Plant of the day: Succulents

In my 2012 garden, I fell in love with succulents and I'm really not sure why I hadn't just been putting them absolutely everywhere prior to that point. Succulents are awesome because they play up to some of my best strengths, namely abandonment and forgetting to water things.

From July, you can see some of the plants are getting big!

Now, I know that these two skills might make me a terrible gardener but somehow my garden always makes it. In fact this year, it got so large I started calling it Jurassic Park. I had tomatoes that would have been taller than me if they hadn't been weighed down by their fruit and 12 ft tall sunflowers (they drove the squirrels crazy!). Once the plants started producing--and you'd be surprised how many tomatoes 23 plants produce...or not--I was a lax photographer so unfortunately, I don't have the pictures where there was plants everywhere!

But back to my succulents. They're great because they're very low maintenance. They like the hot and they like the dry. Plus (and this may not be a plus for everyone) they don't get out of control big. I like to use them in containers because I can then move them around the yard.

Succulents fall into a fairly broad category of plants and even definitions. If you're a botany nerd, such as I am, you'll know that there are a lot of different orders and families that fall into the common term of succulents. Now, I'm not wild about cacti so the succulents I usually plant fall into the family Crassulaceae.  That's mostly because I have a habit of groping plants. Yes, I commit plant frottage.

What this means (the plant family, not my need to touch them) is that I like to plant succulents like Hen and Chicks or Jade. So those are some succulents that are easy to come by and if you plant them in containers, you can bring them inside during the summer so you can enjoy them year round!