Welcome

Featured

Flowers

I do not collect cacti because of their flowers, but they can be quite spectacular nevertheless (such as those of the echinopsis http://echinopsis.com/ genus). However, it’s a special enough event in my collection – New York weather is not ideal for growing cacti – that I do tend to take photos when that happens.

This is a gymnocactus gieseldorfianus I got at the San Gabriel Valley CSS (https://sgvcss.com/) Show and Sale this January. The exact plant I got is in the photo to the right, bluer but smaller.

Gymnocactus gieseldorfianus
At seller eight months back

This is a corypantha cornifera that has not bloomed in three years. I like corpypanthas but I do not find them easy to grow, especially from seed: all my seedlings end up etiolated or stop growing and increasing the light has not done anything. They do not like being repotted either.

Corypantha cornifera
opening up on a cloudy day

The photo to the left is a rebutia. I keep this plant mostly because the beautiful bright orange flowers. Rebutias in general have bright colored flowers and bloom abundantly but they do not have particularly interesting bodies so I only have two in my collection. Dolichotele longimamma is a genus that is very dear to me as it was one of the first cacti I ever owned, about twenty years ago. It bloomed a lot and -the flowers have a gentle pleasant smell – and I repeatedly failed at reproducing it through offsets. One of the attempts eventually killed the mother plant later on.

Rebutia
Gymnocalycium
Dolichotele longimamma

Here are some photos of my other typical bloomers, a copiapoa hypogaea being one the most surprising ones. Despite their reputation as difficult to grow I find copiapoas pretty easy. They are slow growers, but not the slowest (thelocactus riconensis holds that record in my collection) and none of them have died due to over-watering.

Hamatocactus setispinus

Notocactus, rebutia and gymnocalycium damsii

Corypantha cornifera
Copiapoa hypogaea
Matucana madisoniorum

This one is a night bloomer, which took me while to figure out – I kept assuming it was blooming while I was at work. Pretty spectacular flower but I collect this one because of the body which is quite unusual. This season it has been recovering from a spider mite infestation so there was no blooming. This, as many plants in my collection, is from Kyle’s plants ebay shop https://www.ebay.com/usr/kyles_plants.

Pygmaeocereus bieblii

Featured

Growing cacti from seeds. Part 3

Recently I have been taking photos of my seedlings with a macro lens. Unfortunately I still don’t know how to use in any other conditions than strong light without getting grainy photos. So a lot of summer photos in this post.

I haven’t stopped sowing seeds, but my photographing efforts are now focused on the larger seedlings, which are much less tricky to shoot. These two are the oldest I have at 1 year and 8 months, a ferocactus (left) and a gymnocalycium (right).

Some of the fastest growers, pretty much having reached the same size as the ones above although not older than one year, are pilosocereus. I sowed quite a few packs of them, some just labeled pilosocereus mix – most of them from cactusstore.com. While I like their resilience (one has survived two brutal cat attacks – yes, turns out my cat is encouraged by their harmlessness to just snack on them) most of them are bright green instead of blue. There is slight hinge of blue on one seedling alone but even that is hard to capture with regular light. Here are some photos of some them, including my favorite spineless one.

I’ve finally managed to get some copiapoas to germinate and some to even stay alive. I’ve had the most success with copiapoa hypogaea lizard skin where a whole batch of 10 germinated and is looking good. My other copiapoa efforts have yielded about 5 solid-looking seedlings out of ~500 seeds.

Copiapoa hypogaea lizard skin, at 10 months.

I’ve also struggled with weingartia, but this may be because I only had one source of seeds. I insisted on buying the same seeds several times, each time with very little success. All in all I have three good- and different looking weingartia seedlings, looking forward to see them grow.

As I’ve been sowing for quite a while now, I’ve had to move beyond my favorite cacti and start sowing a bit of everything basically. I am not that into stenocactus, but I did sow a few types, and it all went pretty smooth with them. The top left one bellow is a steno multicostatus.

I’m also enjoying the sturdiness of gymnocalycium saglionis (top right corner). I sowed a pack of 100 seeds advertised as different saglionis varieties. At this point, a bit over one year old, I can clearly tell apart two varieties, most because of their different coloration.

Finally the bottom photo above is an escobaria seedling. Again I had a pack of 100 seeds of escobaria, labeled to be a mix. Most of them looked alike with the exception of this guy, looking very odd from day one. As I couldn’t help it, I had it endure the most by re-potting it about four times in one year. To my surprise despite its diminutive size, it did not die and is in fact the only escobaria seedling to make it through the winter! The photo does not do justice to this guy: it has a plump green-yellowish body with relatively large bright orange spines.

Finally some more close-ups (turbinocarpus, random mix, thelocactus hexadrophorous, gymno saglionis) and a group photo of my largest seedlings.

