Enhance Your Garden with This Low Maintenance Beautiful Leafy Plant
Nursery Today Desk
New Delhi: Agaves are low maintenance perennial plants with large fleshy leaves and pointy tips. Agaves are stunning medium-sized and urn-shaped plants, a great choice for any garden. Agaves is a genus of monocots, which is known for its गूदेदार पौधा and xerophytic species.
Certain types of agave are primary ingredients in the distilled liquors tequila and mescal. The agave plant is also good for making syrup, a common sugar alternative much lower on the glycemic index than sugar or honey.
Raw agave is toxic to people and pets but can be consumed after being processed and cooked.
How to grow agaves?
Propagating: The most convenient and inexpensive way to plant agave is by propagating it from the pups(tiny new plants) produced around the base of mature agave plants. Though pups can be propagated at any time but it’s best to wait until they are few inches in diameter.
To propagate the pup, loosen the soil around the pup, find the root connecting to the parent plant and cut that root with a sharp trowel. Do not cut any root growing from the pup. Now, gently dig up the pup. Now, plant the new offset shoot in a new container.
Preparing Potting Mix: An unglazed clay pot is ideal for agave plant, it will allow excess soil moisture to evaporate through its walls. Make sure, there is enough drainage holes in the container.
Use a well-draining potting mix. You can prepare the potting mix with 60% garden soil +20% coco-peat+ 10% sand base mixing. Add 10% any bulky organic manure and your potting mix for agave is ready.
Watering: Mature agave pants are very drought tolerant. They grow better in dry conditions with adequate moisture in the soil. The most ideal frequency to water them is twice a week. Overwatering or logging water in container may damage your plant by root rot.
Sunlight: Agave plants grows well in full sun, meaning at least six hours of direct sunlight on most days.
Fertilizers: For vigorous growth of plants, you can use ½ teaspoon bone meal once in a month or any organic fertilizer like tea leaf compost. Use NPK (19:19:19) fertilizer 2 gm/lit as a foliar spray. This spray maintains the good texture of plants.
Common Pests: In general, pests and illnesses pose very little threats to agaves. A plant may, however, collapse if an agave snout weevil burrows into its center to lay eggs there.
In all likelihood, you won’t become aware of this until it’s too late to preserve the plant. Therefore, get rid of the plant to prevent the pests from getting to any additional agave plants you have. Clean the leaves by cotton cloth at regular intervals and remove all the dead and dry leaves from time to time.
Agave takes around 10 to 20 years to reach its maturity. These plants blooms only once, then dies.
