I'm Debra Lee Baldwin in my garden I am looking around assessing
the damage after a triple digit heat wave. Yeah we got up to
107. I'm about to do a late summer succulent assessment
We're going to take a look and see what needs attention
and discuss what to do about it. For comparison's sake you might want to see
my earlier video that i did in the spring
in which i showed you the garden looking at its absolute peak of perfection
so now in late summer it's looking its absolute
worst for the year. But first we are going to tackle a sunburned
Agave atenuata I had a tree that had died taken out. The
plants around it got too much sun. There's some
damage, but they'll recover. and you do one cut
and then you do a second cut that follows the shape of the leaf
Why cut it at a point? For aesthetic reasons.
The plant doesn't care, in fact it doesn't care if you prune it at all.
Is it a little lopsided? Yes, but does it look 100% better? I think so.
I could do a whole video just on echeverias
and heat, and how to get them through the summer
You can see this one got a little bit of sunburn
even though every day during the heat of the day
I covered them with this non-woven fabric
That is edema, the result of cell collapse. The plant is trying to
draw water from its leaves like succulents do to
survive drought So yeah it'll recover. They lose their
lowest leaves hopefully it'll look fine by the winter
That's not a mealybug down there is it? Oh it is!
Mealybugs proliferate this time of year
If it says 90 you want to dilute it but if it's 70
you're okay using it full strength
Is anything else infested? Clean as a whistle. But if I hadn't
gotten the mealybugs off of the other plants they would have
migrated over here very difficult to get rid of. Also check
your haworthias anything that has deep crevices. So every
time I water this, which is not very often because it's cactus, but every time
i water it. I just blast it right down into the openings to
discourage any mealybugs. Sunset jade showing some heat stress, see
the under leaves are perfectly fine and the plant will recover beautifully
You don't really know how a plant's going to come
through weather extremes but you can get an idea that maybe it's
suffering. This is a cutting of a dragon fruit, a
tropical succulent that I really hoped would take hold. Well actually it's
rooted. It's green on the other side. Well maybe there's hope yet. I got this
Agave nizandensis at a Cactus and Succulent Society show
It has the potential to redden and be really
pretty but it was not happy in the high heat
I had this window screen so i tossed it over and it really helped protect
it I'm thinking about maybe moving that
Here's the challenge. The closer you live to the desert, the harder to stress your
succulents to beautiful bright shades of red
without killing them. There are a lot of benefits to living in the desert but
that's not one of them I planted mangaves here thinking that
they would look marvelous, and indeed i think they would have
except this is a microclimate that gets way too much sun. It's very exposed.
It's going to go into mangave terrace sounds like a Southern California
housing development, doesn't it? So most of the mangaves got moved except
for this one and a couple of others that
have toughed it out but I don't like to have to cover plants
in extreme conditions, so I want them to be able to
make it. So maybe I'll just redo this terrace with cactus
Yes that's a mangave but ah we're not going to digress
These aeoniums look terrible but that's what they do
at the end of summer they're still dormant. You can see they've closed
their rosettes to protect their green inner cores
so all that's very healthy and fine down in there. No big deal
in the winter with the rainy season they'll lose those
outermost leaves which they would anyway, produce new growth from the center of
the rosettes, and they'll be glorious by the spring
This beautifully striped Agave americana has undulating leaves. Where
the leaf folds over it gets more exposure to the sun and can
burn, so what I end up doing is just cutting those damaged leaves to
a point or whack them off close to the center
core of the plant. This Agave americana marginata is
in dappled shade for most of the day and it doesn't have that problem
We're down where i have opuntia planted as a security fence. That's quite dry and
woody in there and I imagine you know I could have
watered it more but i thought it was getting plenty
It needs hydraulic pressure to keep it upright
Now, I can of course take those fallen pads
and plant them as cuttings. If i do nothing
this is what will happen. Summertime in the desert Southwest
the monsoon season, that's when they naturally get water. The plants
expect it and need it. Now this whole area
of paddle cactus gets no irrigation. I forget it needs some supplemental hose
watering in the summertime, and if they're prone
to cochineal scale you can kill two birds with one
stone I mean blasting the scale off is one way
to deal with it, but a better way is to scrub it off
gently. Find out about that on my Youtube video on cochineal scale.
That was as prized as silver by the Spaniards
when they conquered the New World.