The Right Way to Make Succulents Pup: Turn a Single Head into Multiple Heads

Puping actually refers to the way succulents grow new succulents from their own lateral growth points. Of course, if you want your succulent to pup, besides just waiting patiently (some succulent varieties can slowly form multiple heads on their own), you can also use artificial methods to make succulents form multiple heads.

If you don't want to wait, then we can use other artificial methods to stimulate the succulent into pushing out new heads. Here is a brief explanation of why these heading methods work: plants all have apical dominance, so we can break that apical dominance by cutting the top, and promote the development of the plant's other lateral growth points.

The simplest method is beheading (by destroying the growth point at the top of the succulent and removing the part that easily consumes nutrients, you encourage the succulent to push out more new pups, and the multiple heads formed by beheading are also very obvious). Of course, when beheading, we still leave the succulent a few rings of leaves at the bottom (if you cut everything off, the succulent probably won't live much longer).

The second method is directly pinching out the growing tip (by removing the leaf core of the succulent, you eliminate its apical dominance and encourage the lateral growth points to pup). This method mainly involves removing a few leaves from the center of the succulent (destroying the growth), so the succulent easily sprouts new buds from the leaf axils and pushes out little pups (but the multiple-head succulents from this method don't look as impressive as those from beheading).

Of course, if you have a better method for making heads, please be sure to tell me!