Succulents & Cacti
Succulents are marketed as unkillable, which is why so many people kill them. The truth: they’re easy once you accept they’re desert plants — maximum light, gritty fast-draining soil, and the soak-and-dry watering method (drench, then ignore until fully dry). Our guides cover the popular families — echeveria, haworthia, jade, aloe, living stones and flowering cacti like Christmas cactus — plus leaf propagation, etiolation rescue for stretched plants, and keeping them alive through dark winters or humid monsoons. If your succulents keep turning to mush, the watering guide here will fix it in one read.
Use the lowest leaves as your watering gauge. Slightly wrinkled and soft means genuinely thirsty; translucent, yellowing or mushy means the water has already gone too far. Wrinkled recovers in a day, mushy does not recover at all.
