Video: How to Grow Succulents for Your Wedding

How to Grow Succulents for Your Wedding

Growing succulents for your wedding always requires you to keep a few very important things in mind. Grow succulents for your wedding with help from the owner of Eden Condensed, small space garden design in Los Angeles, California, in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Hi. I'm garden designer Angela Price from Eden Condensed small space garden design. I know that succulents are very popular these days and one of the coolest things that you can do is incorporate succulents into floral arrangements. So if you're having a wedding or a special party you can actually grow succulents and use them in arrangements and center pieces. And I'm going to put one of them together for you today and show you how succulents along with other flowers make a really nice arrangement. I actually have a lot of different vintage containers here. I collect vintage milk glass. And these are really easy to find in antique stores or online in places like eBay or Etsy. You can also use other types of containers, old pieces of silver or glass. This is an old beaker and here's another beaker I like to use. You can use these as vases as well. But today I'm actually going to make an arrangement in the vintage milk glass. I like this because it has some depth and it'll hold soil as well. So the first thing you want to do is add a little bit of horticultural charcoal to the bottom of your container. What this does is that it absorbs water, it absorbs any odors and what we say in kind of gardening terms is that it keeps the soil sweet, so you won't get any of that kind musty or moldy smell by having a container that doesn't have a drainage hole in it. What's great about succulents is that they don't need a lot of water anyway. And if this is for a party you can put this together a couple of days before the party or a day before when you put the fresh flowers in. So what you'll want to do is put about half an inch to an inch of the charcoal in the bottom. You can see here, just sort of spread it around just so it covers the bottom. And then on top of that you'll want to add some succulent or cactus mix. This is a potting soil that's specially formulated to grow succulents in it and it's made so that it drains really fast. Again, succulents don't like to be sitting in water. It causes their leaves to mold. And that there. And so it's important that any soil that you put succulents in drains really quickly. So, I'm going to spritz just a little bit of water on top of this just to give it, make it easier to work with. You can just use a sprayer. And I like to use succulents that sort of have a floral look. This is an echevarria. I also have here some aeoniums which sort of look like flowers and sempervivum which is also known as hens and chicks. This are great because they sprout little babies off of them and you can use those too. But I think for this one I'm going to use this echevarria and pull it out of the pot here and if you notice it does have two much soil on it for what we need. So I'll gently pull this off. You may need to pull some of the roots off of the bottom just to make sure you've got enough where you can plant it and it'll survive. But you also don't want it hanging too far above the container here. Make yourself a nice hole in the middle, press the soil there and you can plant that in there really nicely. OK. So that's sort of your center of that. And then what I thought would be nice is to take some cut roses in whatever colors you like, so you can match those. I found some really nice pink ones. With cut roses you want to make sure you strip the leaves off of them and take a pair of floral scissors and cut them on an angle. And we can just sort of move those around. You may need to kind of play around with how long your stems are. You kind of push those in there. The soil has enough water in it right now where it will give some life to the roses and they won't wilt. I'm going to take my gloves off so they don't get the roses dirty. Most commercial roses when you get them don't have a lot of thorns on them so you don't have to worry about poking yourself. And I'm just, I've got a little bee visitor over here, so that's nice. Hopefully you won't have any bees in your centerpiece. And we'll pull these off. We'll keep, make sure they're short enough so that they're all kind of even. Do a few more here. So you can sort of see the idea of how this is going to make like a little crown of roses around the succulent, which I think looks really nice. You can also add some additional greenery. I have some spray roses here, which are little tiny roses. And you can kind of poke those into the spaces and that will give a little bit more depth of color too. And you do three or four of these and put these out on the table and it makes a really nice centerpiece that uses both cut flowers as well as succulents. If you have any other questions about how to do a succulent arrangement for a wedding or a party, please contact me at edencondensed.com. Thank you very much.

How to Grow Succulents for Your Wedding

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