pnw – Suburban Succulents

Posted on February 5, 2024 by Adriane — Leave a comment

Plant Shop Updates!

If you are still receiving our email blog posts, thanks for sticking around! If this is the first update you’ve received from us, it’s because it’s been since Nov 2022 that we’ve created blog posts or sent anything out. You must have given us your email address at some point between then and now… Welcome!

Suburban Succulents has spent the last year moving, grooving, and overall being busy! Besides the business, Baby G has kept us on our toes. Akin to plants, Georgia has grown leaps and bounds. It is time-consuming and so rewarding to be her Mom.

With that, lots of adaptions have taken place over the last year. Trying to juggle keeping the plant shop running, servicing my plant clients, and raising an infant while attempting to remain engaged in my personal and social life has been tough but doable. This year, we are streamlining what makes the most sense for our family. You will notice that we have limited opening times, we aren’t running the same loaded schedule of workshops each month, we are much quieter on our social platforms, are more intentional about the plants and pots that are in the shop, and I am getting the opportunity to become involved in other opportunities that excite me. This is all intentional and we are doing our best to adapt to the season of life we are in!

Thank you all for coming along for the journey! Below in our typical style is a little of what’s going on right now. Read on to find out about our Valentine’s Day Gift specials!

Valentine's Day is upon us...

Reading this blog means you’re getting access to our Valentine’s Day items first! See something you love? Claim it, there are limited quantities of all products.

Click on the “Valentine’s First Look” photo to have access to the Valentine’s catalog I put together. Enjoy!

Need a bulk quantity of something perhaps for work colleagues or as favors? Reach out to us to discuss your needs! 360-843-6602

Order online, via email or text message, come into the shop, or on DoorDash.

Who can we send a little something special to for you? Pick up your items from our shop or we can deliver locally.

What's Next for Suburban Succulents?

We are still here and aren’t going anywhere, just changing up the structure and nature of the business for now.

Shop Hours: We are aiming to be open at least one weekend per month. If you want to schedule a time to come in and shop, you can book an appointment with us on our Google Calendar page and see us anytime that works for us both! We will periodically have sales on our Instagram and Facebook page stories for you to claim items, too.

Product Mix: Offer primarily seasonal specials during periodic times of the year. We are trying different things like currently our Valentine’s Day Product book. We will stop carrying a large variety of plants and bring plants into the shop based on our client’s needs/requests.

Markets/Pop-Ups: We will plan for a few markets throughout the year. Our upcoming events page will be updated monthly and as frequently as we can keep up.

Workshops: We are always booking private events for plant workshops and will continue to partner with locations in the community that are looking to have a person teach a class at their location. Reach out with ideas and dates!

The Chickens still get their moment of glory- all 21 of them are soaking up these couple of warm days we’ve experienced lately. We’re seeing bulbs pop-up all over the yard, so have begun our feeble attempts to keep the plants from the chicken’s wrath. We expect egg production to pick-up in the next couple of months… until then, we are feeding the ONE egg we get each day to Georgia- she loves eggs! G and the chickens seem to get along well, they usually steer clear of her and she’s not quite fast enough to catch them, yet. 🙂

Thank you to all of our supporters- your shopping with us allows me to live out my business dreams of running my own shop. Your flexibility with me and the ever-changing shop is appreciated and I will always be thankful!

I hope you enjoyed this blog update and I can’t wait to see you this month!

Until next time, all our love.

~Adriane and the rest of us at Suburban Succulents Plant Shop

Posted on January 21, 2021January 24, 2021 by Adriane — Leave a comment

our first winter at the new spot!

We’ve had weather in the low & high 40’s… who’s complaining about that?!

So far, there are no complaints about our first winter at the new house. We’ve seen ice, maybe thrice, and no snow, yet! Yeah, it has rained a lot, but I enjoy listening to the sound of it on the roof while I work. Between weather events, we have been able to get the yard and garden more prepared for the coming seasons and have even spotted the Sun a few times! Yipee! On the 5th we received a load of free wood chips to use for the yard and another on the 21st. The yard is now set for mulch for the year. If anyone needs woodchips, bring a shovel, bucket, and a way to get it gone! There is never a dull moment around here.

Our January Garden Update

What we are doing and you might consider too:

Although now is not the time to focus so much on what is growing in the ground, January is the best time to get your plans pulled together for your Spring, Summer, and even Fall gardens. Here’s what we are working through this month:

Create a seed wishlist and go through the backlog of all the seeds to test for viability. We are gathering information as to how much we will use and how much we want to freeze. The public library has many food preservation books that I have been reading through… To sustain one’s family, you need so many bushels of food!

Plan crop rotations and succession plantings. Brett has created a detailed seed catalog that is used as a tool for planning successions and rotations. In some time maybe we will have our schedule fully automated and have simply a reminder of “hey, it’s time to plant x today”.

