Tequila agave

Blue Agave, the tequila agave of the Agave tequilana species, is an agave plant that is an important economic product of Jalisco state in Mexico due to its role as the base ingredient of tequila, a popular alcoholic drink.The tequila agave grows natively in Jalisco, favoring the high altitudes of more than 1,500 m and sandy soil. Commercial and wild agaves have very different life cycles. Both start as a large  succulent, with spiky fleshy leaves, which can grow to over two meters in length. Wild agaves sprout a shoot when about five years old which grows into a stem up to five metres and topped with yellow flowers. The flowers are pollinated by a native bat (Leptonycteris nivalis) and produce several thousand seeds per plant. The plant then dies. The shoots are removed when about a year old from commercial plants to allow the heart to grow larger. The plants are then reproduced by planting these shoots; this has led to a considerable loss of genetic diversity in cultivated blue agave. It is rare for one kept as a a houseplant to flower; nevertheless, a fifty year old blue agave in Boston has grown a 10 m (30 ft) stalk requiring a hole in the greenhouse roof and flowered sometime during the summer of 2006.
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