Separation Anxiety (Or how to separate haworthia clumps)

Not all haworthia clumps look good; or even if they do, it isn't always ideal to maintain them as clumps. Pictured above is a Haworthia cooperi var dielsiana, possibly my most important haworthia specimen. So we will chop it apart. Or, it turned out, the process was closer to ripping than chopping. 

A Little History: Haworthia cooperi var dielseana is not known to be a clumper. There are also several different strains in the wild that look different enough from each other while also looking exactly like other cooperi varieties that it boggles the mind how people know which side is up, down or sideways.

Based entirely on a 13-second cursory check of Jakub Jilemický's photographs of the last remaining wild populations, I strongly suspect the specimen on my bench is a H. cooperi var dielseana joeyae. This cooperi line does clump in the wild. My specimen just never did so until a near-fatal summer led to an unavoidable spring clean-up that injured the rosette. 

I've also had no success crossing this dielsiana with the other cooperis on the bench. No clue why. So the clone was the best possible outcome of experimenting on how long this plant could stay dry in summer. Well. Definitely not all summer.  

The second rosette grew out of that injury, about a third of the way up from the base leaves. In the photo below, the growth is only visible as a void between the individual leaves (around Jan 2019). By May, it had grown enough that the leaves under the emerging rosette needed to be removed to give it space and prevent it from growing deformed. 

That space is where I yanked out a drying (but not totally dried up) leaf the previous autumn.

Four months later, the rosette has emerged, growing in the shade of the parent rosette. You'll have to fix that or it would elongate and look weird. 

At this point, the pot should also be rotated regularly to ensure that the shaded rosette gets ample light to keep its compact shape. Eventually, at around June 2019, I remember unpotting this plant to check whether the new rosette could be removed. I decided it did not have enough roots on its own to effortlessly survive the separation. So it was cleaned up and planted at a different angle so that both rosettes could be alternately exposed to light. 

One winter and a pandemic later, the rosette had grown to about half the size of the parent. In mid-spring, I decided to unpot it again and check whether separation was possible. 

One year later (20 May 2020), time to check it again. It looked kind of nice growing this way. But it feels safer to grow them separately. 

The tangle of roots looked very good--each rosette had a goodly bundle that could support each rosette well through the remainder of spring.

There is no trick to ripping them apart. Just hold one rosette in your left hand and the other in your right hand. Then twist. And rip. 

This is the parent rosette and that is where the offset was connected.

As a general rule when repotting a haworthia, let it dry out overnight and repot it the next day. Hold off watering until sundown. 

That's it.

Two months after separation.

Just a small note about watering after this operation: shallow and frequent watering is your best strategy. The idea is for the substrate to dry quickly especially if you are doing this to your haworthia after spring when it is getting rather hot and the plant is preparing to sit out the summer. This watering strategy will most probably kill your longest old roots that go all the way to the bottom of the pot but that's fine--with enough hint of moisture, it will grow new roots. What you are trying to avoid here is watering the newly separated plants so deeply that it takes too long for it to dry in between watering. The roots will melt anyway and the plant may not be able to catch up by growing new roots. 

So, shallow watering, some dry period of a week and then shallow watering. If it is very very hot where you are (upwards of 32C in summer), bring the plants indoors where it is cooler. That way, they can be kept semi-dormant. 

Alternatively, break up your clumps in either early spring or early autumn.