Hello from Phoenix, Arizona. I grew 700 succulents for my wedding!

New to the forum? Use this section to introduce yourself!
Post Reply
phoenixbunny
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Sep 29, 2017 8:14 am

Hello from Phoenix, Arizona. I grew 700 succulents for my wedding!

Post by phoenixbunny »

Hi everyone! My name is Mckenzie. I live in Phoenix, Arizona and I recently started collecting cacti. I got married this spring (in April 2017) and despite never owning a real plant in my entire life (just fake houseplants), I made the crazy decision to grow 700 succulents in my backyard (for over a year) to use as my wedding table centerpieces! Why? Well, it is a very "trendy" thing to do right now (just check Pinterest), and it fit the theme of our desert wedding (we got married at Saguaro Lake Guest Ranch). Plus, I had a few friends who paid $4,000 for their wedding flowers, and it seemed absolutely absurd to me to pay that much money for something that would die within a week!

I bought 100 plants each of six different Echeveria:
Echeveria runyonii 'Topsy Turvy'
Echeveria imbricata 'Blue Rose'
Echeveria 'Black Prince'
Echeveria 'Perle Von Nürnberg'
Echeveria 'Pollux'
Echeveria 'Lola'

We grew them in individual 4” plastic pots (in trays of 16, which I scored for free from Moon Valley Nursery), but a few months before the wedding we transplanted them into 38 planter boxes that my husband made from pallet wood (he drilled drainage holes, of course!). I also grew some extra bigger ones that I gave to our florist (Camelback Flowershop), which they then incorporated into our bouquets, boutonnieres, and corsages.

I started off buying smaller 2” plants in bulk for about $1.25 each (some were harder to find than others). Everything was going okay in the beginning - I learned some of the basic lessons within the first couple months. For example: (1) succulents can get sunburnt, so I bought 30% shade cloth on Amazon and built a wooden shade structure, (2) the standard Miracle-Gro cactus potting soil at Home Depot is crap, so I found a local nursery (Harper’s in Scottsdale) that sells huge bags of crushed pumice stone and mixed it in at a 1:1 ratio, and (3) overwatering equals root rot, so I bought a moisture meter and only watered all of them when 90% of the plants were completely dry.

Then disaster hit – apparently Echeveria cannot withstand the high temperatures of a Phoenix summer! My beautiful babies started turning yellow and sickly, so I did some research and learned about CAM photosynthesis. Apparently, all plants “breathe” through tiny pores (by taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen through their stomata). Doing so during the scorching heat of a summer day, however, would result in so much loss of moisture that a succulent would shrivel up and die. So, unlike most other plants, many succulents close their pores all day long and only “breathe” at night when things cool down. Thus, for CAM photosynthesis to work, a significant shift in temperature from day to night is required. My babies weren’t dying from the daytime temperatures of 120 degrees – they were dying because it was still 100 degrees at midnight!

I started losing plants en masse. At one point, I even cried over it (my only ‘Bridezilla’ moment), so I moved all 36 trays inside our air-conditioned house (our cats munched on a few of them) while my husband jumped into action and built a makeshift greenhouse, complete with a mister system and swamp cooler. That might sound crazy, but he is an aerospace engineer who loves woodworking and building things – quite a catch!

I lost almost all of my Imbricatas and most of my Perle Von Nürnbergs. The Polluxs didn’t seem to mind the heat so much – some of them even doubled in size once temperatures started rising. Although, I’m not sure if they would have survived without the greenhouse intervention.

I barely made it through summer, and then I had another problem to deal with – Arizona monsoon season! But that wasn’t too challenging because we already replaced the shade cloth with a clear plastic material that blocked the torrential downpours. Still, it was nerve-wracking watching the fierce winds whip the plastic around!

The good thing about winter was I didn’t need to water as often. As you can imagine, watering 700 plants took FOREVER. I started out top-watering with a handheld pump sprayer, but as I bought more plants that method took WAY too long, so I got myself two clear plastic bins (the kind that are meant to go under your bed) and switched to bottom-watering. I bought some Sparkletts jugs and filled them with water from our kitchen’s reverse osmosis system and stored them in our garage between waterings. In the spring, I watered about once every two weeks. In the summer, it seemed like I was watering them every weekend. In the winter, I could go three weeks (one time I even waited an entire month).

After the wedding, we sold the centerpieces to our florist for $2,000. I probably spent more than that because I had to replace the 200+ plants that died over the summer (I bought bigger replacements online from Eastern Leaf for $3.99 each to make up for lost growing time), and who knows how much money my husband spent at Home Depot on tools/materials for the greenhouse. Looking back, my husband jokes that we could have got a second job at McDonald’s for minimum wage and earned enough money to pay for “real” wedding flowers instead, considering the countless hours I spent watering every weekend! That being said, it was an amazing learning experience, and it was so much fun watching them grow along the way. Plus, our wedding guests loved our DIY decorations. We made a ton of stuff ourselves – the ceremony arch, the chandeliers, the doorway, the table runners, the chalkboard signs, the wood chargers, the hanging centerpieces... almost everything!

