Just use some large river pebbles that are large enough to help keep the semps in the ground when they start to freeze heave. Otherwise, they'll just get shoved up out of the ground. Good luck, Chris

In USDA 9 you should be able to do a lot of them - it not being a cold climate per se. Apart from visiting local collections if you find your Sunset Climate Zone in the Sunset Western Garden Book and then look at the Plant Encyclopedia section many options should present themselves.

Two very interesting developments have taken place recently that shed new light on a cold hardy succulent discussed in this thread earlier. We are referring to the posts starting with "Speaking about Echeverias" and "The Echeveria experts" three and two years ago (Houzz doesn't do exact time stamps any more). The plant pictured there on the right, while looking very similar to Echeverias, was honestly believed to be Sedum spathulifolium, as it was obtained under such label. The first development was that the plant flowered for the first time and the flowers don't look like Sedum's at all: (Karen W. knows very well what they look like). The second development was that the crevice garden at JCRA has an identical abundantly growing plant in their rooftop crevice garden. This plant is labeled Orostachys furusei, which indeed appears to be the correct identification. It is definitely the most vigorous of all the Orostachys in that crevice mound, compared for instance to a very sparse O. fimbriata: The good news from this confusion is that, believing that the plant was a Sedum, we planted it in a number of locations without regard to the potential moisture sensitivity that killed our previous Orostachys and it is doing very well in all of them. Taken together these observations indicate that O. furusei may be the best adapted Orostachys for our area.

The biggest is about an inch, maybe inch and a quater. In my system less than 2 cm........ Too tiny to be aeonium. Too skinny to hardy too be s.adolphii. Stems wooden too. Leaves wrong length and shape....