Succulent is starting the flowering process but hasn't produced any babies before it dies. How/where do I cut it off to make a new plant

Thread moved to the Sempervivum forum to get the best specialist advice. Stay tuned...

Not to discourage buy I have cut the flower stalk before and all I got was several new heads that all directly went into bloom.

Kprovost95, I have had great success getting normal offsets after beheading a rosette. Sometimes I may have to repeat the process if it want to produce blooming offsets. If the new offsets start looking like they will bloom I immediate cut them off. Don't let them develop into blooms.
Cut it like this, leaving only 2 or 3 layers of leaves. Just remember, you have lost nothing by trying this. And it does work many times.

valleylynn said:Kprovost95, I have had great success getting normal offsets after beheading a rosette....

My experience of lopping off rosette bloom and result:

September - rosette with bloom


October - post lopping off bloom stem right above the normal leaves of plant



November - very hopeful...


I trimmed the offsets off the top and planted them.

How are they doing now Bev?

Lopping off was done on a Noid and the amount of noids I have is a big mess and as I don't label them, they eventually go into container plantings, gift plantings, donation plantings. Glad I at least took photos to prove that beheading a rosette bloom can result in more offsets to continue the line. Not a success every time but I'm grateful when it happens on a rosette that is the last one I have.

Here's another one I did which initially resulted in more blooms and offsets

Finally found two old photos (2015) of where I made the cut on another semp. Not sure this one resulted in offsets but it illustrates where I make the cut after I feel for where the stem of the bloom starts amongst the last set of rosette leaves before the bloom starts.

My bloomin baby semp I had a feww years back got beheaded and now has four babies, one is going to bloom this year..... Still small. At least I have three, though!

I have executed 4 Packardian that decided to bloom at the same time.
Just for the sake of testing this again, maybe other times I waited for the bloom to be too developed before cutting.

For me a bigger succes would be getting those leaves to produce a new rosette.

Ironically with the hylotelethium (telephium types), leaf propagation produced way bigger and more developed mature plants in the same year than cutting did, also the protects the future plant of a pathogens that can ever via the cut, bateria, fungi, virus.
Now if I would know the secret to always knowing how to get the leaves going would be great.

Bev, wonderful photo showing the process of beheading.

Paleo, I hope it works for you this time.
I think I read somewhere that the leaves have to have part of the meristemic tissue from where the leaves connect to the crown. I do not understand the differences between the different meristemic tissue types.
Maybe @JungleShadows Kevin, can help us understand this?

I have seen many plants where the offsets as well as the main stem all go to flower. There is a hormone called florigen that induces the response but there's also induction of other hormones and these are translocatable from the mother rosette to the offsets. Sometimes if you get offsets after decapitation and detach them from the parent plant, the offset will not flower. Many times though things continue to flower.

In Semps the vegetative meristem converts to a floral meristem and that is the process that you need to interrupt.

Kevin

Kevin, does interrupting the process mean that you have to cut further down from the bloom stalk in order to be successful?

Not necessarily. It depends upon how the signals to bloom have gone and whether it can be disrupted. Of course I look at a bloom as a "gift to hybridize" more!

Kevin

But so sad if all a person has in one rosette of a hard to find semp.

If you collect the seed and regrow, does ALL the seedlings count as "not the same as the mother plant", for example, would all the seeds for a certain hybrid still be considered the same plant as the hybrid? Or, would the select seedlings that are identicle be counted as the same.

Each seedling is different, none are the same as the parent plant.

No seedling should ever be given the name of the parent! That's how we get into messes in naming. Also semps outcrosss readily, that there will be mostly pollinations from another plant if more than one semp is in the yard. It's like saying you should be same as your dad!

Kevin

So, the plants available (from trustworthy nurseries) would all be from chicks and things like that?!?

Alex, yes, what we get from reputable suppliers are offsets (clones) of the named cultivar.