Your typical succulents YouTuber is in southern California or Australia. Maybe northern California. As I watch their videos, I am stunned that they can leave their tender succulents outside all the time and sometimes even plant them in the ground. These are concepts that I can't wrap my mind around. My tender succulents spent the winter in a garage heated to between 50 and 55 Fahrenheit. My hardy succulents spent part of the winter in an unheated greenhouse and half of them froze to death.
Also, up north, our winter nights are longer than those down south. In the depth of winter, southern California gets more than an hour more daylight than southern Montana. The succulents in my garage were under grow lights 14 hours per day.
When shopping for grow lights, you quickly discover you have to sort through hundreds of choices. The first one I got is an imposing FECiDA full spectrum panel (8.4 inch by 12.4 inch) with a dimming switch and its own cooling fan. I use it with an external timer. It's an excellent light and it kept a lot of plants alive in my garage closet this winter, but it would be clumsy to deploy a bunch of them. So my next acquisition was a mistake. It is two lights on a flimsy stand and not much power. The brand name is LBW, as if that means anything. If you adjust the light heads at all, you have to dig out the little wrench that came with them and re-tighten the nuts. The timer can only be set for 3, 6 and 12 hours, which is not useful when most advice is to run 14-16 hours a day. It cannot be connected to an external timer.
The next lights I got were SANSI LED bulbs, which are excellent lights. But they are like spotlights and do not cover a wide area. Finally I discovered Barrina Grow Lights, which are long LED strips that simulate tubes. I got the 2-footers in a package of six and attached them to my 3-foot-wide garage shelves. The reason I got the shorter lights was I figured I could transfer them back and forth winter/summer to the narrower shelves I have in the greenhouse. And recently I did move the two-footers to the greenhouse, where they fit perfectly. But I don't want to move them back, so today I received and installed in the garage Barrina 3-footers, also a package of six. I saved $25 (about 25%) versus new by ordering "Used - very good" from Amazon. One light had a big dent in it and there were lots of cosmetic scrapes on the light reflectors, so the description of the condition was dishonest in my opinion. But they work fine and I'm not going to go through the hassle of returning them and reordering at a higher price. Just remember when you see a 25% discount on Amazon that Bezos did not get rich by giving stuff away.
Here are two of the 2-foot Barrinas lighting up a shelf in the greenhouse.
This is not a comprehensive review of grow lights. There are plenty of those on the internet already. I would just caution anyone who happens to read this not to buy the grow lights that have the most reviews on Amazon, which the LBW lights did compared to the others I also bought. Three of the four I bought are brands worth considering; from there, spend some time on research.
In the greenhouse: I recently potted up an order from Mountain Crest Gardens, and here are a few images. No. 1 on my list when assembling this order was Echeveria 'Doris Taylor' aka 'Wooly Rose.' It's a big fuzzy plant and this one already has a couple of offsets forming. I blew off a lot of the dirt from shipping, but those fuzzy leaves hold on to quite a bit of debris.
Next is Echeveria elegans 'Mexican Snowball.' It may get more pink as it basks in the sunshine. The little scrapes show how green it is now under the farina.
Another one from the order was Crassula capitella ssp. Thyrsiflora 'Pagoda Village.' It got tossed around in the shipping box and I waited a while to pot it up. It should be interesting to watch it grow.
This one is not new, but I wanted to take its portrait now because it is finally looking like what was described when I ordered it from Mountain Crest three months ago, Pachyphytum compactum 'Little Jewel.' It lost a lot of leaves in transit (some of which are now sprouting in my propagation bowl) and took a while to recover.
After ordering from different online succulent dealers, in my opinion Mountain Crest Gardens is the best, but their prices are not the cheapest. Ramsey's Succulents is significantly cheaper and has good quality plants, but doesn't have quite the selection. My advice to anyone building a succulents collection is to start at your local stores. There you can actually see what you are buying and you don't have to worry about shipping damage. The US Postal Service does not care about your plants and ALL of the online orders I have placed have had some shipping damage. After you see what the truly local stores have, next head to Home Depot, which I think is consistently the best of the big box stores in my area for succulents. Walmart can be good if they have just received a shipment, but their older inventory gets ragged because they place the plants on the most awful crowded and dark shelves. Lowe's also carries succulents, but I'm quite sure I saw a mealy bug infestation (white fuzzy spots) at the store in Billings, MT.
All of the retail stores get their plants shipped in from wholesalers, Altman and Costa Farms for example, and you might even find a few succulents at your local grocery store. Two of my better looking Echeverias are an unknown from Trader Joe's in Austin, TX, and an Echeveria agavoides 'Miranda Red' from Albertsons in Billings. Albertsons has absolutely no selection. Right now, it is 'Miranda Red,' one other one I wasn't interested in, and nothing else. Maybe in a few weeks they will get a shipment of something else.
Only after you get what you can locally, go online and check out Ramsey's. For anything you can't get elsewhere, head to Mountain Crest and expect to pay a bit more. There are others I have ordered from and are mentioned in these pages, but I'm not planning on using any of them again.
The Trader Joe's Echeveria has grown a lot and is a lot more red than when I picked it up in February. The first image is from April 1, followed by a phone photo I snapped on the purchase date Feb. 28.
Here is the grocery store 'Miranda Red' on the left, along with another agavoides 'Ebony' I got at Menard's home center a few days earlier. Neither one is showing much of the deep color yet on the edges and tips for which agavoides are known.
