As many of you know, we have had renovations taking place at Dewey Street this summer. New siding. New windows. New roof. All of this has played havoc with the beautiful deck plantings I created in the spring. The guys have been setting up their equipment on the deck and a good deal of the project has taken place over the deck. The plants have suffered as a result. This weekend was positively beautiful. Especially Saturday. Very low humidity and cool morning temperatures. I decided to start putting the deck back together since most of the work is done. There is still the job of installing new gutters, but I think that will be less invasive than the earlier projects. I started with the agave plant, which was full of construction debris. I'll show you a foolproof way of cleaning an agave today. Read on.
You see here that this poor agave was just inundated with debris.
Debris from the construction and dead leaves. The trees in the back yard are dropping their leaves. But not because fall has arrived. They are dropping their leaves because we have not had any appreciable rainfall in months. When the season started the rain came in buckets, day after day. But that soon stopped and we've had hardly a drop all summer.
Another view of a dirty agave. I bought this agave plant about three years ago at a tent sale at the National Arboretum just outside of Washington. I love it.
There was debris everywhere on this plant. Much of it tucked underneath the spiky rosettes. (That is what the "leaves" are called - rosettes.) You can see the rosettes are quite thorny, so you must take extra care when handling. There is even a dead rosette. But I do not think that was from the debris. It is the natural evolution of the plant.
We are going to go off-topic here for a minute and talk about what you see above. Agaves produce small plant offsets, or "pups", around the base of the main plant. In the picture above you can see one of these pups. It is a perfectly formed miniature plant which will grow to full-size if cut away and replanted. I will cut this pup and, using Rootone, I will endeavor to successfully replant. Stay tuned for that post.
Back to cleaning the agave. You will need a good quality spray bottle. One that has a strong stream. Fill it with tepid water and set the spray to "stream" or some version of stream and a little mist. The closer the setting is to stream, the better.
I turned this agave over and tried to shake out as much of the debris as possible. As you can see, there was still plenty embedded in the rosettes.
I started spraying between the rosettes with the spray bottle set to stream and that forced out a great deal of the debris. I used a butter knife to get between and around the rosettes to help aid in removing the debris.
Slowly, I made my way around the entire plant, working from top to bottom and I was able to remove most all of the debris using the spray bottle and the butter knife.
In the end, I had a much nicer looking agave than what I had in the beginning. All of the construction debris was gone.
It looked much happier to have all that removed and to get a nice soothing drink of fresh water.
NOTE: I did not wear gloves. You may want to consider wearing gloves in this process. I do not wear gloves when gardening. I like to feel my hands in the soil. But I know that does not work for everyone. So a pair of gardening gloves will likely be very helpful if you decide to invest in an agave.
You see here that this poor agave was just inundated with debris.
Debris from the construction and dead leaves. The trees in the back yard are dropping their leaves. But not because fall has arrived. They are dropping their leaves because we have not had any appreciable rainfall in months. When the season started the rain came in buckets, day after day. But that soon stopped and we've had hardly a drop all summer.
Another view of a dirty agave. I bought this agave plant about three years ago at a tent sale at the National Arboretum just outside of Washington. I love it.
There was debris everywhere on this plant. Much of it tucked underneath the spiky rosettes. (That is what the "leaves" are called - rosettes.) You can see the rosettes are quite thorny, so you must take extra care when handling. There is even a dead rosette. But I do not think that was from the debris. It is the natural evolution of the plant.
We are going to go off-topic here for a minute and talk about what you see above. Agaves produce small plant offsets, or "pups", around the base of the main plant. In the picture above you can see one of these pups. It is a perfectly formed miniature plant which will grow to full-size if cut away and replanted. I will cut this pup and, using Rootone, I will endeavor to successfully replant. Stay tuned for that post.
Back to cleaning the agave. You will need a good quality spray bottle. One that has a strong stream. Fill it with tepid water and set the spray to "stream" or some version of stream and a little mist. The closer the setting is to stream, the better.
I turned this agave over and tried to shake out as much of the debris as possible. As you can see, there was still plenty embedded in the rosettes.
I started spraying between the rosettes with the spray bottle set to stream and that forced out a great deal of the debris. I used a butter knife to get between and around the rosettes to help aid in removing the debris.
Slowly, I made my way around the entire plant, working from top to bottom and I was able to remove most all of the debris using the spray bottle and the butter knife.
In the end, I had a much nicer looking agave than what I had in the beginning. All of the construction debris was gone.
It looked much happier to have all that removed and to get a nice soothing drink of fresh water.
NOTE: I did not wear gloves. You may want to consider wearing gloves in this process. I do not wear gloves when gardening. I like to feel my hands in the soil. But I know that does not work for everyone. So a pair of gardening gloves will likely be very helpful if you decide to invest in an agave.