Pruning back dormant vines, fruit trees, and blueberry bushes. We placed new beds for our berries this year- now for the hard part- choosing a more permanent place to plant them then in a large portable pot.

Layering our dormant beds with compost and other soil amendments (did you see our tips about compost?). We are preparing our beds now to be productive growers in the early spring!

Fill mulched areas around the yard with another layer of mulch. Now is the time to get woodchips, especially in the PNW. We have had two loads of free chips dropped in the last 3 weeks. I want to simply sing the praises of getchipdrop.com and I am thankful for the free mulch, however, there is a slight issue with the contracted companies not following instructions on where to drop the chips in our yard- so simply beware of that.

There are plenty of other things you can do to prepare the garden at this time of year but nothing beats the time spent dreaming about what you will accomplish in the coming year. Let us know what you are adding to your garden to prepare for spring.

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Try this to build your compost!

Is your compost lacking body and decomposition? Our was.

We learned about a rapid-fire composting technique that involves Wood pellets (animal bedding) and Alfalfa pellets (animal feed) found at your local feed store. Soak the pellets overnight in water and add it to your compost tumbler, or pile, or heap, or whatever. The wood pellets act as the brown (carbon) where the alfalfa pellets act as the green (nitrogen) in your compost. The more alfalfa you add the faster your pile will heat up, adjust your ratios of either type of pellets depending on your compost.

The benefit of adding alfalfa to your compost in addition to your grass clippings and even coffee grounds is that alfalfa is also a slow-release fertilizer.

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What’s growing in the garden?

You can find us currently harvesting small amounts of the following:

Parsley
Kale
Broccoli & its leaves- our bunny loves!
Chard
Fava Beans
Carrots
HELLA garlic
Cabbage
Cover crop
Lettuce starts (inside the workshop)

Which brings us to…

It’s time to plan all the plantings!

Suburban Succulents Happenings

The shop is improving! Each week we try to make an upgrade. Last week we changed out the lighting in our storage space. Now that we are more confident with what is required, we are planning to upgrade the lights throughout the entire shop. We still have to get that pesky door changed out… For those of you who have visited the shop, you know the door I am talking about that is just sitting and blocking the back exit, currently. I can’t wait for the light that will come through that window!

We have finally been feeling the low 20s of winter and as a precaution, the greenhouse has been cleared of tender succulents. We are leaving a few select items in the greenhouse to see what happens mainly Haworthias, Gasterias, and some of our mother plants… we have lost a few soldiers so far, but slowly we are learning which plants can handle the outdoor greenhouse life in the PNW. It’s madness and we love it- I often remind myself that “We grow through what we go through” and next year won’t be this same way.

Animal Updates

Butte moved into a shed to keep her dry… She’s not necessarily happier there because she loved to dig in the dirt in the yard, however, she still gets to jump around the yard occasionally and she is staying a lot cleaner!

The Lil chicks are fully integrated with the other hens and are being weaned off their chick feed (we are really just trying to use through the bag that we last bought). It’s a pain in the ass to corral them into their own fenced area to eat their food nowadays. Little fact: Chickens that are laying should not eat medicated chick food as it’s not recommended to eat their eggs because of coccidiosis medication playing some part with the eggs… not medical advice, but we are working through it.

The other day we went to Orchard Feed to get chicken food and other composting pellets; we ended up ordering 7 chicks, four more than we intended to. We love our wide variety of chicken breeds. The unique egg colors & characteristics of each hen are absolutely fascinating! The pleasure that it brings me to watch them waddle around the yard- pure merriment!

Coming Spring 2021

We are excited about many Spring ventures—-

We look forward to offering plant starts, like tomatoes, peppers, & a variety of herbs come springtime! We are teaming with “As Thyme goes by” who we found by digging around Facebook to find out what happened to Thrifty Feed. As Thyme goes by has provided starts to the community for nearly 15 years. We look forward to being a place for fans to get their starts!
Expect lots of spring bulb planters to be available in the coming weeks. We will also have lots of outdoor pots, some empty and others with flowers, to liven up your home!
By June we should be able to offer cage-free, backyard-raised, well-loved chickens eggs! With our flock growing to nearly double the size in just a few weeks, our egg production should be locked into a steady number by May or June. Please let us know if you are interested in getting on our egg list!
Do you want chickens but do not want the work of the chick/pullet phase? Let us know, I’m happy to raise chicks for you and your family.
How about meat birds? If you want fresh chicken, let us know and we will chat about our meat bird plan.

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Posted on December 12, 2018December 12, 2018 by Adriane — Leave a comment

The 2018 Freeze!

Heat Lamp in the Greenhouse
Frozen Leaf
Many frozen Leaves
This is the Sky, pissed at us trying to grow Succulents outside in WA State…

Well, it happened, the thing we feared most of the impending winter season…. we lost some succulents, actually, we lost quite a few succulents from our outdoor greenhouse

The hardest hit crop was our lucky Jade (Crassula ovata) — not so lucky, eh? I had *luckily* brought a few small cuttings inside the garage; the mother and giant plants are completely ruined, they have lost their characteristic firmness as their leaves hold water (more water than say a skinny echeveria plant) they are now plush & squishy (like play dough and soggy bread feeling) and quite sad looking indeed.

All the plants were looking fine as we came back from our Thanksgiving trip… And then the couple nights of freezing temperatures hit us. After installing a thermometer in the greenhouse, I watched the temperatures drop down to as low as 26 degrees F two nights in a row, even with a heat lamp installed! I should have brought everything inside the first time it got that cold— I did not… Tested out the hardiness of the plants and mother nature taught Suburban Succulents a lesson.

Mind you, not all of our succulents have been harmed! There are quite a few that are not *yet* showing signs of overall damage, so that is a relieving feeling.

Ultimately we have settled on moving all of the succulents inside for the rest of winter. Our garage and downstairs living space is filled with succulent containers and flats! I am happy that the succulents get to enjoy a warmer place– although we are now changing out the cold weather for sub-par lighting issues in the rooms… We shall see where this takes us!

The next job, which I didn’t realize was going to become a job this early in the year, is to replant and categorize our succulent collection according to types. No more of our random flat growing days– we are going to divide and conquer- hopefully, making it easier to inventory with the continual growth of the business.

Catch up with you next week on the progress of all this- and a total assessment of our succulent loss due to the freezing temperatures.

Jade- RIP
Aeonium- RIP
Peperomia- RIP
Hopefully some of these guys make it!
Elephant Plant- RIP
Jade Babies- RIP
Jade Mom’s- RIP
Aeonium- RIP
Definitely not the coldest temperature we captured in the greenhouse
Mother of Millions- RIP
Leatherpetal is doing WELL!
Crassula Tetragona is good too!
This is the lot that gets to come inside first to recover! Now to make room for the rest of the greenhouse plants!

Posted on October 24, 2018October 24, 2018 by Adriane — Leave a comment

#itsreal

Our First Market EVER- Night Market Vancouver… Come & see us 11/2 & 12/7!

Here we find ourselves again… announcing our excitement to attend our *first ever* market at the end of next week! We will be at Night Market Vancouver and this is just the start of our growth process! We have been busy purchasing supplies, prepping our products, building displays, making sure our technology integration is set while still running the normal day to day of the business.

Market Flyer — Come see us 11/2 and 12/7!

The market theme is Salsa night- and we are going for it. We have set out with the frame of mind that we will design our display to be relatively “themed” for each occasion. I have gone over the top with concepts– thinking of a 6’X6′ booth of colorful fiesta flowers and streamers with salsa dresses and beautifully woven tablecloths. We are giving ourselves until Friday to come up with our booth design, so stay tuned for that. It makes most sense for us to finalize what products we are bringing and design based off the space these products require.

We are nervous about all the details of the market however, I feel with the experience Brett & I bring to the table, we will have no problems getting everything pulled together, planned and prepared ahead of time to do a stellar job at the market.

Brett’s hand-drawn succulent designs
Our office space is taken over by product preparation!
Gift toppers almost ready!
Raffle item for the market

Since moving to the PNW, I was concerned we would not have access to the many supplies needed to operate this business. I have been proven so wrong of that concern *thank goodness*– there are SO many great places in Vancouver alone that are springing our company into action. We have found an even larger jackpot of supply in Portland, OR. It is absolutely amazing and kismet. I’ll post at a later time a list of resource stores we utilize.

We have already begun to prep for our second market in December– we will spare the details that we have already begun to plan. I CAN’T WAIT! We were also informed that there is space that opened up in the 2nd November market that takes place at a new location and has a different theme… we are putting off registering as we don’t really have the money to enter– but if fate allows the space be available in a couple of days, we will be entering.

I keep repeating to myself & Brett- prior planning prevents poor performance… so far it’s working for us. We are running on schedule and getting so many of our tasks crossed off the list– and brainstorming our next lists. I feel ready for this business to take off and leave me busy and satisfied with my life work!

our slightly filled greenhouse — Our greenhouse today!

Greenhouse update: The succulents that have been moved into the greenhouse are doing GREAT! So far we have had two nights of about 40-degree weather- nothing has died or rotted to its death, yet… There is rain in the forecast for the next week, so I am considering it is time to bring the succulents that are still in the exposed yard inside the greenhouse for their winter rest periods– to keep them dry and most importantly, keep them alive.

Hoping everyone is getting into the #toospooky season. We have partially set up decorations at the house, but have left it half-done… let’s just say we have put our motivations to efforts that are screaming their importance for success.

