Harvesting Agave Side Shoots To Obtain New Plants

Agave flowering

 When Agaves flower, they will sometimes create side shoots around the flower stem.  These can be harvested to create new plants.  

 

It's an effort.  Some Agaves--not all--will produce plentiful plantlets on their flower stem.  Those are easy to obtain.  Some Agaves produce offsets from their base or their roots.  Those are also fairly easy or even very easy to cut off or break off or snap off or dig out in order to get new plants.  My 'Sun Glow', which flowered recently, had neither offsets nor plantlets.  

Lovely, despite:

 I decided to harvest the three side shoots it had developed, to try to root them for new plants.  I've successfully harvested side shoots in the past with a pruning saw and considerable effort.    Beloved recently bought me a battery-powered small saw, which made the process easier. 

I first cut off the flower stalk and leaves, and then dug out what remained of the Agave.  The battery-powered saw took off the leaves easily.  What cost tedious effort with a pruning saw was a breeze with battery power. 

 'Sun Glow' was easy to dig out.  Not all of them are.

Next, I made wedge cuts into the Agave deep enough to extract the side shoots.  I was able to wiggle the wedge back and forth enough to snap off the side shoot.  Arrows indicate where the side shoot was attached to the original Agave: 

There's the first side shoot, after  I pulled off enough of its leaves to expose its stem.  The shoot will develop roots from the intersection of the stem and the bottom leaves:

  Not a great photo, but this shows the stem tissue, which has a rougher texture than the smooth glossy leaf-bases:

Another, smaller side shoot was next to the first one:

 The second small side shoot may be too small to root.

After pulling off the surrounding material, which came away easily from the shoot, there wasn't much left.

 If you wait for the Agave to produce as many side shoots as possible, or for the side shoots to become as large as possible, you run the risk of the side shoots flowering, and thus dying, unable to create a new plant. 

 

Extracting the shoots was gooey, sticky process.  This Agave happened to have a lot of moisture left in it.  Not all do.  It might depend on how hard (dry) the Agave was grown, or how long after flowering it is.  Regarding the sticky/gooey, some people can develop painful dermatitis from exposure to Agave juice, so be careful if you try this.  My gloves became soaked with Agave juice, but it just happened not to bother my skin. 

The last of the three side shoots was the largest and easiest.  There it is on the right, attached to a remnant of the original plant.   You can see leaf-stem seams on it, the dark red lines.  That is where roots will emerge:

The base of the flowering stem of the original Agave. When you start seeing shorter, smaller leaves appearing at the center of an Agave, you will know it is preparing to flower:

The next photo shows the cleaned up side shoots.  They may look a bit strange because of the curve to them.  However, I've done this before, and the side shoots that rooted became as beautiful and symmetrical an Agave as the original plant was. 

Agaves don't all die after blooming. Sometimes, often, what they are doing is renewing themselves: 

'Sun Glow', a variant of 'Blue Glow', is not a super common variety, so that's why I went to the effort of trying to harvest the side shoots. 

  

'Sun Glow' in her prime: