Meet My Sedums, the Winners of Birds vs. Leaves

Meet #5

Marta Calderon, MScE
The Green Thumb

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Photo taken by the author.

My first box of pollinator plants ordered online arrived in April 2020.

What an excitement.

I was a little suspicious, though. The box was smaller than I expected.

I had seen the photos of the grown plants in the catalog. I did not understand that I would receive roots I had to plant and resurrect.

After this big disappointment, my husband and I planted the nine plants according to the map included in the box.

One of the plants was a sedum. Three months later, it was gorgeous and had grown about ten inches.

We could not be more disappointed. Every morning, we found the leaves gone or bitten. We thought some bug was eating them. Eventually, only the empty stems remained.

We sprayed them with insecticides, hoping to stop the bugs from eating the sedum.

Fall and winter came. The sedum disappeared, letting the roots fall into the winter dream for a better spring.

The following year, the same thing happened.

The sedum popped up, got cute, and the leaves disappeared.

Sometime in the fall, I had an aha moment.

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Marta Calderon, MScE
The Green Thumb

Plant lover and eco-friendly gardener. Want to be an eco-friendly gardener? Join my weekly newsletter: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/sl/IyRTLEF