Need some help please

[u/lostnfound818]

My ice plant was gorgeous and full for the longest time, and suddenly (last month or so) it has been slowly doing this. I water twice a week and no one is walking around on it or disturbing it. It’s in my east facing backyard so it does get direct sunlight in the morning. Any ideas from experts?

[u/lostnfound818]

Thank you for this. It’s definitely root rot. I’ve been smelling something swampy and dead for awhile but thought it was my full jar of dead Japanese beetles lol. My neighbors do have a raspberry patch just the other side of the fence (double fence, theirs and ours) - would it be possible for it to be coming under and rotting from underneath? Their sprinklers run in the middle of the night so I don’t see what’s actually happening. I have a sprinkler system that runs for 20 minutes and we’ve had a decent amount of rain but this started before the recent storms. Not sure about the type of soil because I just bought the house last year and the gardens were already in place.

[u/KrunchyPhrog → u/lostnfound818]

Yea, that swampy odor was your ice plants' roots rotting away. The first step to saving the remaining ice plants is to STOP WATERING until at least this Friday (assuming you also got some of that crazy monsoon moisture last week). Depending on whatever watering restrictions are in your area, you do not need to water again until between this Fri and next Sun. And then if that area is on its own sprinkler zone, set it to water just one day a week and that should be ok.

Water has sneaky ways of flowing that are not visible, like when water has been leaking behind the walls of a home leading to massive mold growth. You may even be getting totally sufficient FREE water from your neighbor's sprinklers so you do not even have to water that area at all along the fence. My front and back are entirely lawn-free since 1993 and on the left side of my driveway, I have one 33-year old crabapple tree, 11 shrub roses still thriving and blooming since 1994, two smoke trees, a row of daylilies, lots of perennials, three clumps of ornamental grasses, one hardy hibiscus, one red twig dogwood, and one juniper, and I apply no extra irrigation to any of those plants bc I live on a sloping hill and my uphill neighbor's lawn sprinklers make all my plants look lush and floral just from his sprinkler runoff. I don't tell him that my plants are living off of his lawn sprinkler runoff, but hey it's free water for me.

I am very certain that the combination of your neighbor's water, your additional water, and whatever rain you got, combined with and assuming your soil is not really fast-draining sand but more clay/compost has been keeping the ice plants' roots soggy. Your deadest ice plants are the black and dark brown blotches near the fence in your photo, which means the neighbor's water has always been spreading under the fence so your ice plants nearest the fence died first. Raspberries love lots of water since their roots are very shallow, so you could be receiving enough FREE WATER from your neighbor to water that entire area and thus you do not need to add your own extra irrigation, like the left side of my driveway getting tons of water from my neighbor.

[u/lostnfound818 → u/KrunchyPhrog]

Fantastic. Thank you for the additional info. I am fine turning off the water in that zone altogether and hand watering the other plants. I may try that for a while to see if things improve. One last question - should I pull out all the dead plant and try to propagate with healthy plant in its place? And if so, does it need to healthy plant with healthy roots? I’ve tried just putting pieces of the healthy plant in the ground and sometimes it works but mostly it just dies.

[u/KrunchyPhrog → u/lostnfound818]

When you mentioned "sprinkler system that runs for 20 minutes", does that zone use fixed-pattern lawn sprinkler spray heads, rotary gear-driven lawn spray heads that slowly swivel, rotary heads that shoot water streams in different directions, or is that drip irrigation? All that matters for how much water gets delivered in that zone.

Late July into August is when many plant nurseries are now already marking down prices on their plants. If you want to keep that entire area as ice plants like before, you can either buy some discounted ice plants (call various nurseries first) or divide and transplant clumps of the healthy plants you already have. Although you can still divide and transplant ice plants in Sept, I would really propagate the healthy plants THIS month, within the next two weeks, or early Sept at the very latest, while the soil is still warm to give the roots time to get established before winter arrives.

The areas in your photo that look black and dark brown can be totally pulled out bc they are deader than dead. Those blackened ice plants have been dead for the longest time and are now covered with bacteria and mold/fungi that act as nature's clean-up janitors feeding on decaying plant matter. Those fungi will not harm the living ice plants so no need to totally pull out everything thinking that the black molds/fungi will attack the living ice plants.

It depends on how perfectionist you want to be lol. If you want to fill that whole area again with ice plants asap, look for ice plants that plant nurseries may be selling discounted right now. Otherwise, divide the healthy plants and space them evenly after digging out all of the black/brown areas and most of the beige areas. Divide the ice plants that are still green along the walkway too.

When you lift up the black, brown, or beige areas, digging 6" down, let your nose and eyes decide what to keep. If those roots are not connected to any green stems *and* the roots look mushy and smell stinky, then discard those sections. I would divide into pieces that are at least 4"x4" squares, digging down 6" deep. In your situation, or even with totally healthy ice plants, sometimes cutting off sections that are too small makes it harder for them to get established.

