Succulent Ramblings

I like to ramble on about my plants... and other things! My hope is to log the progress of plants and talk about my frustrations with others. So, tune in, turn on, or drop out (if you find it boring!)

Sunday, October 12, 2025

Celebrate and...

 I've now been on my diet for 3 months - it will be 13 weeks this coming Wednesday.  Weight Watchers + Ozempic (for what is now true diabetes, but should also help with the weight loss...)  A couple weeks after I started dieting but before I went on Ozempic, I was at an appointment to see the nurse practitioner who specializes in hormone imbalance/metabolic issues and she weighed me - I had lost about 9 pounds in the first two weeks.  But I've dieted often enough (and known people who diet) to know that the first 10 lbs is usually water weight than comes off when you start eating better, so I didn't get too excited.  Two weeks later, I saw her again and I had lost a whopping one pound in that 14 days!  Oh boy... what a disappointment, but not exactly unanticipated.  Last time I tried WW (which was back in 2018), I don't think I ever got much past that first 10 pounds...

So I've been avoiding the scale.  I didn't want the disappointment of knowing all my hard work isn't netting much and I didn't want to give myself an excuse for giving up.  But I've been very good and very meticulous and mindful.  I've noticed little changes in the way clothes fit me, but nothing that screams WOW.  And as far as seeing any changes - nope!  But my mantra right now is "if I keep at it, sooner or later it's got to work."  

Today, a little mishap caused by my older cat, Pearl, when she fell and knocked over a cup of water I keep in the bathroom next to the vanity for the cats - water ended up under the vanity.  So I got out a towel and dragged the scale out from under the vanity to clean up the mess and when I was done, I thought "Well, it's out and maybe it's a sign that it's time to face the music..."  I held my breath and stepped on it - I'm down 26 lbs from my starting weight!  I was shocked.  It's incredible that I can't see or feel it other than a slight difference in how things are fitting - not that things are "loose", mind you, just different!  Well, that calculates out to 2 lbs a week, which I've always said was about the max I prefer to lose so that it comes off in a healthy way and so maybe my skin can spring back at least a little... I have a long way to go, but at least this gives me hope that I can do it.

Something I won't dwell on for too long - OMG my hip has been KILLING me!  Dr. Corey, my chiropractor, says it appears to be my psoas muscle is shortened and probably spasming.  So I'm trying to do some exercises I found on the internet that are oh-so-painful!  But you know what seems to help even more?  Something I learned from my spiritual guru, Abraham... "Act as if"... in other words, when I get up to walk, I DON'T allow myself to "gimp."  No matter how bad it hurts, walk as if there is no pain.  And if I can consciously do that, the pain is far less!  This came out of an observation that it doesn't bother me as much when I am at work.  I think when I'm home, I'm far too focused on it, which exacerbates it! 

Joe Dispenza tells his story of healing himself from severe spinal injuries with the power of his mind.  He was apparently badly injured in a biking accident and refused surgery that would leave him with permanent chronic pain and instead used his mind, focusing on the "feeling" of being healed and whole - in other words, you get what you focus on or think about.  If all you can see and feel is what IS, you will get more of what IS.  If you can see past what IS at what's possible, tricking your body into feeling what you want, that state of wholeness has to follow.   It's very "heady" stuff that essentially is about the power of the mind.  So it's what I'm trying to focus on.  Seeing myself fit.  Seeing myself pain-free.  Seeing myself with clarity and youth and energy.  

And before I "blog-off" (tee-hee), I wanted to show pics of a dish garden.  Every year for the last few, the DM cactus club has been having a field trip meeting at a very nice nursery in Norwalk called Bedwell's.  We create a dish garden, so I've got 3 now and I just brought the last one in today, snapped some pics as it looks really fabulous.  Here is the whole thing (closeups to follow)...

I couldn't get the top of the tallest plant in the photo, but here is the top with some detail.  This is Senecio crassissimus, commonly known as Vertical Leaf:

It's been out in full sun, thus the red edges.  It's one of the neatest of the Senecios IMO.  Next we have Sedum burrito, the smallest of the Burro's Tail type succulents...

When you have a pot full of this, hanging, it's quite impressive!  Next is Crassula spiralis 'Estangol'...

I'll keep my fingers crossed that it stays this compact through the winter, but it's not likely here.  And last one is Senecio jacobsenii...

A lot of people call this the cascading or hanging Jade, but it's not in the same genus.  It's another one that looks pretty impressive when grown hanging.  All are doing very well.  I will photograph another dish garden next time.




Sunday, October 05, 2025

And fall begins?

 Well, we should be seeing some fall weather, but so far, it's been HOT.  Here it is, October 4th (the big "10-4") and it's almost 90 degrees and windy as hell.  But I guess today is the last of it... they're predicting the low 80's tomorrow, then possible storms tomorrow night brining in a cold front that will give us a fall-like high on Monday of the low to mid 60's.  YAY.  I'm tired of heat!  Tomorrow, I will make it a point to get the second east window shut in the greenhouse (I shut the other one a month or so ago when we got cold temps at night...)  Then, if the night temps really go down, I'll shut the south window.  Because the north window is easy to use, I then use that one to open and shut as the weather permits in fall and early spring. The other three are challenging to open and shut, so they get opened when night temps are above 45 and shut when night temps fall below 45.

