had been from the place that I bought it from. And so that's one of the things about cacti is that they can sunburn. All plants, in fact, can sunburn. Some of you may have experienced this with your own plants. If you've moved someplace, if you've rearranged plants on the patio on the deck or something like that, you may suddenly find that leaves that were fine have brown spots on them and start withering and dying. That's an example of plant sunburn. Plants are very sensitive to their orientation to the sun. If you were to go out to the desert in Arizona and dig up one of the saguaros and rotate it 15, 20 degrees and plant it back in the ground, it would get sunburned from the change in orientation to the sun. So that just means that you need to be careful when you're moving succulents or adding succulents to your garden. If it is in a really sunny spot, the kind of spot that gets sun for most of the day, you want to do that ideally in the winter when the sun is less intense and then sometimes you might even want to add a cover. So this is an example here on this cactus. The top area has grown since I planted it and since it got sunburned. This yellow band is the band of sunburn. And so that unfortunately will always be yellow, discolored, sunburned. Plants, unlike humans, can't recover from their sunburn either. So a sunburned part of a plant like a succulent like this will always have that appearance. This is an example. A few years ago, we had an extra cold spell in Berkeley and one of the edges of this plant started having some rot, so we had to cut that off. This is an agave that fortunately someone walked into the yard and pulled a leaf off of. I'm not sure if maybe they thought it was an aloe and they could use that. Fortunately agaves can have some irritating sap, so hopefully they didn't try to use it on their skin. This is a particularly bad sunburn in my own yard. This cactus was originally another blue species of cactus. It would have been grown in shadier conditions and it did not take well at all. So it got severely sunburned. All of this yellow is a severe sunburn. The discoloration is where the sunburn was so intense that it actually blistered. It's kind of similar to humans. You can definitely give a plant a very bad sunburn. Since this time, this plant has grown new growth out, maybe in one of the later pictures that we see. And there are now nice new blue growths coming out of the cactus. So it can grow in full sun, no problem, but the change from where it was growing before to where it's growing now was enough that the parts of the plant that already existed got sunburned. All right, succulents are really productive minimalists. And so that means that they have fewer prunable parts. And so that's something to keep in mind. A succulent doesn't have a lot of leaves necessarily or a lot of things that can easily be cut off. The branches are usually kind of minimal. This is an agave peri-eye, a very nice agave. It would work well in San Francisco as well in a sunny location. But as you can see, there's not really much here you can do to trim this plant very easily. Each of these leaves are bigger than your hand, very tough and covered in spikes. So that's just something to keep in mind with your succulents is that if you do put them in certain spots, you need to allow for the fact that it's not going to be easy to trim them. And sometimes you can't trim them because there's only one central stem with only one portion that can grow at all. This is an aloe, a young aloe tree that's in my front yard. And this is just showing how there's not really a lot that's prunable here. You can cut off some of these pieces, but there's only one branch here. So not a lot you can cut. This is a large euphorbia as well. It has a few large branches. Now the nice thing about the minimalism of these plants, so many succulents are very easy to propagate from cuttings. So if you cut off a branch very frequently, you can just leave it to the side and then plant it a few days later and it will grow. Some succulents are actually prolific on their own tissue. So this is a calancoa. There's a whole bunch of different forms of this plant and all of them have this wonderful feature of growing tiny baby plants at the margins of their leaves. So this is a plant that can actually become sort of a pest because as you can imagine these babies can break off and get started in the cracks between the sidewalk or underneath the hanging poppies might be growing in or down the bed. But in many ways, having a plant that is a bit of a hassle can be great if you have a street planting or something like that, it gets a lot of traffic. Succulents are also easy to propagate from a lot of their leaves. So sedums especially, these are some sedum leaves. You can frequently break off a leaf of these plants, let it harden up just a bit and then leave it in a somewhat shaded spot and it will start growing a tiny baby plant at the bottom of the leaf. Not all succulents can do this. Many of them that have leaves that look like this can. So it's a sedum certainly can and a few others can, but not all of them. And succulents mature steadily into well-defined shapes and they usually hold those shapes over time. So you can see here this is an Isagave Victoria Regini and so there's a large one here and much smaller one, but you can see kind of the same shape just increased in size slowly. Another Isagave, this is the Isagave periade that we saw earlier. It's a really nice one. And this is just shot from the Huntington Garden down in LA but this just shows some large cacti and how those mature. So these are golden barrel cactus. This is another