Urban Jungle Bloggers: My Gardening Secret

Hello urban jungle friends and green lovers! A new month has started and we are slightly gliding from mild and sunny autumn days into more gloomy and cooler winter days. November is a period not only of meteorological shifts, it also means a considerable change for your plants at home. Even more so if you have cacti and succulents at home like I do. So I will focus in this month’s post on cacti and succulents and share ‘my gardening secret’ with you. Although I don’t think it’s a secret at all, but maybe it might be handy for green newbies and those of you considering the addition of cacti and succulents in your home.

Cacti and succulents are perfect green companions for small apartments and for busy urban folks. They require a minimum of care and still thrive and prosper happily. During the sunnier periods of spring and summer you can place your cacti and succulents on sunny places, windowsills, balconies, gardens. You water them depending on the weather every other week and fertilize them to make sure they get all the botanical nutrition they need. But when winter season comes upon us, your green friends will slide into botanical hibernation. This means you have to care even less for them, but you need to consider a few simple points for the perfect plant hibernation.

Small scale dwellers will need to find a nook in their homes that is less exposed to daylight and thus ideally a tad cooler. If you have no extra room or space like an unheated stairways, basement, an unheated extra room, try of find a corner of your apartment with the least sunlight exposure and try not to overheat the room (it’s anyway not so good to live in overheated apartments for that matter). Group your cacti and succulents together and leave them there. Stop fertilizing them as of October/November until warmer spring days arrive in March. Stop watering them too. If they remain in a heated space, water them only rarely to avoid complete dehydration. But be stingy with water. They don’t really need a lot. 

Even though your cacti and succulents will go into hibernation over winter, look after them from time to time. And love them no less than in spring and summer. They will reward you with fleshy, vibrant greens and probably a few blooms coming spring. Happy urban gardening!