Today was the last day we will be doing the farmer's market.  There are 2 more weeks of it, but I think it's going to be too cold early in the morning and I just don't care to be freezing my ass off out there!  So I will be giving the last of my "extras" to Michelle.  She runs a plant booth the first week of September at the Holy Cross festival.  I've been giving her plants for the festival for years, and this year I told her that early September is a little too early for me because I'm selling at the farmer's market that goes on for another month.  I asked her if it would be ok if I gave them to her after the festival, and she could winter them over until the next year.  She was fine with that, so now I can give her a lot more.  If she has the room, I think this will really benefit the festival, and it's a lot better for me!  But it's nice to have someone to send my "extras" to because I have trouble finding space for everything in the fall!

I have a lot of catching up to do with posting photos of my most outstanding plants this year.  I spent a lot of time blogging about (or should I say "bitching about") the things that were disrupting my life.  Neighbors, health things... So on to that more fun task!

The Hoya we used to call 'Dee's Big One', now called skinneriana, was one I got from a Florida plant friend quite a long time ago - maybe 20 years or more.  I grew it for a long, long time and when it didn't bloom for me, I got rid of it.  I got another one about 4 years ago in a trade.  It bloomed at long last!  A nice bloom, too...

I have no idea why it's happier than it was before, but I'm not complaining!  There was only the one bloom, but that's ok, too...

Recently, as I was watering plants, I found flowers on a Sinningia I got from Karin, my Plattsmouth plant pal from the cactus club.  This is one of those Sinningias that develops a caudex and it seems a little easier to grow than the fuzzy leaved one I've had in the past.  Here it is...

The leaves are highly textured on S. bullata, and you have to be careful not to let it get too dry or the leaf edges turn crispy.  I hope I can maintain it through the winter - you have to be cautious about giving too much water to caudex plants in the winter or the caudex can rot.  But I can always cut it all back in spring if I do end up with crispy leaves in the winter months...

I enjoyed the unusual flowers on two different weird plants recently.  First was Cynanchum marnieranum.  Many Cynanchums are strangely leafless plants with long hanging stems and are grown mostly for their weird flowers.  I've been reading about some that have leaves, and I think I'm going to go on a hunt for some of those to grow.  Anyway, here's the weird flower of marieranum...

And just so there's no doubt that I love weird, here are the flowers of Ceropegia ampliata...
The smaller one has yet to "open"...But the bigger one is about 2.5" long to give you an idea of the size.  Ceropegias are some of the most other-worldly flowers I've personally grown.  Everyone seems to know of the one they call string of hearts, C. wooddii.  A photo of its flowers:
This photo is from the web... I grow it, but I don't seem to have any of my own pics of the flowers, probably because it's so common and flowers so profusely that I haven't bothered... But I think everyone has grown this one at one time or the other.  Probably my favorite Ceropegia flower is C. radicans...

They call them "parachute" flowers and I think this one illustrates that name best of all!

My Haworthias came in looking like a million bucks this year!  Which proves, in my head, that you really can't get "too much" rain.  C&S folks would have you believe that too much rain will rot your plants, so you should cover them at a certain point.  I don't, never have, and at the end of a particularly rainy summer, they always look great!  Not that I haven't had losses due to rot.  It happens now and then.  If I kept plants soaked with tap water, they would surely rot. So there is definitely something different about rainwater. Whatever it is, the plants absolutely thrive in rainy summers!

So back to my Haworthias.  I'm going to how some photos - I have around 40 or 45 (36 according to my database, but there are several lumped into one species because I'm a sucker for every variant of that species!)  So here are the ones that really knock my socks off!...

First, here are some of the maughanii and truncata and hybrids of those two species that I can't pass up:

They hybridize these like crazy and 15 years ago, they would sell pups for a ridiculous price, some over $500!  The great thing about Haworthias is that they stay relatively small, they grow slowly and they're perfectly happy on a north, east or west window sill.  In habitat, they grow in shady spots, so they don't need lots of light to thrive.  There is nothing interesting about their flowers and they are all exactly the same - they shoot up a tall flower spike and little white flowers open along the top of the spike.  Many growers pull the flower stalks to force the plant to put it's energy into the plant itself rather than flowering.

Other Haworthia that are looking awesome... H. emelyae comptoniana:
H. reticulata v. hurlingii:

You can't tell from the photo that this is one of the tiny Haworthias - that pot is at most a 2.5" pot!  And we have H.pygmaea 'Love Heart':
H. cooperi - I grew this one for years but I think I lost mine in that bad hail storm a couple years ago, so I just got a new one:
A nicely variegated one - it didn't come with a name, but I think it's a form of H. cymbiformis:
One with a lost tag, but I'm pretty sure it's a form of H. emelyae, and maybe even another clone of emelyae comptoniana - there are a lot of them with slight differences:
This is a particularly interesting one... H. magnifica atrofusca.  The leaves grow in a less symetrical way than most Haworthias, but it's the pink tones that make it particularly beautiful!:

This MAY be a splendens hybrid:
And that's all I'm doing today.  My back is screaming at me so it's time to go ice!  More next time!