Repotting an Agave

Of all the things the previous occupant of my last apartment left behind, my favourite was a potted Agave.  I've never had much luck with potted plants and never seen much point in plants that aren't useful but the Agave was looked pretty and hardy and was free.  Unfortunately, judging by the pups squeezing their way out from under the parent plant, the Agave needed to be repotted.

This chore scared me in a number of ways.  I have very little experience with repotting plants, so the odds of killing it in the process seemed high.  Furthermore, the Agave is a large, spiny, dense plant so the odds of injuring myself seemed equally high.  So I put it off for a year.

Now that the days are warm again and the Agave has survived my neglect for a whole year, I felt that it deserved some care.  With the help of my wife (who got stabbed instead of me) I've finally done it.

We started by removing the Agave from it's pot.  This took the form of a dangerous tug-of-war, myself gripping the dead leaves around the base while my wife struggled with the pot.  Once freed, it was apparent just how badly root bound the poor plant was.

I carefully began untangling roots, cutting off far more pups than I expected as I came across them.  The pups were attached to the parent plant by way of long ropey looking growths which I mostly cut off and discarded.

In the end I had eighteen pups, removed and potted in plastic ups (with holes in the bottoms, of course).  The Agave returned to it's original pot, it's roots trimmed down by about half.

Will any of these survive being manhandled?  I hope so.  When I feel certain which ones are going to survive, I will make another post here offering them up to any local gardener who cares to claim one.  I certainly don't have a need for so many Agave.

A Rose By Any Other Name...

...would still need pruning.

Allow me to say, before I go any further, that I don't know how to prune.  Really, I don't.  I know that it needs to be done.  I've seen how a good pruning can make plants healthier and more lovely.  Every time I try to prune, I read as much as I can find in the library about pruning that particular plant in an effort to do better.  I feel like, when I have to prune, I end up hacking off branches at random.  Fortunately, most plants seem more than capable of surviving a bad haircut.

A few years ago, home from college on spring break, I noticed that rose bushes in my girlfriend's parent's backyard.  They had, apparently, been planted by the house's previous tenants several years ago and had since lacked the attention they needed.  They were massively overgrown, sprawling up onto the roof of the house, a dense mess of  bramblous branches.  How I wish I had a photo of that wild mass of twisted branches.

Wanting to impress my future in-laws, and having just assisted my aunt with her masterful pruning the week before, I offered to do what I could to tame these rose-beasts.  Despite it being rather late in the year, I armed myself with welding gloves and my trusty bypass pruners and lopped off branch after branch.  I was terrified that the severity of my attack, combined with it's less than surgical nature, would send the plants into shock and kill them all.

It did not.  The roses sprung back, stronger than ever, in a profusion of blooms.

Last week marked the third year that I have picked a fight with those prickly plants.  Each year they seem more like rose bushes and less like a horticultural horror.  This year I filled three trash cans with the waste cuttings and the roses are already sending out new growth, preparing for the coming season.

The moral of the story: prune with enthusiasm!  Don't be afraid of butchering your plant.  Odds are good that it will survive your ineptitude, as the plants in my care continue to survive mine, and you can attempt to fix any mistakes next year.