Beginner gardening guides - Succulent container gardening - Low maintenance guide

Succulents & sedums are a great option for low maintenance container planting. Not only do they require minimal watering, but you don't need to dead head or prune them at all! Here's my guide to using house leeks / Sempervivums to create a stunning textured container for a garden. Presented by Garden Ninja, Manchesters Garden Designer and blogger Lee Burkhill. He's an RHS winning garden designer and expert panellist on BBC Radio Manchester's Saturday morning garden phone in. Why not subscribe to my youtube channel? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuhMHrXyf2bvga2Mq0DJvwQ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gardenninjadesign/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Garden_Ninja Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/garden_ninja_lee/ hi welcome back to garden ninja now pots are a great way to inject some colour into your house and garden and they are a great way for beginner gardeners to start gardening. However, do you find thatafter you potting up a pot with lovely annuals and flowers after a few months they go all crispy and horrible like this lavender and you don't really know what to do? Because if that's you then I'm going to show you a really quick way to get year-round interest using succulents! So the succulents we're going to be using today are these sempervivums and I've got four different cultivars that I'm going to use in the same pot now you could use sedums and you can use any other form of succulent for this kind of creation but they give an amazing texture as you can see here now usually when you're putting up a plant like this should go in for bold colors and big showy flowers but they do require a bit of maintenance whereas succulents are going to give you all this beautiful texture minimal maintenance and they'll survive all the way through the year! So come on let's get cracking! So you don't tell you a few key bits of equipment to create your succulent container. The first is a really good quality multi-purpose compost which will be the growing media for the succulents. It will retain moisture, feed the plant over time. However, succulents really hate soggy bottoms they're a bit like Mary Berry so what we're going to do is introduce some of this which is perlite we're going to mix it into compost and this is an inert substance which means it doesn't have any nutritional value but what it will do is allow the roots of the sempervivums to stay free draining you don't want water to sit around those roots because they all run it's gonna help wick moisture away from the roots. The kind of succulents that i'm using in this demonstration are these sempervivums or house leeks as they are commonly known, now I've selected a number of different variations of cultivars to give me a real nice mix in that pot and the great for texture as you can see each of these leaves has a really distinct form and that's what we're focusing on is texture. Now if like me you've got a pot that has last year's compost in chances are the nutrients pretty much well and gone what with house leeks they don't have a huge nutritional requirement a lot of their roots are really shallow so I'm already gonna remove half of this I'm basically gonna leave the bottom half is still up there I'm gonna put in a compost with a pearlite mix together and that should be enough to feed the house leeks for at least the next year they have a need to you can use a liquid feed or a granular feed through the years after. There's no point in filling this entire full of rich compost because the roots are never gonna go through probably add about a third. One third perlite, two-thirds compost ratio as you can see there it is who's this just lightly dig that in that's what you want to do it's to incorporate that so that allows the roots to be free drain so you don't want to dig it all the way to the bottom just for the roots are gonna sit. Now start planting! Now I want to arrange this bad boy in the center and then using the other three I'm going to position them around the outside of this this is the focal point this is like the crown in the middle of this pot weight you tap it out a good rule of thumb is before you plant these if you just let them dry out ever so slightly so much easier to work with. Once all your sempervivums are in place carefully backfill the soil usually just using the finger or the end of a paintbrush it is a bit time-consuming but it's well worth the effort.