We’re busy taking the last batches of cuttings of the season before the weather gets colder, as well as repotting some of our mother plants and our personal banana plants.
In the picture below is a great example of an Aeonium that had its growing point damaged in the frost last winter. We thought for a while we had almost lost it, but it survived! Having the growing point taken out forced it to become a multi headed plant as from the single point it has now sprouted 4 different heads. You can do this yourself by either scratching it out or chopping the entire top rosette off.
Some of our unusual plants we can’t grow from seed as they’re sterile so we have to do them from cuttings, we have a number of plants that we “farm” in order to produce the new plants to sell. We have been busy repotting these and giving all of them a health check before winter, we’ll bare root them and pot them on into a bigger pot, check them for any bugs in the plant and within the roots as well as taking any cuttings if we can and removing dead leaves.
As you can see from the photo below a lot of the Aeoniums are still in full growth, you can tell this by the distinctive green coming through around the center of the rosette as a lot of what makes them different later in the year often only comes through as the leaves get older.
We have a number of seedlings and larger plants that we have hybridised, we have potted these on to make sure they are big enough to get through the winter, we’ll soon begin selecting which ones of these have the characteristics we want to continue and hopefully by next year we’ll be able to announce our first hybrids that we have produced!
Even though it's now cooler and often cloudier its still dry and we have noticed the pots are still drying out quite quickly, especially in the perennials along the outside of the nursery, so if you have any at home, especially in terracotta pots make sure to keep up with the watering and perhaps if the plant needs it give it an autumn feed.