one that you can grow in San Francisco as well. It's a little bit happier in warmer climate so it won't be a champ in San Francisco but you certainly can grow it. And down in Huntington and down in its native range in Mexico it can get very large and over time can slowly clump. Some plants are more apt to clump than others. In fact, when you're at the nursery, if you're getting plants, cacti are various kinds. You can frequently see plants where one pot will have lots of small plants that seem to be clustering and one pot will have just a single large stem and that's the same thing here. You can see these are a very clumpy plant that's put off lots of babies back here in the foreground as well. Whereas this large plant doesn't seem to have any offsets yet. But these plants are also very old. These are probably 70 or 80 year old, very fast. So these are some very mature plants. Microclimates are really important and in San Francisco you probably, if you garden much, know about microclimates. Winter shade can be really kind of a very wet circumstance that also stays very cold. It can be a problem for some succulents. A lot of succulents do really well here in the summer. They suffer a little bit more in the winter. So a darker or colder spot can be harder for them. One thing to keep in mind in San Francisco, and this is in the Bay Area and everywhere in the world, anywhere where you garden, are radiation frosts. This is one of the things that I find that the people, even experienced gardeners are the most ignorant of in terms of this being a phenomenon you have to handle. So even on nights where the forecasted low is nowhere near freezing. So a night when it's 37 degrees, 38 degrees, a night when the, so we have a nice clear sky in the winter and there's not a lot of air movement, you can have a radiation frost. And so what happens in that circumstance is the heat in the ground and in structures, trees and things, it radiates off into the air and the infrared. And so even when the air temperature around things doesn't get very cold, the surface of the ground, the surface of objects like your roof can go down below freezing. And this is something even, I used to live in San Francisco and lived in San Francisco about seven years. And I had a rooftop garden for a while on top of my apartment in Pertura Hill, so in one of the warmer parts of the city. And I had frosts on my rooftop on at least two or three nights a winter. So you can definitely get frosts in San Francisco, but they're radiation frosts. So the nights when I had frost on the roof, the forecast low in San Francisco was probably 37 degrees that night or even as high as 40 degrees. But because of radiation frosts, you can definitely have frosts even on those kinds of nights. And in addition to those radiation frosts, when you do have cold air being produced by the roof of your house or other structures, rocks around you, pavement even, that can flow down downhill. So if you're at the bottom of a hill, if your house backs up to a hill and your backyard is kind of a trough at the bottom of a hill, that can be an especially cold location. And so likewise on those radiation frost nights, you can get an especially hard cold in your own backyard. Same thing happens in my backyard, because the cold air rolls off of the roofs around you and builds up into low spots, right? So slopes and air movement, you know, as that graphic showed are great. So a lot of us in the Bay Area live in hilly locations. And so that can be good for letting the cold air drain away. Unfortunately, like I mentioned before, if you're at the bottom of a hill, that can also mean the colder comes to you. But that just means that succulents that have the ability to put the air around them to keep moving are great. In my own yard, for instance, my front yard is right on Ashby Avenue in Berkeley. And so that open street area allows the air to move through. So I rarely get any kind of frost in my front yard, whereas my backyard that's surrounded by other buildings and has roofs emptying onto it gets frost probably four or five, you know, 10 or 20 nights a year depending on that. And if you do want to get ambitious with certain succulents, there are certain succulents that want a dry winter rest. They like their water in the summer. They even like the Bay Area climate of cool summers, but what they want is a dry winter. Those can be kind of hard. And so those can be a challenge in the winter. So that can require frost cloth or other kinds of shading to keep some of the rain on. All right. So now we can move on to thinking about designing with succulents and how you can put together a succulent garden. So as we mentioned before, succulents are kind of slower. So, you know, it takes more time for succulents to fill up space. If you plant a bed of succulents, there's going to be, you know, it's going to take longer for them to fill up and mature into that spot. But one thing to be careful about is if you want to use more plants. And so you can add some smashed plants. So this is an early shot of one part of my garden when I had first planted it. And this was planted 10 years ago. So to focus here, we have a little euphorbia, clumpy euphorbia here. This is a small edge of area. And this is an agave. So about four and a half to five years later, these were how the plants had grown in. So everything's grown in nicely. But as you can see, everything's a bit smashed together now. And if you zoom in, the little edge of area here actually used to grow about here. And slowly as these plants have gotten bigger, it has extended itself out and managed to just keep up with the growth around it to manage