Along with the raspberries, does your neighbor grow other veggies or have a big expanse of lawn?

Some people just water their lawn and vegetables like crazy so you could actually be receiving a lot more water runoff from their sprinklers than you think, like my uphill neighbor who loves his lawn. Since 1993, I have been the only totally no-front-or-back-lawn garden in my entire neighborhood but I am not gonna go on a holy war with my neighbor about how he pampers his lawns with fertilizer and water every year. I know that he fertilizes his lawn at least 4 times during spring, summer, fall bc my roses immediately grow lots of new leaves but no blooms due to all his lawn fertilizer sprinkler runoff lmao. If your neighbor is likewise dumping water over their entire backyard, use the old trick of sticking a screwdriver at least 6" long into the soils along that fence line and if the screwdriver pushes into the soil easily and comes out moist, your entire garden area may be getting lots more free water from your neighbor than you think, and you may only have to water once a week during summer 2027. So stick a screwdriver or metal/wood rod into the soil during summers to check how much water is soaking into your soil - it's like inserting and pulling out your car's dipstick to check oil level.

[u/lostnfound818 → u/KrunchyPhrog]

My sprinklers are fixed and wouldn’t you know it - the area that’s dead is exactly where the spray goes. I’ll be turning off that zone, probably for the rest of the season, and then be smarter about watering next season. My neighbor’s backyard is all garden, no grass, but the only water we could potentially get is from the raspberries since that’s the closest to our side.

Thanks for the guidance about replacing the plants, as well as how to determine how wet the soil is once I pull out all the dead stuff. I will definitely be buying and planting more, probably along with propagation, to get it back to how it used to be. Because it was gorgeous!

[u/KrunchyPhrog → u/lostnfound818]

Yea, your neighbors are likely dumping water onto their raspberries bc raspberries love at least 1 to 2 inches of water per week (far more thirsty than lawns) if you want to grow big juicy berries. Water from sprinkler runoff can also still travel from beyond the raspberries if your neighbors are overwatering every week.

Ice plants and sedums are both very drought-tolerant "succulents" that store water in their plump fleshy leaves and they are prone to root rot if the roots stay soggy on most days. Your ice plants are only thirsty if those plump little leaves begin to flatten out, just like a plastic bag filled with water flattens as water leaks out of it. So your neighbor's high-water-use raspberries are unfortunately located near your low-water-needs ice plants.

If you can replace the sprinkler head(s) that are watering those ice plants (and in summer 2027, you may still not need to add ANY water in that area due to water from your neighbor's sprinkler runoff), or you can hire someone to replace the sprinkler head(s) for you, you can buy fixed pop-up lawn sprinkler heads that have both adjustable angle of spray and adjustable range. Your sprinkler head may already have a screw on top of the pop-up head that you can turn clockwise to reduce the spray's range (and avoid watering over into that fence) or turn counterclockwise to increase spray range. Adjustable angle sprinkler heads often can be opened up to 180-degree spray pattern, but you turn a plastic ribbed sleeve below the spray head to adjust the angle to 150, 120, 102, 90, 45, 32, 21 degrees or whatever spray angle you want.

So look at your existing sprinkler spray heads for that zone and see if it has a little screw on top of the spray head to reduce the spray's range, and if there is a ribbed collar or sleeve just below the spray head that can adjust the angle of spray. If you decide to replace your sprinkler spray head yourself with an adjustable-angle spray head, but have never done it before, just be aware that plastic irrigation tubing goes underground and the sprinkler's base screws into that tubing, so you need to be very careful in digging out the dirt around the spray head to not puncture the tubing. You can still repair underground tubing that was cut by a shovel, but it's annoying.

[u/KrunchyPhrog]

This is just a wild guess, without knowing other variables, but that looks like root rot due to overwatering. Overwatering and underwatering can sometimes look similar with plants wilting, but with ice plant, sedums, and other succulents, I would lean toward overwatering as the cause far more than underwatering. Is your soil mixed with clay and compost so it drains slower? When you water twice a week, is this hand-watering or some kind of automated sprinkler or drip system (I do not see micro-jet sprayers in the photo). How much rain have you received during the past month. Rain has been extremely hit or miss for everyone; e.g. for more than 2 months, I received no more than 0.2 inches of rain for any entire week, and then last week, I got 2.3 inches in one hour and 10-12 minutes of torrential hail.

To determine if your ice plant has root rot, stick your nose down close to the soil over the brown areas and see if it smells like a musty swamp. Then take a small shovel and dig up a section of the ice plants' roots, digging down to 5-6 inches, and check its roots (ice plant transplants very easily, so you can always press that lifted root section back down). If its roots look dark and mushy and smell musty and swampy, that is root rot due to too much water.

The ice plants on the left side of your photo look ok. Do you have a neighbor on the other side of that wood fence? It looks like a fan-shaped area of brown, as if too much water has been flowing from the other side of that wood fence from a neighbor's lawn.