Regular followers of this blog will know that I went back to England for a week to visit our son and daughter, tidy up our English garden, and see the mighty Tottenham Hotspur – the football team I support – beat Real Madrid. But forget all that, the big news is that whilst I was away I left my wife Cruella in charge of a few precious cuttings. Normally this is the equivalent of leaving a fox to babysit your chickens; the end result is normally death. But in this case they survived and look reasonably healthy; mind you I haven’t seen the cat and Cruella does have new fur gloves.
7th November: Things I have been doing lately
🌱 Creating more Yuccas. You can never have too many Yuccas. These versatile canes are easy to grow from pruned cuttings and provide you with some lovely greenery without the need for constant watering; what’s not to like. OK they can poke you in the eye if your not careful, but that’s your fault – health and safety gone mad. Anyway, I have lots of Yuccas of various sizes, and I love their flower spikes. But once they get too high, you end up with a flower spike that can only be appreciated by passing aeroplanes, or my friend David’s drone. It is at this point that you need to cut them back and then use the cuttings to propagate more. The picture below shows a Yucca that I have chosen to cut back, from this you can see that the plant is about 3.5 metres high which means the flower spike is more or less invisible from the ground.
When you prune a Yucca you should be thinking of reshaping the plant and where you want new growth. New spikes will grow from around the edge of your pruning cut, and will in effect become branches of the Yucca. Once you have cut the plant back, each of the pruned stems has the potential to become a completely new plant. If you want to plant these then firstly you need to trim back any brown dead leaves on the stem, then trim back the green leaves until only a few are left at the top. The easiest way to do this is to put on your gardening gloves (Yucca leaves are very sharp) and holding the stem in one hand, pull the leaves down sharply with the other. Do this all around the stem until you have the required growth left. See the first picture below. If you have not decided where to plant your cuttings, you can leave them for up to a week in a trug filled with water. See second picture below.
I decided to plant my cuttings in pots in a terrace at the back of my house which I have only just noticed looks a bit bare. I have decided to enliven this terrace in a number of ways as it is North facing and can look a bit dull. The picture below shows the Yuccas in their new home.
Oh by the way the cats back, the picture below shows her drinking thirstily out of a water feature. Cruella denies everything, but I think we are looking at a potential kidnap situation here. I suspect, but can’t prove it yet, that the cat has been kept captive as a means of putting psychological pressure on me. Cruella wants a new kitchen and I did receive a weird telephone call from someone demanding a new kitchen or the cat “gets it” I think that explains everything.
Spanish Garden 
Goodness! Yuccas! Years ago, I buried yucca canes just below the surface, and pulled the shoots that came up. There were hundreds of new plants. However, I prefer to grow fewer but larger plants. Any size cane will root. I took canes eight feet long because that is how long the bed of the pick up is, and they rooted like instant yucca trees. They make great deer fences too, because deer will not go through them. Supposedly, they do not know the difference between these yuccas and the nastier ones that will poke them.
LikeLike