Featured

Cacti of Zion National Park

I took a week-long trip to Zion National Park around the Memorial Day weekend. While cactus spotting was not the reason I went there, the hikes were (I followed this great guide for that), I was pleasantly surprised to see quite a few cacti in habitat, many of them in bloom.

By far the predominant cactus species was Opuntia. What I did not expect though were so many different types of Opuntia, much more diversity than in places like southern Europe, which is the only other region I had seen them in habitat before. Here are some pictures of them on the Watchman trail, including a gorgeous variegated one. I wish I knew the names but I am no Opuntia expert so I could not really identify them.

Variegated opuntia on the Watchman trail

Opuntias and echinocereus
Variegated opuntia leaf

Other than opuntias I was really happy to spot a few echinocereus. Most of these were on the Watchman trail again. I saw something spiky through the grass and which led me to going a couple of feet off the trail into an entire area with echinecereus clumps spread among opuntias. Most of them were about to bloom but I must have been 1 day too early, so I couldn’t tell what color the flowers were. These echinocerei had really long threatening spines that on closer inspection were paper-like in texture.

Finally the Angel’s landing trail, one of the most beautiful trails in the park, had a bit of both but especially some amazing opuntia blooms that varied greatly in color: I had never seen a peach color bloom (the body looked identical to the pink flowering one next to it) or an almost red one like the one in the photos bellow. The echinocereus clump I saw on this trail had grown in the shadow of a dead tree and looked different than the ones on the Watchman trial: the body was slightly smaller with a lighter shade of green while the spines were much shorter.

Peach-colored opuntia blooms on the Angels Landing Trail

Featured

San Gabriel Valley Winter Cactus Show and Sale 2019

This year I went, for the first time, to one of the cactus show&sales that seem to happen regularly in the LA area. This was a winter one and it was organized by the San Gabriel Valley Cactus and Succulent Society – their website has a list of upcoming events, out of which the CSSA Annual Show in June is probably the largest.

The event took place at the LA County Arboretum. At first I was slightly under-impressed with the size of the hall, but the sale, although small, had really great plants at very good prices. This first couple of photos are plants from Desert Creations, one of my favorite sellers there and one of the suppliers of the LA’s Echo Park Cactus Store in as I found out. Their website does not do list most of the plants they sell, but I was told I can just shoot an email if there are any plants I want (they do ship).

Astrophytum ornatum
Grafted uebelmannia pectinifera

There were many other nice plants, in particular RobRoys plants, who I met and was also a very friendly person. As it turns out, I didn’t take many photos of his plants, I just bought them: case in point the top row of the 6 plants in the last photo of my haul, sclerocactus uncinatus v. wrightii, acanthocalycium glaucum, echinocactus platycanthus and the thelocactus lausseri at the bottom. The other two plants in the photo are a gymnocactus gieseldorfianus from Cactus Data Plants and echinocereus subinermis v ochoteranae, which bloomed a couple of weeks later.

My haul from the show. I had to lose the pots and pack them in my carrier for the next day’s flight back to NYC.

The second half of the hall was reserved for the show part. The only thing I can say about these plants is that the photos don’t do justice: most of them are more massive than the photos convey! Some of these cacti have achieved fame status and I recognized them from instagram photos other people had posted in the past, like this unbelievable Uebelmannia clump from Wendell S. (Woody) Minnich.

Uebelmannia pectinifera clump

I can’t really say what plants were my favorite here so I’m just posting some of the photos I took.

Gymnocalycium pflanzi
Matucana

Featured

Huntington Library Desert Garden

I finally made it to the famous Huntington Library garden. As I was sorry to discover, the Conservatory greenhouse, which hosts the more rare cacti and succulents, is only open on Saturdays. Even so, the open-air collection was larger and more exciting than I had expected and definitely impressive way beyond the huge golden barrels that are featured in most of the photos out there.

First, the desert garden is so large (and in fact a very friendly guide recommended me I skip it in the interest of time) that I did not see it all in the two hours I spent there. Granted I took photos of almost every plant and spent some time trying to find a way to get close to the browningia’s – there is none. The garden has many columnar cacti which are interleaved with the other plants throughout the entire garden rather than isolated to their own section. Many of the more unusual ones shared the space with gymnocalyciums in what looked more like a forest substrate on the left side of the main path when descending into the garden. Very few of the plants had visible name sign posts: they all had small army-like metal tags which were impossible to read unless you are really close to the plant. And unfortunately you can only get very close to a tiny number of plants, the ones lining the pathways.

The garden does not have a large variety of gymnocalyciums, but the ones I saw looked much larger than what I was familiar with. The predominant genus was gymno horstii.

