Sedum Carpet Experiment, Year 2

November 15th, 2022

   Two springs ago, I took a shot at growing what’s known as “sedum carpet” – a tray of short, dense, perennial, creeping sedums of several varieties.

Sedum carpet comes in a shallow tray of mixed varieties.

   They’re cut into pieces and intended as a fast, weed-preventing way to cover the ground, especially in hot, sunny areas where you need something short, such as along walks and driveways and across the front of garden beds.

   After two full growing seasons, I thought I’d report on how my experiment is going with sedum carpet around my street-side mailbox.

   In a nutshell, the planting has done very well.

   The plants established quickly, made it through the first hot summer and first winter, then continued to perform well all through this season.

   And it’s been one of the few plants I’ve grown in my unprotected front yard that haven’t been eaten by deer.

   Here are more specifics in case you’re thinking about giving this option a try.

The planting

   I bought my 10-by-20-inch tray of “Garden Tiles” at Lowe’s for $21.98 and got eight five-by-five-inch pieces out of the mat. That’s about $2.75 per plant – not bad for a perennial.

   The mix had at least five different varieties of creeping sedum. Some were golden and ferny, some were more succulent and blue-tinted, and some had pinky-nail-sized green and/or burgundy-tinted foliage.

Sedum pieces were planted about 10 inches apart.

   My planting site was in a foot-wide bed between a brick column that houses my mailbox and the asphalt street. It’s a hot and mostly sunny spot that gets salty residue from road salting in the winter.

   I loosened the soil a few inches, pressed the pieces into the surface about 10 inches apart, firmed around the edges, and gave the plants a good watering.

   Then I left them to fend for themselves – watering just twice over the first summer when the weather got hot and dry for more than a week.

   By mid-summer, the sedum pieces filled in to make a near solid coverage. The plants remained full, healthy, and colorful all growing season with no bugs, no disease, no fertilizer, and not even any of the floppiness or “rattiness” that I’ve seen from some of the larger varieties of creeping sedum.

The second season

   The planting came through winter with no losses and took on fresh growth by April.

   By May, the edges were creeping outward, and the whole mat was looking healthy and lush. Again, no bugs, no disease, no dieback, no deer browsing, and no supplemental watering all season.

My sedum carpet is full and healthy in year two.

   Growth has been dense enough that I’ve had almost no weeds in the two-inch-tall mat.

   Some of the varieties bloomed for awhile (white or yellow), but none of the spent flowers were tall enough or intrusive enough to need deadheading.

   The only thing I’ve noticed is that one of the varieties seems to be dominating more so than the diverse blend of five or so species I had last year.

   The most vigorous of the bunch is a light-green, very dense and tiny-leafed variety that I think might either be mossy stonecrop (Sedum acre) or tasteless stonecrop (Sedum sexangulare).

   It’s not so frisky that I’d call it invasive or even overly aggressive, and it’s shallow-rooted enough that the edges can easily be dug out to control spread.

   I have a few shrubs around the corner of the mailbox column, so I’m going to let the sedum carpet colonize its way under them.

   We’ll see how it continues to go, but so far, I’m happy with how this experiment is working out.