Recently, I bought some new hypertufa pots from a local pot maker. What is hypertufa, you may ask? It is a concoction of cement, peat, and other stuff such as vermiculite or perlite that is used to make planters, fake rocks other garden objects. Its main advantage over regular cement is that it's lighter. Plants, such as succulents do well in planters made of it.
Years ago I made my own hypertufa pot and it turned out well. But it was quite messy and time consuming for one pot. I planted some Sempervivum funckii, Monstrosum and Cobweb in it and pretty much ignored it for years. The pot sat there in all weather, staying in good shape and the semps grew.
Eventually the pot got partially covered up by rogue lavender plants, which didn't hurt the pot, but did cause some of the semps to disappear. I pulled the pot out from under the lavender, put it back in the sun and the semps resumed their growing. See the picture at the top of this post.
Since I really like the look of hypertufa as well as its ability to withstand our freezes and thaws, when I saw some for sale (at a VERY good price!) I bought some more. The picture above shows one of four I bought.
Then, I hit up some of the end of season clearance sales at Timberline and O'Tooles and bought some more sedums, alpines and sempervivum. I planted them in temporary pots and will keep them there until next spring, when I'll then plant those that overwinter well into the hypertufa pots that will be well seasoned by then and ready to plant.
The pot above contains Sedum dasyphyllum, Sedum globosum, Sedum tetractinum and an unknown sempervivum.
The pot above contains Sedum divergens, Draba aizoides, Sedum rupestre 'Angelina', Sedum Major, Sedum hispanicum Purple Form and Sempervivum arachnoideum.
I also acquired some sempervivum via mail order. The above two pots contain sempervivum Blue Boy, calcareum, Gay Jester, Magical, Maigret, Speciosum, Spherette, Casa, Sirius, Fuego, Solange, Dolle Dina and Jovibarba arenaria x hirta f/Belansky Tatra.
3 comments:
i always wondered what those plants were called, good to know :)
I learned some new stuff from your post today. Thanks so much.
Beautiful plants and I like the hypertufa pot.
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