Random plant event: Yucca guatemalensis resprouting

Like most people, I have ideas all the time, and like most people, some of my ideas are better than others. Earlier in the summer, I thought it sounded like a good idea to cut back all of my big Yucca guatemalensis plants, because they were getting too big to be easily manageable, and there was all that bare, propagatable stem just sitting there doing nothing. So I cut them back down to maybe a foot tall or less, and stuck the tops in pots to root, and the leftover cane I put in vermiculite, in the hopes of getting it to root and sprout and make even more plants.

The stupid part of this was that I probably, I'm thinking, should have left more stem on the original plants. I also probably should have known better than to leave them outside in this summer, of all summers: so far they've just gotten really wet and cold. They're coping with it pretty well, considering, but I started out with seven separate plants (in three pots), and one of them rotted and died almost immediately. Of the other six, four have not yet done anything, and then there are these two:



Of course it's good that these two have decided to resprout, and as best as I can tell, every single one of the tops has already decided to start rooting, which is a lot quicker than I was expecting. The cane sections haven't really done anything yet, but cane sections take a while anyway, so I'm not worried about that. So overall it's not like I've lost anything. But I still wish I'd left a little more cane on the original plants, and that the weather had been a little warmer and drier for them.

They're Yuccas, so they might still forgive me yet. But you know how it is when you cut something way back and then realize afterward that maybe you overdid it a little.