The Fairweather Gardener - A Sucker for Succulents

I've recently realised that I’m a cactus collector, well cacti and other succulents. This seems to have been my unintentional lockdown project. I spent a lot of time potting offsets and cuttings of my houseplants.

The autumn before covid 19 struck, I'd bought a small, three-tier, wooden shelving unit with attractive turned uprights, which was narrow enough to sit on the window board in my conservatory. At first I put a few small cuttings of jade plants (crassula) and a lot of baby spider plants on it. I soon discovered that on a sunny day, I could put the spider plants and one or two other rooted babies outside with a sign, “Houseplants Free to Good Homes” and they’d be re-homed within a couple of hours. 

So the shelving unit now displays some of my small to medium succulents beautifully. On the top shelf is a bears-paw (cotyledon tormentosa), a small jade plant with unusual pointed leaves, a tall, variegated jade plant (crassula ovata variegata) and a long crassula perforata in a beautiful artichoke pot, whose stems are beginning to hang down.

On the middle shelf in a red and green pot is an echinopsis cactus with several babies who need potting on. There's a second echinopsis sharing a low dish with cobweb houseleek (sempervivum) and between the two are my latest editions, four small pots whose occupants I'm not yet sure how to care for so I'm being careful. Two are types of lithops (living stones) which I know can be tricky, one is a string-of-pearls (senecio) which I'm assured is easy, and the fourth is a tiny, unidentified, globe cactus which I'm hoping is as easy as the echinopsis.

The bottom shelf houses another echinopsis, an echiveira (they come in lots of varieties, mostly look the same so I don't know which type this is!) a sad Christmas cactus which I'm nursing but may not survive (I overwatered the poor thing) and some Hawarthia in a strange Spanish pot with crude butterflies decorating it.  

In the pot to the right of the shelving are sanseveiria (snake plant), echinopsis and haworthia which have all been in one very overcrowded pot for ten years, I seriously need to free them! Beside them on a stand are another haworthia below, and above a green jade plant in a lovely red glazed pot. This is only about half of my windowsill collection of succulents and that number doesn't include two large, potted gasteria verrucosa which sit on the floor and are flowering in the sun. 

There's also Mama cactus, who was my first echinopsis and has produced all of the others. She's very fierce, lives mostly outdoors, she flowers every summer and lives in a colony with many daughters and grand-daughters. They will shortly be going out onto the patio, when I can find my thickest gardening gloves.