The Plant of the Month for December over at Gardening Gone Wild is all about sedums! Sedums (also called stonecrop) are a type of succulent and are capable of storing water in their leaves which makes them very drought tolerant here in Tennessee. We have several kinds of sedum in our garden with one of my favorites being the Dragon's Blood Sedum or Sedum sprurium. Dragon's Blood sedum makes an interesting ground cover due to its burgundy colored foliage.
The other day while we had temperatures in the upper 60's (very unusual for December) I took a few cuttings of our sedum to use in an indoor pot. Sedums are extremely easy to propagate and in most cases just need to be stuck in dirt to grow roots. I used the dirt sticking technique and put four small cuttings (or maybe I should call these pinchings since I pinched them off instead of making a cutting) into a small pot. In the spring I'll add these sedums into various places in the sedum garden but I can easily overwinter them inside the house.
Please forgive the chip in the pot. It's been around a while!
There are a several of other kinds of sedums in our garden one of which is everyone's favorite sedum 'Autumn Joy' (Sedum telephium) seen here in the picture behind a mound of mums and some hollyhock leaves. It never fails to offer up a bounty of pink colored blooms. We have two other 'Autumn Joy' plants both of which came from cuttings. I used the sedum-in-a-jar-of-water method, which of course is the technical term.
I picked up an 'Angelina' sedum (Sedum repestre 'Angelina') at a plant exchange last year but sadly it disappeared after planting. It was either a victim of rabbits or neglect (since as I remember I was very slow in planting it). At the same plant swap I came home with a sedum 'Acre' but I had second thoughts about planting it. Sedum 'Acre' is known to expand its territory very rapidly. It's still resting in its pot waiting for something to be done with it, any suggestions?
Another sedum in our garden is the 'Blue Spruce' sedum. 'Blue Spruce' is a great one for propagating since anywhere you stick it, it grows! It shoots up yellow flowers in the summer like in the picture to the right and has an attractive blue-green hue to its foliage. One plant in a pot eventually turned into three large clumps that will spread to cover large portions of our sedum garden - it makes a great groundcover. I have it mixed with the Dragon's blood sedum for some color contrast.
The last sedum we have is officially an unidentified one that we purchased last spring at a garden show. I suspect that it is Sedum sieboldii but I don't know for sure. The sedum didn't have any identification. It's a good thing it never got pulled over. The blooms look great as you can see in this picture from August. The soft shaded green foliage is what attracted us to the plant but the flowers really do make it worth planting!Labels: perennial
The other day while we had temperatures in the upper 60's (very unusual for December) I took a few cuttings of our sedum to use in an indoor pot. Sedums are extremely easy to propagate and in most cases just need to be stuck in dirt to grow roots. I used the dirt sticking technique and put four small cuttings (or maybe I should call these pinchings since I pinched them off instead of making a cutting) into a small pot. In the spring I'll add these sedums into various places in the sedum garden but I can easily overwinter them inside the house. 
There are a several of other kinds of sedums in our garden one of which is everyone's favorite sedum 'Autumn Joy' (Sedum telephium) seen here in the picture behind a mound of mums and some hollyhock leaves. It never fails to offer up a bounty of pink colored blooms. We have two other 'Autumn Joy' plants both of which came from cuttings. I used the sedum-in-a-jar-of-water method, which of course is the technical term.
