The New Crop of Hypertufa Pots

Since hypertufa pots work so well for hardy succulents such as sedum and sempervivum in my climate, I made more this year. Here are the ten pots I have cured so far this year and I have four more curing in water at the moment. I've settled on a favorite recipe of 1 part portland cement, 1 part spagnum peat and 2 parts vermiculite. I like the texture of vermiculite hypertufa over perlite and it seems to cure faster too. I'm switching over from using the bottled cement coloring from Home Depot to powdered coloring from a concrete supply place.
Here are some of them potted up with sempervivum. These poor plants had been waiting years to get out of their small plastic pots.

Sempervivum Glaucum Minor

Sempervivum Pacific Shadows

Sempervivum Grigg's Surprise

Sempervivum Dark Cloud are Larissa which are new this year

Here's some from last year. The pots and the plants came through the winter very well.
Sempervivum Sioux

Sempervivum Red Beauty and an unknown

Sempervivum Pacific Blue Ice

Sempervivum pumilum hepworth, Atroviolaceum and erythraeum

Sempervivum Cebanense

Sempervivums, Sedums and Hypertufa Revisited

A little over a year ago I posted about some recently acquired hypertufa pots and some plants to put in them. Well, not only did the plants I bought do well, but I went and bought some more pots from Fox Meadow up in Fort Collins, Colorado and then went hog wild buying plants. It didn't help that Timberline Gardens, a local nursery in Arvada, Colorado, has an unbelievably large variety of sedum and sempervivum. This variety, combined with Timberline's discount table where many cool plants can be had for only a $1, cause me to go crazy and buy way more plants than I had pots or gardens for. I guess I'll just have to get more pots and dig up more of the back yard.
The picture above shows the pot I pictured in the 2009, only all potted up with some sedums, sempervivums, jovibarba and a tiny dwarf ice plant. The pot below is my old, home made hypertufa pot filled with sempervivum Oddity, S. funckii and S. arachnoidium. Click on picture for a much bigger image:


The other new hypertufa pots from Fox Meadow are shown below, all planted up. Click on the pic for a bigger image:


Plus, there's a new pot made from left over Quikcrete and a bit of cement colorant:


And then there faux hypertufa, or as I like to call it, faux faux Tufa since hypertufa is meant to simulate tufa, which is a naturally occurring rock. These pots are made of Styrofoam boxes that have been roughed up and painted with leftover house paint and some acrylics.



All of the pots, whether they are hypertufa or styrofoam have plenty of drainage holes in the bottom.

The plastic pots planted up with sedums, iceplants and sempervivum in the spring filled in nicely:


It was fun the see the radical color and appearance change in the sempervivum throughout the year. These pictures show the color change Sempervivum Calcerum Pink Pearl went through from May to July (click for larger pics):


These pictures show the range of colors S. Spherette went through from May to September:


Sempervivum Fuego also undergoes a radical color change. Here it is from April to September:



As winter arrived, some became an intense shade of red, while others became more green. Some changed from blue green to purple. Some stayed pretty much the same. I have lots more pictures here.