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.
