Hello from Minnesota, USA

Hi all,
I just joined and wanted to introduce myself. My name is Mike and I live in Bloomington, Minnesota, USA. I've grown succulents most of my life (I'm 52), but they have all been mainly tender succulents. I have a small collection of a few different caudiciforms and a fairly large collection of Haworthias, that I grow under fluorescent lights in my basement.

I've always loved Semps and have grown for many years (what I thought was a semp) that I received from my paternal grandmother. Since I've been doing a little research, I've found out that the "semp" I received from my grandmother is really a Jovibarba or "roller". I believe my great grandparents brought the Jovibarba over from Germany when they immigrated to the US.

Anyway, I just started collecting Semps/Jovibarba/Jovibarba heuffelii in earnest and have around 30 different species/cultivars right now. Since the weather is turning much colder, I will have to curtail my collecting until next spring, to add any more semps to my collection. Since there are really no local nurseries that carry any real selection of semps, I have been purchasing my plants via mail order and eBay.

It's great to find a group of people that I can "hang out" with and talk about semps with other collectors.

One of my other passions is unusual trees and dwarf conifers and it's been nice collecting something that doesn't take up huge amounts of space and isn't overly expensive.

I'm looking forward to learning a lot from this group.
Thanks,
Mike

Mike, welcome among us!

I must admit I have absolutely no idea about how Minnesota looks like, but you wrote the weather is turning much colder. Same thing is going on here in central Europe, so I guess we have pretty much the same growing conditions.

Hi Renata,
Thank you! It's good to be here.

Our temps are in the mid to lower 50's °F right now (10's °C). Minimum winter temperatures can get to -30°F (-34°C) here.

Our summers can be quite hot and humid with temps from 80°F to 95°F not uncommon (27°C to 35°C). The sun is setting around 6:30 pm, CDT, now, but in less than a month we will go off of daylight savings time and the sun will start setting around 5:30 pm.

I think MN and central Europe are probably fairly similar. Here is a link to the Explore Minnesota web page. It's our state's tourism page and there are photos of various places in Minnesota, if you'd like to take a look?

http://www.exploreminnesota.com/

Well, for what I've seen this quickly, nature looks pretty much the same as here in Slovenia.

But - 34°C?! Well, Illustrator (he lives in one of the coldest parts of my country!) might have experienced such low tempertaures, but here in Ljubljana temps rarely drop below - 18°C. I wonder how semps cope with such extremly low temperatures. One of my friends wrote me the temperature below - 30°C last winter killed almost his entire collection.

I myself just HATE winter! Right now we have temperature around 10 °C (2 - 14 during daytime this week), too. Within few weeks it will start freezing and Sempervivums will dramatically cange their colour.

We generally get a lot of snow, so the semps are rarely subjected to actual air temperatures. Occasionally, we will have a fairly snowless winter, but it has been a number of years since that has happened so I'm not sure how the semps would react?

You and I are a lot alike: I HATE winter, too! It just seems like it is so unnecessary! A few weeks around 0ºC so the plants can get their cold/dormancy requirements out of the way is all that is really needed and then bring on summer and the warm weather! I guess I live in the wrong part of the country!

Time does fly by so fast so it will be spring before you know it!
Mike

If by lack of snow you mean rainy winter, this might be problem. Damp conditions are not something semps like.

But if on the other hand no snow means dry, cold and windy winter - don't worry, they will do just fine.

Yeah, no snow means dry, cold and windy winter. It's too cold here to get rain in the winter, generally.

It's been so dry here for the last month. September we had record rainfall and we have not had any measurable rain since Sept. 25, 2010. It is dry here. I just got done watering my rock garden (Semp. garden) so they don't go into winter too dry.
Mike