It would have a better chance if you removed the flowers and larger buds so that the plant could concentrate on making roots instead of expending the enormous amount of energy it takes to make flowers! Good luck.

Don't worry about the main plant, it will put on new growth soon. Make sure the plant is warm & in good light. You needn't worry about where you cut a scheff back. Leaving foliage on a particular stem is unnecessary. Scheffs retain large amounts of photosynthesizing tissues in stems & produce new leaves & roots quite readily. Stem tip cuttings with all but one or two leaves removed will root quickly in perlite or a porous soil w/o the aid of a rooting hormone. Place cuttings in bright light, but not direct sun. Ideal soil temp about 70* F. Taking tip cuttings will also stimulate back-branching on that stem. You can also cut a portion of stem into 1-1/2 - 2 inch leafless pieces & just lay them atop a moist soil in bright light where they will root. Al

While they don't look like what I usually have seen, I must ask - are the pebbles glued together? The plant looks pretty thristy to me. Chances are good that the soil is your problem. Usually, what they come in is not the best for long term health of the plant. If it were my plant, I'd unpot it and see what is going on below the pebbles. I've had plants in a peat substrate that would take up a lot of water, but have dry spots near the roots - so the plants were still thristy because the water was going around the roots. Once the peat dries out, it really won't hold water again. There are a lot of good soil "recipes" on this site that will be better for your plants. If your apartment is that hot and other plants have died, sounds like you may need to water more often. Are the plants near a register or air flow that will make them dry out faster? Is the apartment really dry, as in low humidity? (And they all have probably had the same soil issues.) I hope some of our experts chime in to help you. I am merely sharing my experiences. And I have been a gross over-waterer who has rotted a lot of succulent in the past. They were all in lousy soils, too. The folks here sure know their stuff! Hope they help you.

Legacy77a, It is hard to say, but not necessarily. It would depend on how greenish they were.....sometimes when harvested green they do sprout and sometimes they don't. The more the green has faded to a whitish-green or a tannish-green, the better, though. If you want to test their germination, let them sit for a week to ten days which is sort of a dormant period for them. Then, wet a paper towel or coffee filter, lay a row of 10 seeds on it, wrap them up in the paper towel, put it in a plastic zip-lock bag and put it in a cool, dry location. Check every day to see if the seeds sprout, and how many sprout. After a couple of weeks, all of them that are going to sprout will have sprouted. From that, you can estimate if your germination rate is going to be 10% or 50% or 90% or whatever. And, you'll know if your seeds are viable or not. Patty, That's all I do. When I clean up the garden debris, I just leave the flower heads that I want to self-sow. I don't generally tear the flower heads apart and scatter the seed around, although you can if you want to. Sometimes, too many seedlings do come up in one small area and you can either transplant the extras while still vey small, or just pull them up and discard them. Generally, though, wind and rain will scatter the seeds around on their own. If you pile the chopped leaves onto the beds only a couple of inches thick as mulch, the odds are that the seeds still will sprout in the spring. If you put the leaves much thicker, though, they might prevent or slow down germination of reseeding annuals like zinnias. If you want to play it safe, save some seed to plant next spring in case your plants don't self-sow. That way, you're covered either way. I suppose this is an extreme form of winter sowing, minus the containers. I do it all the time. I even gather wildflower seed from one pasture and sow it in another just by scattering handfuls of it around the pasture after the first hard freeze. That seed will lie dormant and at least some of it will sprout in the spring. When plants self-sow naturally, whether in a cultivated garden, in a pasture, in a woodland, etc., those seeds also have to deal with plant debris and, generally, the debris doesn't hurt the seeds or keep them from germinating. All kinds of annuals and half-hardy perennials self-sow in my garden with little or no help from me, including zinnias, four o'clocks, poppies, larkspur, evening primrose, angel's trumpet, swamp hibiscus, morning glories, moonvine, hummingbird sage, black-eyed susan vine, cypress vine, cardinal climber vine, ornamental peppers, some tomatoes, some herbs (including catnip, catmint, some basils, parsley, cilantro, etc.), clasping coneflower, hollyhocks, french hollyhocks (malva), kiss-me-over-the-garden gate, and verbena bonariensis. Often, pumpkins, winter squash and gourds self-seed as well. In my garden today, I already have verbena bonariensis, malva 'Zebrina', angel's trumpets, tomato plants and hummingbird sage that have sprouted in the last month or so from seed that ripened and self-sowed in late summer. Of these plants, the tomato plants will not survive and come back next year, but the others usually do if their roots get large enough before it gets really cold here. The reason some people have better success with winter-sowing than with self-sowing seed in their gardens is often that their gardens have too much wind or too much rain and their self-sown seed blows away or rots before it can germinate in late winter to late-spring, depending on the type of plant it is. In my garden, I let "the usual suspects" self-sow as they choose, and I winter sow other plants in containers if I know from experience that they have not self-sown successfully in my garden in the past. Hope this info helps. Dawn