G. monvillei
G. horstii
G. denudatum
G. horstii

I also spotted g. cardesianum, g. monvillei and quite a few g. denudatum, apparently a.k.a pink beauty.

I enjoyed most the thelocactus and coryphantha section, which is quite extensive. It has a lot of thelocactus hexadrophorous and t. riconensis, my two favourite thelocacti. I even spotted what looked like a t. hexadrophorous v. fossulatus (photo bellow), but I could not see the tag to verify.

Corypantha sp. and thelocactus hexadrophorous

The gymnocalycium section slowly merges into a small copiapoa section. The copiapoas are mostly of the spiny variety, and while larger than the small specimens you usually see in nurseries they were not as impressive as the large clumps found in habitat (like the one here Copiapoa tenebrosa clump in Chile).

Some other photos I took at the Desert Garden.

Featured

Colors

I have to say that for the most part of my cactus collector life, I never really noticed the variations in color. But recently I could not help become completely taken with “the blues”. From what I can tell, most deep blue cacti are of the columnar variety, pilosocereus, cipocereus and of course azureocereus imperator (or browningia hertigliana, don’t know the difference). So here are some photos of the blues I own.

This is my azureocereus, and yes, I know, it is not blue yet, but I haven’t lost hope. These are not easy to purchase online in the US and I got this, along with most of the other blue cacti in this post from Giromagi in Italy. This is a photo of what an adult one typically looks like.

Azureocereus imperator

I also got a few cipocereus bradei in the same order. They were relatively small but have picked up considerably since. They had some black spots and other fungus-like type of scaring by the time they got to me but nothing some serious fungicide didn’t fix.

Cipocereus bradei
Pilosocereus odilensis

Some pilosocereus cacti are famously blue. I have several p. azureus, from giromagi and from arid lands nursery. They have grown a few inches in one summer, which is much more than any of my other columnar cacti. While p. azureus are for sure good-looking cacti, I really hope to get my hands on a p. glaucens one day, like the ones roaming the gardens of Venice Beach in these photos.

This is another blue cactus I don’t own: I took this photo a couple of summers ago at the Cactus Store NYC, a pop-up store echoing the LA-based Echo Park Cactus Store. I do not know what it is but I would sure like to find out.

Another famously blue cactus, this time not a columnar, is melocactus azureus, the tropical cephalium-producing cactus. I have several of these and I have also started growing them from seeds. They are the fastest growing of the melocactus seedlings I sowed – the ones below are 8 months old. The two adult plants are from Arid Lands, the bright green one in the center, and from CalCactus. Disclaimer: This one used to be bluer but lost some of its color due to the neem oil I have been spraying to prevent spider mites infestations.

Featured

Trip to Singapore and Thailand

Chatuchak market, Bangkok

Thailand is a cactus paradise so I was very excited to go there this February.
Bangkok has the large Chatuchak Plant Market starting on Tuesdays afternoons and all through Wednesdays (at least when I was there). I went through all of it once and visited some of the booths twice, and had a great time all in all. You can find many varieties is small seed-grown astrophytums, gymnos or fraileas, sometimes dozens of them in a tray.

One of the Chatuchak plant market stalls

Some sellers exhibit unique, gorgeous plants, like the one above. They are not cheap but that doesn’t really matter since import regulations make bringing these to the US almost impossible. You’d need phytosanitary and potentially CITES certificates which take time to produce and, I’ve been told, the sellers may not be able to get for some of the more regulated species such as uebelmannias, which is a pity because uebelmannia is very popular there.

Gardens by the Bay, Singapore
The place to go for cacti at the Gardens by the Bay is the Sun Pavilion. It’s not large, but you can see a nice selection of gymnocalycium, melocactus and astrophytum together with a few fat cardons (pachycereus pringlei) supported by metal pipes. Although I missed it, Terminal 1 of Singapore Airport is known to have a nice rooftop cactus exhibit. It can only accessed once inside the terminal, after passing security.

I am sad to say I missed probably the best collection in Thailand, the famous Uncle Chorn’s. Check out this slide show Uncle Chorn’s Cabin YouTube. Next time…

Growing cacti from seeds. Part 2

It has been over a year since I planted the first cactus seeds and my oldest batch of seedlings is 1 year and 2 month old now.

I planted many batches throughout last year, starting January all through the end of September, but overwintering the seedlings has not been easy. The larger seedlings have mostly made it through but I lost about half of the other ones, in particular these that I had replanted from their original containers in fall. These are some of the photos I took throughout this year, organized by genus.