to not be squished and covered up completely. So that's just one thing to keep in mind that when you do plant succulents together, you need to account for the fact that they will grow slowly and sometimes they can end up crowding each other out. Here's another example. This is a large aloe that I have. And this was a cactus that was planted next to it. And the aloe was originally smaller, but aloes tend to grow faster than cacti. So it eventually got bigger and managed to smash the top of the cactus beside it like one of its leaves. So a little bit of plant competition, sometimes unavoidable, but something that in retrospect, I probably would have planted these for a different park had I known how to. And so knowing your plants is important. So montane and interior species are good, even though you live on the coast and a fairly mild climate, we are cold and wet here in the winter, which is not necessarily what a lot of succulents expect. So it's good to go after plants that are from more interior areas, they can handle colder conditions, they can handle wetter conditions. So this is an agave from, agave utiensis. It happens to grow in Utah, but in other states as well. Ocuntias, this is another native. It can handle very cold conditions. It can handle all kinds of conditions. You see this growing along the coast as well, sometimes it's been introduced. This happens to be an Escobarria, but there are lots of small cactus like this. They grow in the Midwest and in northern Mexico, and they can definitely handle wet, somewhat wetter conditions. It depends. Some cacti from the Midwest are very sensitive to winter moisture and some aren't. This happens to be one that's resistant to winter moisture. I would be remiss in talking about succulents in California. I didn't talk about Dudleas. Here's one of them. Dudleas are a wonderful native succulent. They've recently been in the news because of some poaching problems, but they definitely are wonderful plants. You can find them very easily at nurseries. I even found the spring Home Depot had a huge flat of Dudleas growing. It looked very nice. This is a euphorbia, euphorbia clavarioides. It's a wonderful plant. You can see this growing, a really nice couple of these growing up at the Tanifle Garden of UC Berkeley. These are all plants that are from colder regions. The euphorbia here is actually a Zone 5 plant, so you could grow this in Utah if you wanted to. This is a really nice South American plant. It's called a Orbia variegata. This is a relative of milkweeds. All of the plants in this group have these wonderful starfish-like flowers with great texture, some of them are fuzzy. They stink to high heaven. This plant will attract flies. It's good to know your plants as well because if you don't know your plants, you don't know how big they're going to get. Here's an example of a whole bunch of agaves. These agaves all look very similar, but they will end up on vastly different trajectories. This agave can end up being four, five, six feet across. This agave might never get bigger than a foot across. This agave might never get bigger than five inches across, so all of them could easily be mistaken for one another if you weren't paying attention, and they can get definitely to very different sizes. Most likely in San Francisco, you don't want a single plant that's going to grow to be seven or 10 feet across from when you plant it. Sometimes you do, but frequently those can be surprises. There's a round of sharp pointed swords that can be difficult to deal with, so it's always good to know your plants. Another example are some look-alikes. This is fenestraria called baby toes. It's one of my favorite plants, and this is frithia. It is not fenestraria, and whereas fenestraria is fairly successful in the Bay Area, protected from the wettest winters, it will do just fine and survive for years. My own garden had been around for 7, 8, 10 years. This plant wants dry winters, and it will rot away if it's cold and wet. So it's good to know your plants and make sure that you get your accurate identification because even plants that look almost identical can have very different care requirements. This is another agave. This is a shot from my own garden. When I bought this agave, I was not as savvy about my agave cultivars. I had hoped that it would stay small, and this is an agave that can get to be about 7 feet wide, so eventually I had to chop this out with an axe, unfortunately. I did feel guilty about it, but it had grown far, far, far too big for the spot that I had been given to. All right. So it's good to keep your faster-growing succulents segregated. So earlier when I said the succulents were slow, there was an asterisk there, and that's because succulents aren't always slow, and certain succulents are certainly faster than others. So here we have a wonderful succulent, oscularia deltoides. It's a great plant. It's pretty widely available. You can find it at a lot of nurseries. I've seen it in Humbibo as well. It is a wonderful ground cover, a wonderful rock wall kind of tumbling plant. It's really vigorous. It has this wonderful pale blueish color with pink stems, and in the springtime, right about now, for instance, in my own yard, white pink flowers completely covered in white pink flowers. This oscularia, however, has been planted with a couple of aloes here, and then some sedum here. And the oscularia is growing much faster than the rest of the plants. So you can see it's already starting to tumble over and cover up the aloes. The aloes don't grow as fast. So it's good to keep plants like that separated. Again, this is all learning in my own garden in hindsight. I