Piante grasse cactus spine

Tag: propagation

Grafting cactus: when a succulent plant can be grafted and what is the correct procedure to follow

In cacti as well as in many other botanical families, grafting is a common practice, usually adopted to grow delicate plants more easily and to speed up the growth rates of the plants themselves. In short, it consists of combining a delicate plant with a robust plant, which will provide the former with nourishment and encourage its growth.

Those who follow this site know well that the “philosophy” underlying the cultivation of cacti and succulents adopted by me is based on obtaining plants as similar as possible to those in the habitat. My approach to cultivation is essentially simple and spartan and is inspired by the so-called “wild” cultivation method, which precisely has the aim of obtaining cacti with a natural, lived-in appearance and, overall, as similar as possible to what plants have in nature. It is for this reason that it is not my habit to practice grafting cacti, which can certainly be a useful technique in many cases but which does not lead, from an aesthetic point of view, to obtaining specimens similar to those that grow in their habitat. This is not only due to the very fact that one plant grows grafted onto another, but also due to the fact that grafted plants tend over time to take on very different characteristics from those of plants grown naturally. In fact, grafted plants can have much more swollen stems, sometimes deformed compared to the norm and even the thorns can grow differently.

However, given the high number of growers who practice grafting (also useful for speeding up the growth of cacti and making them flower so as to be able to pollinate them to have seeds with which to reproduce them) or who do not disdain the cultivation of grafted plants and considered many questions that they reached me over time via email, here, for completeness, is an article that deals with this practice and explains how to graft cacti (…)

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Sowing cacti: how to prepare plants for the first winter and the “trick” to help them in the first few months

For any plant enthusiast, whether succulent or not, planting is an extremely important point of arrival. An arrival point which, in many cases, soon turns into a starting point which accompanies the enthusiast for most of his life. It is undeniable that there is no comparison between a purchased plant and one we have seen born, grow and develop from a tiny seed, even more if we have collected that seed from one of our plants. This is somewhat the “magic” of sowing: closing a circle born of a flower with another flower, the one produced by the plant originating from that first seed that we have been able to germinate, become a plant and lead to full maturity. And all this without going into detail about the satisfactions that are obtained by trying to select particularly interesting species, from flowers of unique colors to peculiar or almost unique thorns or stem shapes. As regards the procedure for sowing cacti and succulents, many novice growers “get lost” in the proverbial glass of water right after the phase least subject to our control, i.e. germination: we cannot in fact force a seed to germinate, although there are good practices that favor the birth of plants.

For many, however, the critical issues begin after that moment, that is to say in the first months of life of the plants, which are indeed delicate months because the seedlings are still weak and easily subject to rotting or parasitic attacks. It is above all to these growers that the following article is addressed, with a little “trick”, to be understood as advice, on how… to make life easier for seedlings and how to let them pass the first winter unharmed. (…)

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Strange combinations of Nature: how did an onzuka end up in the pot of an old Thelocactus?

When many plants are grown in a relatively small space such as that offered by a greenhouse (however wide it can be), it can often happen to discover welcome surprises in the pots. Cacti whose flowers have been pollinated naturally by insects or self-fertile cacti, capable of doing everything by themselves, produce fruits which, once dry, split letting the seeds fall directly onto the soil at the base of the plant. This is how one can find specimens of a certain age surrounded by seedlings or small plants, in a sort of “potted” re-proposition of what commonly occurs in nature. In spite of what one might think by observing the precise procedures necessary for the reproduction of cacti, spontaneous sowing is a common phenomenon in cacti and is sometimes able to give real surprises, as has happened to me these days.

Here is a small report in the following article. (…)

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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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What are cactus ‘suckers’ or pups? Is it better to remove them? Do they affect flowering?

Let’s talk about cactus pups o cactus suckers. Some call them “branches”, others call them “new heads”. Some, more prosaically, call them “children” of the mother plant or “pups”. In all cases, they are new “protuberances” that sprout around the body of the main plant.

In cacti, as well as in agaves, this is a common phenomenon, and in some species, it never happens, in others it very easily happens, even with young plants. Attention: we are not talking about true seedlings born under the stem of the mother plant from seeds that have fallen from the latter, but about authentic new bodies that are attached to the main stem and sprout from the latter, and then grow steadily in size. The correct term is “suckers”, and anyone who grows cacti or has looked at this plant family in a nursery or botanical garden will have seen one or more suckers. Why do cacti produce suckers or pups, which genera are more likely to suck and are less so? And again, the most frequently asked question: is it true that pups steal energy from the mother plant and reduce flowering? Can the suckers themselves blossom? Another frequently asked question: is it better to leave them attached to the mother plant or remove them? Can they be used as cuttings to obtain new plants identical to the mother plant, and in the event of disease of the latter, can they be detached to save it and reproduce it? In other words, how to propagate cactus pups?

In this article, we take a closer look at the subject and answer all these questions (…).

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