Will we see any of you at the Night Market on 11/2? How about 12/7? Let us know below!

www.nightmarketvancouver.com. Check them out.

Posted on October 9, 2018October 9, 2018 by Adriane — Leave a comment

Winter prep in the PNW continues…

AH! The cold nights and dreary/rainy days have arrived– the sprinklers went off this morning and I freaked out at the thought of too much of a chill hitting our little succies. (They are all ok!) Today involved a lot of plant moving in order to find warm, relatively dry spots for them to continue to grow until the new greenhouse build is complete.

To top it all off, with this wetter weather, the grey slugs are out full force. We are keeping them at bay with our natural methods, with the emphasis on keeping them at bay. There are no methods to completely eradicate slugs from your plants only killing as many as you can to hinder the population growth.

Here in the wet PNW, these slugs can get massive. The gray leopard slug in the photo below can grow to be 8″ long! This one here was probably closer to 4 and gross enough for my liking.

gray leopard slug enjoying our pumpkin plants — Leopard slug on the loose! We left his smashed carcass for his brethren to know their fate if they enter…

Did you know? Grey slugs should never be touched with bare hands– they can carry a nematode that can cause meningitis. Definitely avoid touching bare handed and always wear gloves!!

I have started to rig our current greenhouse to utilize more of the upward and inside middle spaces- it is very difficult to maneuver in there but as long as you walk straight in and reverse yourself out, it works out…kinda. I have faced a couple of tray casualties, the obscenities were shouted and mess cleaned up, but what else can I do… Can’t wait for the new greenhouse to see how much more room we will have to work with.

greenhouse DIY design — Suburban Succulents new greenhouse plans!

The greenhouse plans have been created and we are keeping the structure basic which serves our purposes just fine! Above is a rough sketch that Brett put together for us. We are hoping to utilize as much upward space as we can. The best part of making your own greenhouse is the customization options. We will keep you updated with the progress and share what worked and didn’t once the project is complete.

Have any of our succ-scribers built a greenhouse themselves? Let us know in the comments. See ya next time!

Posted on September 4, 2018September 4, 2018 by Adriane — Leave a comment

Suburban Succulents Story

I realized we have been so busy talking about and creating our brand, we forgot to tell you a bit about ourselves! We realized that we would never be able to afford a reasonable space to buy in the Bay Area of California while not living above our means. We moved to the Pacific Northwest in early 2018 to get the hell away from the hustle & bustle we experienced in California. Boy, are we glad we did because we are loving the Pacific Northwest lifestyle!

Founders and Lovers of all things Succulents.
We have now lived and raised gardens at 4 different homes together in various parts of California and Washington.

How it all began…

Simply put- It started with one succulent arrangement my mom gave me quite a few years ago that we have just let grow in its pot, not really doing much to care for it, its a succulent right? When I began working with Orchids, I became more interested in succulents. Brett and I got a couple of our own succulents from OSH (:'( bye OSH) or a big store like that and we started our own succulent garden. While all of this was going on, we were renovating a backyard space at our rental home and soon became infatuated with growing veggies and flowers. Thankfully, I started to work for a plant maintenance company getting cuttings from the many succulent displays that had to be cleaned up– this is where the collection took off and has grown to the operation we have today.

Finished Renovated Garden in San Jose, California

Another driving force behind this endeavor is our difficulty with accepting a boss other than ourselves, so with Adriane’s well-rounded business management and administrative expertise and Brett’s fingers producing magic on the computer we are able to share these parts of our life with you and thus Suburban Succulents was born.

Please join us on this adventure and be sure to check back soon for more succulent fun!

Posted on August 18, 2018September 4, 2018 by Adriane — Leave a comment

We are prepping for Fall/Winter

While it’s not quite September yet, we find ourselves rushing to get ready for cold weather– reality check, it has been in the high 80’s here every day… and hot at night… but I feel the days getting shorter and know that the succulents are probably going to freeze this winter if I leave them outside. Brett and I are going to experiment this winter with what varieties can survive outside, but the rest are going to start to acclimate inside the house soon– so that means many things- change out the soil- cut back the plant if it is getting leggy, fertilize, and kill any bugs or spiders hanging out on the plants. I am sure I’m forgetting some steps, but you get it, prepping for cold weather is no joke… This will be the first time in my life, well, since 6 years old, that I have endured a winter– California and Arizona did not produce snow or much if any, rain. I am feeling a HUGE learning curve is going to take place in regards to watering amounts as well as freezing conditions. I am excited to see what we learn and can pass on!

Anyone out there familiar with growing plants in a colder climate during the winter? Be sure to let us know your experiences or want to know how we are doing a specific task.

For more up to date succulent pictures be sure to check out our Instagram page.

Tag: pnw