When you've gotta garden but the temp is triple digits

What to do when you can't spend another minute indoors, you've already watered everything, and the temp is headed to the triple digits (again)? Well, you divide an agave of course!

Temperatures in the 90's (headed to 100+) aren't when most plants want to be pulled from their containers and have their roots cut up, agaves though, they couldn't care less. This mass of agave-ness has been living in this container longer than I care to admit. 

My brother who lives in Phoenix, AZ, sent me several pups from his agaves years ago, I stuck one in this container and then proceeded to ignore it for years. Sure, I moved the pot into and out of the shade pavilion greenhouse each autumn. Then in the spring, I'd vow to do something about the increasing amount of plants in the pot. Of course since it was a task that didn't demand immediate attention I put it off...until pretty soon there I was, moving it again in the autumn. No more!

It was time to pull out and pot up the pups. My first attempt was successful. The soil was so loose and dry that I didn't even have to tip the pot and pull all the plants out. 

I got to thinking about the only other plant I'd ever removed from this pot, it was a variegated pup—very unusual since the mother agave is not variegated. I pulled that one before a visit to my brother, and took it to him as a gift. I'm not sure if it lives on or not.

Back to work. Pretty soon I had this assortment of spikes to show for my efforts...

...and only the main/mama plant remained.

Since I loved the container, but was no longer in love with the agave I went ahead and removed her too.

There were more roots than soil at this point, and she was busy making more babies.

Speaking of my brother's garden. You may have heard it's been hot in Phoenix? Yep, 31 consecutive days of 110 degrees Fahrenheit-plus, with nights "cooling off" into the 80's and 90's. That's tough on people and plants. His agaves in full sun are not happy, they're tough plants but they do have their limits. This clump was looking pretty sad back on August 5th...

It was even worse last week when he sent this photo...

I asked about the opuntia to the left of the agaves above. He inherited it with the house and it had been a beautiful, huge, purple-hued clump when I was last there in 2018. His reply; "it's sad, the pads are thin, it looks like it's been in an oven for a month at 115 degrees"... which is actually a pretty accurate description of what it's been thru.

These sad agaves are at another friend's house in Scottsdale, AZ. 

Here's another huge loss. This saguaro photo came from my brother, it's not in his garden but at an office building he was visiting. Unfortunately I hear talk that this is happening all around Phoenix and Tucson.

Over-watered saguaros in gardens and commercial landscapes are basically cooking from the inside during the heat. They can handle the heat in a drought, but they can't handle being watered like a garden plant and then having to endure the extreme temperatures.

Back to my garden now. Thinking about the variegated agave pup I mentioned I gave my brother sent me out to check on the random all-yellow pups from my variegated Yucca filamentosa 'Color Guard' in our hell-strip.

They look great!

Speaking of our hell-strip, were you wondering what I was going to do with all the agave pups I just ended up with? I'm going to give them away in our Little Free Greenhouse...

Portland has many Little Free Libraries on the street, so when I saw an image online of a Little Free Greenhouse in another part of town I jokingly asked Andrew if he wanted to build one and, well, he did! It has a door so that I can put garden books and magazines in it in the rainy season, but he took the door off for the summer so it doesn't become unbearably hot in there. My hope is that it becomes a place for the entire neighborhood (not just me) to share plants, it was slow to get started but in the last week I've had a few folks leave starts from their garden, seeds, and even a few tomatillos.

Driving home the other day I passed a lady walking down the street with her dog and an agave in her hand, from the greenhouse. You know that put a smile on my face!

It's secured in the ground with a cement base and a metal post. This part of the hell-strip has a thick later of sedum which we cut thru to put in the greenhouse, I kept it and "planted" it on top on the cement, there is a thin layer of soil the roots were already growing in. Since the sedum keeps growing out across the sidewalk in places, I think it's going to do just fine here. Hopefully it will keep going to grow down the sides to start to cover the cement (which I "aged" by rubbing it with wet clay soil)...

Okay, enough rambling! Time to pot up those pups...

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