would have separated these plants if I'd known. This is a shot from earlier that we saw. I'm just coming back to this. So this wonderful little plant here is called String of Pearls. I absolutely adore it. It's a great plant to grow. It looks wonderful tumbling over rocks over the edge of a pot. But it can be pretty vigorous, especially in the summer when the water is good and the temperatures are warm. It can get pretty, it can grow pretty quickly. And you can see here it's starting to smother this little cactus. I'll probably go in this a way to make sure that it doesn't grow too closely. Make the cactus unhappy. Here's another example of some other plants. This is a shot close to that earlier one that had the oscularia and the seed in here. This is another aloe that's also being overtaken by the seed in. So again just another example of where, you know, if I'd known, I would have moved the plants around and had a different set of plants growing closer to the aloes, or had the aloes growing closer to slow plants. So and so, you know, succulents can be hard to move. As I showed earlier, that, you know, that agave was just a mound of teeth. I did lose a bit of blood and taking it out. So it's good to make sure that you know what you're planting and where you're planting it so you don't have any prickly situations. And so also it's great to get the right materials. So some succulents can have some problematic sides. So euphorbia, a really wonderful cycle. There are tons of euphorbia, all kinds of shapes and sizes. A lot of the plants you've seen in pictures have been euphorbia. They produce a white sap. It's a latex like sap. Not everyone is sensitive to it, but some people do get contact dermatitis, like when you get poison oak from having the sap on it. So it's good to, you know, be careful of that. I don't happen to be particularly sensitive to it myself, but I've definitely seen people who have the poison oak like symptoms from getting it on it. This is just another euphorbia. Wonderful euphorbia here, euphorbia planaganiae, but just more of that sap. Here are some zoom-ins of some agave thorns. You can see here actually this agave was close enough to the sidewalk on my front yard that I made sure to regularly prune the thorns off so that as the leaves expanded out and got close enough that someone could potentially have touched them, it wasn't going to prick anyone, but you can see here so this is a new brand new leaf. It's just starting to come off the center. And perhaps the thing that I would warn people about the most are Glockids. So Glockids here are these little tiny fuzzy tufts. So a lot of cactus have these, especially a lot of the cacti that are pretty popular at nurseries and you see frequently on the flat of cactus that you might find at the Home Depot or something like that. You'll frequently see opuntia, or a group of cacti that have a lot of Glockids. And they're like tiny hairs but they're much stiffer and so you should think of them more as like micro needles as opposed to hairs. So this little cactus isn't fuzzy, it's covered in micro needles and those needles can get in all parts of your skin. They're particularly bad on the soft parts on them like the back of your hand. If you happen to eat cactus fruits you can get them in your lips and at the edges of your mouth. Very, very pleasant. So I myself stay away from the Glockid producing cacti like the little opuntias and stuff. They look very cute they're the cacti that kind of look like a little muppet or a sock puppet with little kind of tufts all over it. They're wonderful plants but I keep away from them just because if you are in the garden working around and needing to weed and prune things, just barely brushing across this cactus won't even hurt at all and then only later you can get all these little tiny irritating needles. I have some great tools that I use. You can go online and find some really large tweezers I have a set that's about a foot and a half long you can get some great forceps all of these are great for working with your cacti. Once you get stuff planted you can certainly have an issue with weeds and things so those tools are great for being able to get near something that's full of thorns to kind of prune out a dandelion or something like that. As far as pest controls go cyclones are actually pretty easy to care for most of the time but there are a few things that you will inevitably get when you have succulents. One of those are aphids. Here's some aphids on the balloon stem of an edge of area. Aphids need to have fairly soft tissue to drill into and so usually they go after things that are faster growing on succulents and balloon stems are frequently faster growing. This is just a balloon stem that's been covered with aphids a really easy way of handling this is a jet of water so you can get a special end for your hose and some multi help hoses have a mist setting so you can use that and sort of support the balloon stem with your hand and just kind of scrub it down with the mist setting of the hose and that will dislodge that aphids. Physical removal is usually completely effective if you do it for a few days or a few weeks in a row it will usually eliminate. Now another thing you have to contend with are the ants. Ants are farmers and ants will bring bugs to your plants. So this is an example of a little cactus growing in a pot on my back porch. This cactus is nowhere close to other plants it couldn't have picked up these aphids that are growing on or these mealy bugs that are growing on it but in fact ants brought the mealy bugs to this plant. If you watch closely in your own garden you might sometimes