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Cacti & Succulents

Echeveria middle leaves drying out??? Help please.

4 years ago

The middle leaves of my echeveria lilacina are drying out. I don't really understand what that means. I also had some lower leaves that looked like they were drying out/rotting so I removed those and any completely dry leaves. Am I overwatering it?

I have pulled it out of the soil for the pictures because I wanted to check the lower leaves. The soil is a mix of succulent potting soil and perlite. I usually try to let it dry out before watering it again, but it is kind of difficult to tell because I don't want to smudge the leaves.

Thanks in advance!

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Comments (4)

rina_Ontario,Canada 5a
4 years ago
Drying up of some lowest leaves is normal, but not drying up of middle leaves. You also mention rotting leaves. Too bad you didn't take photo before removing the leaves, it may have been helpful to see exactly what is hapening.

It is not quite clear from your photo, but it looks like there is soil encasing the rootball. Did you remove all original soil (which, in most cases is peat) when repotting? It may also help to clean it off now to see the roots. Are they dry? are they rotting?
HU-507346997
Original Author
4 years ago
No, I did not remove all of the original soil encasing the rootball. I will give that a try and update.

Next time I have an issue, I'll take the photo before removing any leaves. To me it looked like they were shriveling up and then rotting because they were touching wet soil. I think I saw a black spot near the middle of it as well.
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I'm so sorry, but, it doesn't look completely dead yet. Your potting mix looks very wet or is it just very black? Young lychee plant don't need the extreme moistness of larger trees does. Carefully pulled out the tree and look at the root ball/system. If they are still whitish and not dark brown. Then the lychee still has a fighting chance. All those leaves will eventually drop or you can pull them off now. It will be a slower process to regrow new leaves, but, if the root system is dark brown, then it is most likely dead. But, whitish roots, still have hope for recovering. Will be slower, but will recovered. I have some young plants like that too, all the leaves died and turned brown. But their root system is still alive, just took longer to recover, after such a stressful period of leaf drops. Hang on to the little guy, it will recover, eventually. Just don't give it water unless you notice the soil is getting on the dry side.
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That is actually good, since now you have some experience in beheading :) As you can see, the plant survived accident and branched. Looking at existing mix, it may contain some bark - that is good (unless it is all sapwood). You could start making better mix by sifting existing mix (use kitchen sieve) to get rid of very small particles. Buy small bag of perlite, sift it too to get rid of dust, and mix sifted ingredients (larger particulates that stayed inside of sieve) about 50/50. That should give you quite good mix for succulents. (Small gravel, scoria, pumice, turface are all excellent to use for succulent potting media should you decide to grow more of them and put some effort in making your own, well-draining mixes.) Many of my succulents are overwintering in the basement that is dark, and I use lights that are on 14 hrs/day. Give your plant lot of light to grow more compact. If you use light, put it further away from a plant to begin with, moving closer every few days in order to avoid burn (using CFL, fluorescent or LED bulbs helps since they produce less heat, and likely brighter light).
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rina_Ontario,Canada 5a
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
One of the reasons I use gravel topdressing is to make sure leaves do not touch wet soil (...but I do not use soil anyway). If your soil stayed wet enough for leaves to start rotting, it is too water retaining, and it may be better to consider different potting mix.

It is a good idea to take photots - if no problem, they can be easily deleted. But they help to figure out a problem if there is one.

Plants just purchased should be repotted - they are, most of the times, in pure peat. Peat is easy to overwater, and if kept too dry, it becomes hydrophobic. Neither is good for plants. If you just take existing plant out of pot, leave the peat and just fill the rest with your own mix - it most often doesn't work. It doesn't mix with new potting mix.

If you find it too dry around roots and difficult to remove, try using skewer and tease it off. If it still doesn't work, you can swish rootball in a bowl of water and rinse it off. If peat is very dry and caked on, water should be warm - it helps to soften up peat.
HU-507346997
Original Author
4 years ago
I think my mistake on this one was not removing the peat from the rootball.

When I tried to remove the peat today, the roots broke very easily. Does this mean they are rotted? Where should I go from here? Thanks for all of your guys' help!

Here is a picture:

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