Oops I did it again- Agave

[Tina]

I was whats apping( fantastic app for chatting to others in any country and sending pictures for free) a friend in Belgium a photo of a rare agave I have and was grumbling a bit about the uneven variegation, its a agave romanni with very good colour but not uniform variegation and the only one I have seen so far- unless you know better.
I have noticed some songs that come to mind with certain procedures, anyone else do this ? or am I cracking up.



He was saying I could cut it or just keep my fingers crossed for an offset,Agave romanni doesn't often offset naturally, I dithered a bit for a day and then this is it so fingers crossed for some exciting offsets- please not green.

Getting my tools nice n clean & I could always drink some for dutch courage

Next song to sing is 'first cut is the deepest'

At the end I placed some clean palnt labels between the two cuts, I would normally put some hormone rooting poweder on them but had misplaced it.

I only do this with plants that are in good growth, have not been recently repotted or watered, it will stay like this until next year and then will probably be split into two pots or if you have the space one larger pan and space the two halves apart a little more, the second method means less root disturbance so in theory faster growth/offset, you can also remove the growing points for each half so then it will only produce offsets and the base will ultimately die off I am going to leave both halves of the growing point as I want to see what happens, when I removed the growing point on a different agave I got an offset for each leaf axil not offsets from the base so watch this space but probably no updates until next year

[WayneM]

You are a brave woman.
Looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Best Regards Wayne

[Paul in Essex]

Ouch. Good luck.

Not quite the same but I cored an exceedingly rare hybrid agave with some success. Fortune favours the brave!

[Diane]

Good luck from me too!

[agavemad]

OMG OMG I did look at a couple of mine this year with a view to doing some choppy choppy, but I am just not brave enough! Good luck, I hope you get some good results

[Tina]

I maybe should explain some of the reasoning for the cut, several agave addicts I know will only swap 'special agaves', they are retired, have money but want more special variegates that they don't have so to get a rare plant from them I have to have a good special swap that they don't have, very difficult as they also have lots of contacts.

I don't like coring as I did it once and killed the plant so now I stick to cutting, this way I'm only likely to lose half a plant at the worst. Another friend unpots the plant, washes the roots to cut it exactly in half I don't like this as its going to place a lot of stress on an already distressed plant.

Ultimately I could name my own cultivar this way , do I just need to get it published in the BCSS journal ??, maybe next year we can make up zippy names for it or send condolences of course.

[ralphrmartin]

Did you ever see that chap who took a power drill to the center of his Echeverias? For the same reasons as you, but the butcher's approach rather than the surgeon's...

[Tina]

butcher's approach rather than the surgeon's..

I'm also good with a scalpel , I was told a heated needle is good for growing points too, I did wonder if I could use a candle to heat the needle we have an electric hob now so no use.

[Stuart]

The meristem - growing point - on Agaves is so low down into the centre that its hard to cut it out, what usually happens is that it will continue to grow as normal with a ring of damaged leaves. The only Agave I've tried 'quartering was a Romanii, not variegated but a very pale form, and it produced about 30 plants, all four parts grew, one just continued with a single growing point but the other three clustered well. They were the ones I sold at the 2012 National.

Stuart'

[AnTTun]

Tina, if I got your post right, you have cut agave in half hoping that at least one half will lose growing point and start offseting. Correct?
How deep that cut was? To the top of the soil or deeper?