see an ant carrying one of these around and they will find places to farm these bugs and so that's something you have to be aware of. This is the same treatment as the aphids that I mentioned earlier just a good mist from the hose will usually dislodge all of these and physical removal is usually all you need to do. Alright so there's definitely techniques for succulents not in just small spaces but everywhere and these garden techniques are usually good for all kinds of growing as well so I'll go over those. So topographical features are great so flat spaces can be very pretty. This is a succulent pot from my garden as well. They can look very nice but they can get to be a bit monotonous and things can get to be crowded there. So if you are gardening in a small space topography is definitely something that can really add. So this is a similar pot to the one from my garden that's been mounted up in the middle that just allows you to get more plants in the same space. Here's a shot of a garden on a slope and as you can see this is a wonderful 1970s photograph and as you can see there's a ton of plants here and if you were to flatten the slope down all of these plants would be on top of each other would be overlapping would be shading each other out but on a slope here even all of these plants crowded as they are each get plenty of light and you can see them well making grow well. So topography is definitely maximized when you can fit in your garden. Here's a small spot and this is at the edge of my driveway so this is a bed about a foot wide that's between the side of my house and my driveway and so I mounted up a few rocks on the back of that bed and planted dirt in between the spaces in the rocks and so this is another example where if we were to flatten this bed down all of these plants would be on top of each other but with just a little bit of topography sort of stacking them up to get many more plants in the same spot and they're all pretty happy. So here's a shot of my yard so when I originally got the yard at the end of the talk I've got some more yard photos to show sort of the transformation of my yard from a non succulent yard to a succulent yard this is a shot you know several years into the garden and so I had brought in a whole bunch of dirt to make several mounds in my yard and so this is a large amount that kind of wraps around this side of the sidewalk there's a amount right here as well that's allowing to put a lot more plants and grow them well, give them all the sun that they want right so plants you know you want to space your plants out you don't want to have them all you don't want to garden with succulents as if that's the only thing that needs to be there and that's really a good rule for all kinds of plants you know other kinds of features gravel, rocks, wood large pieces of wood can all be really nice in a garden rocks give you topography they also get contrast they can give a nice clean background to the succulents so you can admire their shape and their form and their color they also just take up space so you don't have to feel like every part of the yard needs to have a plant there you can instead take up some space with other things being in the Bay Area, being in San Francisco there's lots of rocky slopes that rocks fall out of all the time so it's a lot of these rocks you see in the pictures these are from my yard, I found these rocks on the side of the road up in the hills you can do the same thing on the peninsula in San Francisco all over the place this is another early shot from my yard I've kind of changed things up a lot since then but you can see, heavily use the rocks and the rocks also form the spots where other things can grow so rocks aren't just taking up space themselves they're also kind of giving some landmarks to your garden that you can use to give you tips about where you want to plant things this is just another example this is a shot that's actually looking down one of the paths that's in my garden that I can use to access the garden to weed and stuff so these are just a couple of stepping stones here more topography with lots of rocks and then this is an old Manzanita Burl that I got as driftwood and so this is also just another part of the garden that I it's not plants but adds enough character and beauty to the garden as well gravel is great for your garden it both keeps the soil kind of moist keeps the soil from getting hot a lot of cyclists have shallow roots because they want to try to catch the water as soon as it hits the ground so a really hot soil surface prevents them from being able to grow their roots as close to the surface whereas a nice gravel cover will be much better for their roots and gravel also will help discourage weeds so that can discourage plants from getting started so one smart thing to do with cyclones because cyclones are slower they don't compete as well with weeds so other kinds of plants you can plant them if weeds get started usually the plants you planted will grow faster than the weeds so it's not so much of an issue cyclones are going to be very slow and so if you do start with a bed that's already got lots of seeds or weeds in it then it's going to be a problem so it's good to start with clean dirt if you can one trick that I use is to reuse the soil that's already there but always bury it underneath 4 or 5 inches if possible of new soil and that will usually keep the seeds that are that deep from sprouting weeding a little bit often is much better than waiting a long time and what's really key about waiting especially the succulents is trying to keep things from getting started in the first place this is a lesson