The Succulent Bowl and the Wild Ride

The Succulent Bowl and the Wild Ride


A succulent bowl takes a tumble on a ride home, but lives to look better another day.
Here’s the scene: we were doing a plant photo shoot for Costa Farms and designer Virginia Ash whipped together a beautiful succulent bowl planted in a white pedestal dish. Here it is all styled and coifed and smiling for the photo with a friendly snake plant.  

When the photo shoot was over, I packed the succulent bowl into my car and drove it home where it was going to live happily ever after on my kitchen table.

But I took a rather fast turn on the road home and when I opened up the hatch on my station wagon, the dish was upside down and all the succulents were scattered like dice in the back of my car.

I felt like weeping.

So I swept up the soil and gathered up all the succulents and packed them back into the bowl. I gave the plants a shot of water and set them in a sunniest spot in my kitchen. It looked great. Like it never had been in any sort of car shakeup at all. 

And here’s what it looks like 3 months later. Beautiful!


Here’s the key to raising succulents indoors (as I have discovered).

1. You need a really sunny spot. My kitchen table gets several hours of baking sunshine, and is the closest thing to the desert in my house.

2. You need to resist the urge to overwater. This footed white bowl is for serving salads, not growing succulents, so there is no drain hole. So it’s REALLY important not to overwater the succulents because they will die in wet soil.

3. Don’t take your succulent dish for a ride in the car. Unless you are a really careful driver.

Get more tips for success with succulents.

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Written by Karen Weir-Jimerson