Gymnocalycium

This is my oldest gymnocalycium, a seed from a mix pack from Kakteen Haage that was part of my first batch, sown on January 3rd 2018. It looked quite small and fragile 2 months into its life. The first photo was taken in early March, when I came back from my 1-month trip to Thailand. It started picking up rapidly about 6 months in and its growth rate ever since has been the highest of all my seedlings. I water it frequently as I have heard that it is difficult to kill a gymno through over-watering, and I myself do not remember ever having had a gymno rot.

These are two other gymnos, the lighter colored one from the same January batch mix pack, so also un-identified. The other one is a G. glaucum, sown 4 months later. It has a very unique white spine brown skin contrast, but the glaucum seedlings have been quite finicky – doing great 1 week, dying the next. The one in the photo is the last one alive.

Echinocactus

The most painstakingly slow to grow seedlings have been for me echinocactus horizonthalonius, a.k.a eagle’s claw cactus. I’ve had the adult plant in the photo for about 3 years and ever since I’ve bought it from East Austin Succulents (amazing place btw, I highly recommend it) it’s had a dried up flower. It never bloomed again since I’ve had it but one day this summer I decided to pick out the dried flower and inspect it for seeds. I found about 70 seeds in there, some of them prune-skinned but most healthy looking!

I planted them right away and sealed the pot in a ziplock bag. One thing I noticed about this plant is that the seeds were slow to germinate but they kept germinating, even 3 months after sowing. 6 months later, about 50% had germinated, not bad at all. During this time I also purchased several varieties of the same plant, about 50 seeds in total from mesagarden. The germination rate for these was lower, about 25-30%, but they all have in common growing incredibly slowly. They bodies are rather large but they do not have any adult features even 8-9 months in, which is not the case with any of my other seedlings.

The other echinocactus species I’ve sown a lot of this year is echinocactus grusonii v. brevispinus. I find the adult plants very visually appealing and the seedlings are not bad either. I would say these were not difficult to keep alive. They did not particularly thrive when being re-potted, like most gymnos for examples, but they did not die because of it either.

The other echinocactus seeds I sowed came as a mix pack. These look healthy a year in but a bit etiolated so I don’t know what will come of them. I am almost sure the left-side one is an echinocactus grusonii, no clue about the other one.

Growing cacti from seeds

This winter I planted cactus seeds for the first time in an attempt to keep myself busy during the cactus dormancy period. I started out by planting them in plastic egg cartons. These have both a tray and domes over the separate egg compartments, which seemed perfect. I cut tiny holes into the individual compartments using nail scissors and ran some cactus soil through a fine-grained sieve and microwaved it. I mostly followed the instructions here: Raising cactus from seed

My seeds were from two sources: Uhlig Kakteen in Germany and I also had 3-year old seeds from cactusstore.com. I sowed about 10-20 seeds per cell.

First three months

This is a picture of my first batch taken 2 months in.

First batch of seeds 2 months after sowing.

The egg cartons are not perfectly sealed, so the air and soil do dry out, especially when placed on a heated surface. I ended up watering them every week. I did not use fertilizer in the first 3 months with my first batch, but I started used it right away on the other seedlings. Despite the warnings against overusing fertilizer I am yet to experience any signs of having used too much. I now use it in two thirds of the waterings although the suggested amount seems every other time and half-strength.

There was a lot of growth in the next month for some of the gymnos as well as some of the large cacti, especially the cardon (pachycereus pringlei) seedlings, which also had a 100% germination rate. I had sown copiapoa and weingartia seeds as well, but none of them germinated.

Five months in

I followed this first batch with 2 more, about 2 months later. This time I used freshly ordered seeds from cactusstore.com only, specifically: thelocactus, gymno, eriosyce and notocactus mix packs, copiapoa gigantea and mix. I attempted 2 types of acanthocalycium but despite some initial germination three months later none of them turned into viable plants. I also got a few packs of melocactus (almost 100% germination rate) and browningia hertigliana (none germinated).

Five months later, I repotted all the healthy-looking seedlings, now between 3 and 5 months old into larger, shared containers. By far the fastest growing plants are the cardons. They are also robust as practically all of them made it through.

I ended up with 4 such containers, two of them containing 10 to 20 of the larger seedlings each while the other two fitted 40 to 50 seedlings. They all seem to have plumped up after having been moved.

All in all, these first 3 batches resulted in surviving seedlings of the following: echinocactus, melocactus, thelocactus, gymnocalycium, carnegia gigantea, ferocactus, eriosyce and 3 notocactus seedlings.

I got two more batches sown in the meantime, this time using only small plastic containers in one case and small pots sealed in a ziploc in the other. The new seeds are mostly escobaria, astrophytums and pilosocereus variants (not easy to keep alive past the first month in my case) and seeds of a few rarer plants that I really like: discocactus, gymno denudatum and saglionis, corypantha poselgeriana, thelo riconensis, mamillaria schumannii. Will return with an update!