I had to learn myself when I planted my garden for years after I planted my garden we had a couple of droughty winters so I didn't really have much in the way of weeds during the winter so I didn't have to worry about things but slowly during that time I hadn't really noticed but all kinds of seeds had blown in from the wind and from one or two clumps of grass here or there that I hadn't been particularly vigilant about removing and then we had a wet winter and in that wet winter every seed that had blown into the garden started sprouting and I was overrun with weeds and it took me almost two years to get back to a state of fewer weeds again because once you have the weeds going they reinforce themselves they scatter more seed it just gets worse and worse so I can't stress enough that when you do put a succulent garden together make sure you keep on top of the weeds and just weeding a little bit it's usually enough but if you go too long in between weeding you'll pay for it and so we talked earlier about conservative watering it's great for the plants in terms of color and form it's also great for weeds if you water thoroughly in a nice deep water standing at the bed and watering with a return down hose for 10 or 15 minutes that would be much better for the plants because their roots would be able to soak up the water and less frequent waters that are nice and deep will discourage weeds because the weeds won't be able to start the surface as easily and a nice vigorous spray as I mentioned earlier for the parasites is also just great in general depending on where you live in San Francisco or the Bay Area more generally you may have highway soot you may have sea spray you may have the general schmutz of urban living in all of those cases a spray with the hose can be fresh and it's also good for the plants especially rosette plants if they build up organic material in the center of those rosettes that can encourage uncle problems and rot so it's good to spray things out and a lot of those plants are shaped so that rain or water falling on them will naturally clean out their structure so that water blasts off their surface alright well that is pretty much the end of my talk I can just go over some shots of my yard and then we can open it up to questions so this is when we first got the house in Berkeley it had been planted with a whole bunch of bushes and large plants so it was kind of full of plants as a flat yard and it was completely covered in bushes there were some native bushes and roses, there were a variety of plants and so I removed a lot of those bushes of the Miracle Craigslist and then I brought in a whole bunch of soil and some big rocks to build up some mounds to create topography and so this is just a shot from after I had kind of brought in all the soil and started building up the topography this is another shot from the housing house side of that bed and so this is after I escaped it originally this is a little bit say about a year after that original escaping you can see here I've made a little awning with some screen over a plant that I was concerned about getting sunburned when I moved it so this is one of the tricks you can use if you do have a plant that you need to move into a really bright location and it's in the summer you can't avoid the move you can cover it up with a little bit of screen for a couple of weeks to actually help with the transition so this is just some shots so this is that same shot in that direction about three years later so you can see the plants have grown in a lot more really of course sort of expanded out this is before, this is the agave that I ended up having to take out as it was getting to its largest size and then this is another shot from the other direction at that same time and so every garden changes, every garden evolves and so eventually the fence, let's see that you can see here the large fence along the street this wooden fence, so it started to rot and to sag so we had to replace the fence and so I used that as an excuse to redo the front side of the garden so this is that in sort of mid-progress I had moved some plants around at this point I had brought in a whole bunch of rocks I started planting new plants you can see this is all rubble that I had managed to collect over years from the side of the road in various places this is taking down the fence and this is the new fence and so a refreshed garden so this is also something that one of the nice things about succulents is that they are very resilient to being moved around and so you can, at various times if you want to dig up a succulent kind of rescape things, rearrange things as long as you're careful about sunburn your orientation to the sun there's definitely something that you can rearrange and you don't have to be so concerned about moving them because they can definitely handle moves pretty well alright and that is it for my talk anybody got any questions we can go back to any of the images or any of the pages if you want to yeah, hi Kip, it's Anissa there's lots of questions let's jump in what succulents are good in full light situation of a rooftop so all succulents are going to be good in full light situations there's only a few that are sensitive to full sun and even those can frequently grow in full sun you just have to be careful when you first acquire them so let me un-full screen this for a moment actually I wanted to bring up some champ plants to talk about so I'll just talk about those because that's a good answer to the full sun rooftop question so Ionians here are a champ in the Bay Area, you've probably seen them all over the place there's lots of different Ionians they're