I used to keep this argument going in my head every time I bought a new specimen, standing in front of a shelf of empty pots trying to decide which material was “correct” for a plant I’d just spent an uncomfortable amount of money on. For years I assumed there had to be one right … Read more
I put off repotting a rare Ariocarpus for almost two years longer than I should have, entirely out of fear. I’d read enough horror stories in collector forums, plants that seemed perfectly healthy going into a repot and then collapsed within weeks afterward, that I convinced myself the safest option was simply not to touch … Read more
For a long time, I treated every stall in growth as a problem to be solved. A plant that stopped putting out new leaves, stopped plumping up, stopped doing anything visible at all, felt like a plant that needed intervention, more water, more light, maybe a feed to nudge it back into motion. It took … Read more
For the first few years I spent collecting succulents seriously, I thought I had the fundamentals figured out. I understood light, I understood watering, I’d read enough to know that soil composition mattered more than most beginners assume. What I didn’t think about at all, not once, was air movement. It genuinely never occurred to … Read more
I killed my first genuinely rare succulent not with neglect, but with kindness. A Conophytum I’d been babying for months finally looked strong enough to “reward,” so I hit it with a full-strength houseplant fertilizer meant for tropical foliage, the kind of product that promises lush, rapid growth. Within a week the tight little body … Read more
The irony of sunburn damage is that it almost always happens to growers who are trying to do the right thing. I’ve seen it happen to my own plants more than once, moving a specimen outside for what I thought was a well-timed dose of stronger light, only to find bleached, damaged patches within a … Read more
The first time I found mealybugs on a rare Haworthia, I didn’t even recognize what I was looking at at first. Just a faint, cottony fuzz tucked into the crevice between two leaves, easy to mistake for something harmless until I looked closer and realized it was moving, ever so slightly. That plant survived, but … Read more
A cold snap caught me off guard a few winters ago. I’d left a small group of rare Echeverias on a windowsill that had been perfectly fine all season, not realizing that a sudden overnight temperature drop, combined with the plants sitting close to the glass, had exposed them to conditions considerably colder than the … Read more
For years I resisted buying grow lights, mostly out of some vague sense that a “real” succulent collection should rely on natural sunlight alone. Then I moved into a space with a single north-facing window that let in what could generously be called ambient daylight, and every rare specimen I owned started stretching within weeks. … Read more
For the longest time, I couldn’t reliably tell these two problems apart just by looking at a stressed plant, and I suspect that’s true for a lot of people, because the visual symptoms genuinely do overlap more than most care guides admit. A soft, slightly wrinkled leaf can mean a plant is thirsty, or it … Read more