Here are some pictures:

The progression of our initial shade cloth structure (I started out labeling each plant, but I quickly abandoned that idea):
Image
Image
Image

Our makeshift greenhouse (the swamp cooler is on the right, not pictured; the misters were underneath):
Image

A shot of each type before we planted them in the wood boxes:
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image

Our cat Yuri (named after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who was the first man in space) decided to bite into my largest Pollux:
Image

On the tables at our wedding:
Image
Image
Image

Our other DIY decorations (we also bought the Blue Cameron agaves that lined our ceremony aisle and planted them in our backyard after the wedding):
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image

Our bouquets (yes, those are identical twins):
Image

I got most of the bouquet succulents to grow new roots after the wedding. I only kept one Pollux as a memento, but my husband accidentally moved him in direct sunlight a few weeks ago and it got badly sunburnt.

Now that the wedding is over, my husband tore down our makeshift greenhouse and is in the process of building a vegetable garden in its place. I have put my dreams of collecting succulents on hold, until we move into a bigger house in a few years, at which point my husband has promised to build me a proper, air-conditioned greenhouse (an oxymoron?). In the meantime, he built a “cactus ladder” that I want to fill with cacti. Does anyone know if cacti will have the same CAM photosynthesis problem as my Echeveria did? I’ll have to see if anyone else on this forum is from Phoenix…

I mainly joined this forum because I have taxonomy OCD – I need my cacti labeled correctly or it will drive me insane. Unfortunately, it seems like there is no universally agreed-upon naming system, so I’m likely to go insane anyway. For example, yesterday I bought a cactus that Altman labeled Notocactus uebelmannianus. I googled it and found it is now called Parodia werneri because it underwent a name change when IOS merged the genus Notocactus into the genus Parodia in the 80’s (it was named after Werner Uebelmann, but there was already a cactus named Parodia uebelmannianus, so they used his first name instead). On top of that, apparently the NCL calls it Parodia crassigibba (I’m not sure why). I only have one cactus so far and I’m already super confused!!
User avatar
gemhunter178
Posts: 2762
Joined: Mon Oct 31, 2011 6:10 pm
Location: Massachusetts,USA. Zone 6A

Re: Hello from Phoenix, Arizona. I grew 700 succulents for my wedding!

Post by gemhunter178 »

Welcome, and congrats!
That's quite a lot of plants and a lot of arranging!
I do believe we have some members who live in Phoenix, I am not one of them
A cactus and succulent collector who especially likes Ariocarpus. …Though I have a bit of everything! Want some pictures? See my flickr! I also do art and such.
User avatar
7george
Posts: 2628
Joined: Tue Dec 30, 2014 7:49 pm
Location: Calgary, Canada
Contact:

Re: Hello from Phoenix, Arizona. I grew 700 succulents for my wedding!

Post by 7george »

Impressive! Keep on this way. =D>
If your cacti mess in your job just forget about the job.
°C = (°F - 32)/1.8
User avatar
hegar
Posts: 4596
Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2006 4:04 am
Location: El Paso, Texas

Re: Hello from Phoenix, Arizona. I grew 700 succulents for my wedding!

Post by hegar »

Hello Mckenzie,

I too do not live in Phoenix, Arizona, but in a somewhat similar climate (cooler in the summer and colder during the winter months).
Well, It looks like you had a small nursery going for your wedding preparations! :)
I am very impressed with your perseverance, growing the Echeveria cultivars and also, that your new husband helped you out as much as he did.
Succulents, and especially cacti, are not everybody's favorite plants. However, those Echeverias do look nice and interesting. I had no idea, that they were used in bridal bouquets.
Two things I wanted to ask, if you do not mind answering the questions:
1. What kind of plants are those at the end of each rows (Agave sp.)
2. I do like the names of the guests. They do look three-dimensional. What material are they made of?

Now back to the plants. Yes, cacti also do use the Crassulean Acid Metabolism cycle (CAM). They do, however, have different requirements as far as successful cultivation is concerned. Some genera/species will tolerate full sun, others do prefer filtered light and will suffer severely, if exposed to overly bright and hot sun rays. The biggest enemy to cacti is in my opinion cold, wet soil. I have lost a lot of plants to root rot, which seems to be detrimental to some cactus genera.
About growing cacti on a "cactus ladder" I cannot comment, because I have never tried this. However, if the growing medium is adequate and the plants receive enough light, it should not be a problem. Perhaps you could even regulate the amount of light for each plant with that kind of setup, with the more sun loving, larger plants being on top of the ladder.

Harald
kuni1234567
Posts: 87
Joined: Mon May 01, 2017 4:36 am

Re: Hello from Phoenix, Arizona. I grew 700 succulents for my wedding!

Post by kuni1234567 »

I like your idea about using live plants at your wedding. Have fun growing and collecting plants. I have some plants that I have been growing for more than fifty years.
Post Reply