native to the Canary Islands and they're just wonderful all kinds of cultivars dark ones at light, green ones, variegated ones pink ones, yellow ones they're great, they are robust growers so they're one of the ones that will bully the plants around them but they also can compete very well with plant so Ionians are the sorts of thing you can plant in just a regular garden setting and they will compete well with herbs and things like that even aloes are another super plant also great for rooftops they like sun they have the bonus of some very pretty balloons at certain times of year very vigorous agaves are they're larger plants, generally speaking they have small cultivars so one of these in a pot is usually the centerpiece of planting and in pots they will grow more slowly so even on agave that will get gigantic 10, 12 feet across if it's grown in a pot it will take a very long time to get there so you can enjoy even the larger species for a while on a rooftop I had a few agaves when I was on land on a rooftop in San Francisco so these are mesems that's just short for mesembryanthemum which is one of the plants in this group so these are a whole bunch of relatives of daisies from South Africa South Africa is an amazing biological region it has an astonishing array of species in a very small area and a good portion of the country is in a climate like the Bay Area a Mediterranean climate and so many plants from South Africa grow wonderfully here, a few of these this guy, aloenopsis is wonderful titanopsis is wonderful let's see this is a pleospilos another wonderful plant of that group haeworthias are a wonderful group and they're ones that do like more shade so haeworthias you may have seen already they're kind of popular these days at home depots and at grocery stores and things like that that is because they are more adapted to shade and they're also from South Africa but they grow in areas where they are in grasslands and things like that so they actually do like a little bit more shade they can handle very bright conditions as well you can always experiment with them but this is definitely a plant that's more suited to shadeier conditions etcheverias are a great new world group of succulents they grow mostly in Mexico and Central America in the south of the United States they're wonderful, wonderful plants they're similar to the dudleas which we'll get to in a moment there's all kinds of colors there are many plants like etcheverias and are called etcheverias anymore once upon a time everything was called an etcheveria but now there are grafted petalums and all kinds of other plants but etcheverias and sedums are wonderful wonderful succulents wonderful colors, wonderful shades very easy to grow and as I mentioned earlier the wonderful dudlea California native there are all kinds of species here there's more diversity in Southern California than here in Northern California but you can grow most of the species that you find fairly well they do like to be on a slope or another orientation where their rosette is not flat straight up because they can hold water in that rosette and encourage rot so it's best if they're angled with respect to the ground lots of wonderful, wonderful documents absolutely I'm going to try and combine these two questions so let's see how I do it's about propagating let's see da da da da um I currently have plants that are rooting indoors but would eventually like to move them outdoors I've had bad luck with over watering like the small ones I'm rooting are underwater underwater and when should I move them outdoors and the second one hopefully we can combine um can you remove babies and clumps can you remove them and become new plants do you pot them right away or should I wait before potting yeah so um in terms of dividing clumps and stuff so side cuts are definitely very resistant to being divided up and cut and broken apart um but you'll maximize the chance that the plants will re-establish if you give them a couple of days at least and that allows the scarred areas to heal over to dry out and that means that it's less likely that fungi or other kinds of bacteria can get in there that might cause rot or damage to the plant so if you give them a few days sitting on a you know on the porch in the shade um that scar will dry out and it's much more likely that will survive so that's a great way to handle that um in terms of moving things from indoors to out you can move things indoors to out anytime you want um moving things from you know succulents really in almost all cases should be grown outside um some of us you know can't grow them anywhere else because we don't have outdoor space um and so you know you can you can definitely grow succulents inside but ideally succulents want to be outside lots of air movement very brightly um and so moving them outside the sooner the better is always what I would say um and um since it is now we're moving into summer we're moving into the brightest parts of the year um you probably want to be careful about moving into a spot where they get lots of sun so as you move succulents out you'd best to say do it in the spring um early in the spring when the sunlight is less intense and slowly move them into the brightest spot so don't don't take them out to the balcony where sun at noon right away take them out to the shady spot at the edge and then slowly move them towards the brightest spots but they won't be happy once they're in those bright spots and they will grow um and even if they happen to get a little bit sunburn most succulents will you know continue to grow new tissue that isn't sunburned um but just be careful when you move