...I want tons of succulents

I have to say that succulents are pretty awesome. All you do is, uh, "liberate" a leaf from a well established plant at Lowe's or Home Depot or Wal-Mart or any store that sells succulents, and take them home, and you can get your own garden going! It is so fun to watch a whole new plant grow from just a leaf, and it's so incredibly easy.

A lot of articles on Pinterest say all kinds of thing about mixing special dirt with special fertilizer and blending it all up with special desert sand and then putting them in the window and moving them around and all this crazy stuff. Don't do that, you don't have to. Also, some articles say to place the succulent leaf straight into the soil- that also doesn't work. I'm not entirely sure why, but I do know that the first few leaves I tried to propagate that way all rotted. My theory is because the leaves are mostly made up of water so when you stick them in the ground you're just keeping the water trapped and giving it the perfect place to sit and rot by sticking in the soil.

But here's how you do propagate succulents! (Please forgive my bad picture quality and badly painted fingernails)

So here is a "liberated" leaf. Make sure you get a whole leaf and not one thats torn halfway up. I just stick them in my pocket while I'm looking for other plants to buy and set them out on my propagating dish when I get home. A lot of places will say to let them sit for a day to scab over before trying to propagate them but it doesn't seem to make a difference- they'll scab over whether they're sitting on the dirt or not. 

And this is what I mean by "scab". All that means is that it's not watery on the end anymore, it's dried up. It will generally look brown instead of the pink color here- in this picture this succulent is actually about to start sprouting roots and I know that because of the pink color, but I'm getting ahead of myself!

So, I started with a shallow dish full of soil. All you need to do is lay the leaves flat on top of the soil and keep the soil wet. Because my dish was so shallow that meant I was watering it every day. Good news though, if you forget to water it, it's not a big deal, it just means they probably won't propagate as quickly. What else is awesome about this? Do you see how many succulents I can propagate at one time in such a tiny dish?

 Then not long afterwards, they started shooting roots and new leaves! You might be able to tell (even with the horrible picture quality) that the original leaves look kinda shriveled and like they're dying- that's ok! That's actually what you want to happen! The original leaf is going to die and leave the new plant by itself, which is good. Otherwise you would have this gorgeous new succulent with this ugly dead leaf tumor hanging off of it, and no one wants that. 

So yay! New succulents are growing! After they started to get bigger I transferred them to their own little temporary plastic pots. Why? Well, because we're broke and we don't have anything pretty to put them in, but more importantly because they not have more established roots they need their own pots so they can start growing into bigger plants! 

And now what? Well, once you've got some slightly established plants you still want to water the soil whenever it dries out to keep them growing. What do you not want to do? Mist the plants. That makes them grow shallow roots. Why? Because the water will only go to the very top layer of the soil. You want to encourage the roots to reach down far into the soil, so water all of it, not just the top layer! 

Succulents in general grow pretty slow, but once they start propagating it's pretty incredible how quickly they grow. It's so much fun and I really encourage you to try it! Plus, if you're sneaky you can do it for free! And when I grow up, I want tons of these bad boys!