How to clean cactus fruits and how to store the seeds to reproduce our plants

Reproducing cacti starting from seeds is one of the best ways to get to know these plants in depth. Through sowing we can in fact observe the entire life cycle of the plant, from birth to the production of the first flower, to aging and death. Without forgetting the great satisfaction that the birth of seedlings is able to offer to those who practice sowing for the first time as well as those who have practiced it every year for decades. Not to mention the first flower: getting to see that the plant that we have given birth from a small seed, after two years or after twenty years depending on the species, finally opens its flower… it is priceless, there’s little to do. But before getting to all this – with regard to the sowing procedure, remember that on this site there is an entire section with at least fifteen articles dedicated to this topic at this link – you need to get the seeds. Banal, obvious. But without those you go nowhere. And there are two ways to get the seeds: buy them from specialized retailers (now almost exclusively online) or produce them with the manual pollination of your own plants. Or… simply collect the fruits that our plants have produced thanks to some pollinating insect, accepting the fact that two plants not of identical species may have been pollinated (and therefore we will be dealing with future hybrids), clean the fruits, store them and sow them in the spring.

In this article and in the related video we see how to clean and prepare the seeds for storage for future sowing. We sholud always remember that the seeds must be stored correctly, on pain of deterioration of the seeds and the consequent drastic drop in germinability. (…)

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Brief tutorial on planting cactus in natural light and heat: the various stages of the procedure

I usually sow between the end of March and the first week of April, always in natural light and heat. This year, given the unusually low minimum temperatures, I had to postpone it until mid-April. In these days I have taken advantage of the raising of the lows and the improvement of the days to sow some seeds that I obtained from my pollination last year and some recently purchased seeds. I sowed cacti exclusively: Copiapoa, Gymnocalycium, Pyrrhocactus, Astrophytum, Lobivia, Escobaria, Frailea, Leuchtenbergia, Ferocactus, Thelocactus and more. The seeds had been cleaned immediately after harvesting and stored properly. I have written several articles on sowing: you can find everything in this section of the site: sowing.

In this article I thought of creating a sort of sowing “tutorial”, photographically documenting all the various steps involved in my method. It’s good to specify it: it’s simply my method and I’ve been following it for years now, but it doesn’t mean that it can be good for everyone or that it can be comfortable for everyone (…).

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