them. Thank you too um let's see uh is it normal for outside lower leaves to dry up and drop off? Oh yeah absolutely so so um even in their natural habitats succulents are um expecting to cast off older leaves as they make new foliage. Now not every um succulent will do that some succulents do hold onto things and a succulent that is in you know a particularly good spot in its natural environment may have a lot more leaves in a different one but the a sun but it's not a bad sign that the lower leaves dry up and fall off um really the only question is the plant shrinking or is it staying the same size? If it's staying the same size you're fine it's getting bigger you're even better if the plant is shrinking and that's a sign that something is wrong you might need to water it more you might need to repot it and give it fresh soil or more nutrients um you might need to check it to make sure that there isn't a problem at the roots sometimes um you can get mealy bugs and other insects infesting the roots of succulents so there's various things that you might want to look at if the plant is shrinking but just having dead leaves um it's not a problem at all. Excellent thank you um I think you kind of hit on this is um does the soil and potted succulents need to be replenished occasionally? Yeah so um so you want to repot all your plants not just succulents every kind of plant you want to repot them periodically for a variety of reasons so obviously you know there's the issue of getting root bound the plant may get too big um it may you know its roots may become constrained in the pot which can which can damage the plant um not all plants need to you know not all plants mind being root bound some actually prefer it um but but it's good it's good to repot them for their roots as well but also over time when you're watering plants and pots the water that you're using is got dissolved salt so even in san francisco with hechechi water um it's a very clean water but there are dissolved salts in that water and that salt stays in the soil after the water dries up and is soaked up by the plant and so over time the soil in any pot will build up will build up salt slowly um and so that eventually becomes comes to the point where the plant has a hard time soaking up other nutrients from the soil because there's so much salt there so that's just a good a good reason if you don't have plants outside where rains you know where they get rained on in the winter and the rains can flush that salt out you know nice pure rain water can flush the salt out every once in a while um that's something you definitely want to be careful of so indoor plants particularly and that's house plants succulents you know all kinds of plants like that where water can't drain away from them freely will often build up salt over time and so it's good to you know repot plants every two or three years depending on the size of the plant thank you let's see if we can fit in a couple more I know we are running out of time but um how to repot spiny plants and cactus and how to weed around spiny plants yeah so I mentioned before get yourself a giant pair of tweezers you can hop on google or ebay type in giant tweezers or giant four snips and they will they will basically you know they're pretty economical to get and it looks just like a giant pair of tweezers and so that lets you get close to those succulents like that in terms of moving and handling them a beach towel is a great choice roll it up kind of make a you know a sausagey roll of beach towel and then you can wrap that around succulents to move them around and it will keep the thorns you can also use grocery bags so wadded up grocery bags or another option you just basically want something that's just strong enough because you know that there's enough spines generally on a cactus that if you can you can pick it up by the spines it's just spines with pierce your own flesh but a beach towel or like a crumbled up rolled up grocery bag wonderful thank you and let's see one last question what is there a proper way to trim an oscularia they'll toy this after they've bloomed so oscularia is very you know is very resilient to being trimmed so you know you can you can usually cut it back in all kinds of ways and it will sprout back out the blooms the bloom heads do become unsightly because it is so thick with blossoms and so after it blooms when those blossoms die the plant sort of looks like it's covered in kind of a brown crust because of all the dead blossoms in those kinds of circumstances it's not easy because the blooms are everywhere to trim them off one by one so what you can do is just give it a little bit of extra vigorous watering to kind of blast the old bloom stems off and generally new growth will come out fairly quickly and cover that up but it grows fast enough as well that you can just trim off branches that have bloomed and let the branches that have it grow over them and in their place all right well friends we are out of time we don't want to keep it too long and those are some great questions and like I said you can I put the link to the chat of today's notes I put in some book lists that you can find to get more information about succulents and more summer stride info and you can watch this again on YouTube because that was a lot of great information that Kip provided we have a lot of gardening programs on our YouTube we've partnered with the California Native Plant Society and I'll add that to the doc but yeah check it out again Kip thank you so much for helping us kick out summer stride with a great presentation and San Francisco Public Library community thank you for joining us today bye