Repotting: Repot the plant only as needed during spring or early summer when it is actively growing. Use a slow-release fertilizer in spring or a liquid fertilizer diluted 2 to 4 times more than usual and used less often than recommended. 'Icycle' grows well without fertilizer but may benefit from the extra nutrients. During the winter months, water just enough to keep the plants from shriveling.įertilizing: E. If you have saucers under the pots, make sure after a short time to empty the water. The "soak and dry" method is the preferred schedule for watering E. Watering: Provide moderate amounts of water from spring to fall. 'Icycle' can withstand temperatures as low as 20 to 50 ☏ (-6.7 to 10 ☌), USDA hardiness zones 9a to 11b. Hardiness: This plant is a tender succulent, which means it must be brought indoors for the winter to survive. However, commercial succulent potting mixes will work fine. Soil: This succulent needs a potting soil mix that drains quickly. It will stretch if it does not have enough sunlight. 'Icycle' is inside, put it near the brightest window in your home. The intense afternoon sun can cause sunburn. If you are moving your plant outside in the spring, do it gradually.
#Pictures of an icycle full
'Icycle' prefers full sun to partial shade. One could call it the Platonic form.How to Grow and Care for Echeveria 'Icycle' The resulting shape turns out to be described by the same mathematical equation that describes stalactites.
Strangely though, both methods lead to the same mathematical shape for icicles." "It was only later that we examined the layer of rising air, which is technically more correct. "At first, we focused only on the thin water layer covering the icicle, just like we did with stalactites," said Short. As the rising air removes heat from the liquid layer, some of the water freezes, and the icicle grows thicker and elongates. The updraft of air occurs because the icicle is generally warmer than its surrounding environment, and thus convective heating causes the air surrounding the icicle to rise. The growth of an icicle is caused by the diffusion of heat away from the icicle by a thin fluid layer of water and the resulting updraft of air traveling over the surface. For an icicle to grow, there must be a constant layer of water flowing over it. The National Science Foundation funded the research.Īs residents of cold climates know, icicles form when melting snow begins dripping down from a surface such as the edge of a roof. Short, a doctoral candidate in UA's physics department, Baygents, a UA associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering, and Goldstein, a UA professor of physics and the Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems at the University of Cambridge in England, published their article, "A Free-Boundary Theory for the Shape of the Ideal Dripping Icicle," in the August 2006 issue of Physics of Fluids. Whereas heat diffusion and a rising air column are keys to an icicle's growth, the diffusion of carbon dioxide gas fuels a stalactite's growth. The finding is surprising because the physical processes that form icicles are very different from those that form stalactites. It really highlights the beauty of nature," Short said.
I think it is amazing that science and math can explain something like this so well. "Everyone knows what an icicle is and what it looks like, so this research is very accessible. Surprisingly, the team found that the same mathematical formula that describes the shape of stalactites also describes the shape of icicles. Although other scientists have studied how icicles grow, they had not found a formula to describe their shape. So the team decided to investigate icicles. Once the researchers had found a mathematical representation of the stalactite's shape, they began to wonder if the solution applied to other similarly shaped natural formations caused by dripping water. However, stalactites aren't the only natural formations that look like elongated carrots. In 2005, the team figured out that stalactites, the formations that hang from the ceilings of caves, have a unique underlying shape described by a strikingly simple mathematical equation. Deciphering patterns in nature is a specialty of UA researchers Martin B.