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Micromegas

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Everything posted by Micromegas

  1. Micromegas

    WBs random photos

    My ters x psych0 is a mongrel. spiny ugly skinny thing, but flowers now. no where near as good as ters or pycho0 on their own. but that is the seed-grown lottery i suppose.
  2. Micromegas

    Noob's cacti

    Well as you will find as your hobby progresses, repotting cactus is a pretty standard thing to do, and trimming the roots is best practice, at least this is what I have found. The fine hairs at the ends of roots are damaged no matter how carefully you repot, and in a pot that stays wet a lot, sometimes he root will have died at the end anyway, so trimming roots just make more surface area for the very fine hairs to regrow, and gives less chance of the plant becoming pot-bound by having long roots dangling ready to wrap around the inside of a pot. Not all plants should be root pruned during transplantation, and not all plants like being moved. But trichs love being moved, especially when they are unhappy, and trimming roots helps them settle in fast and recover more quickly from being relocated in my experience. It might not solve your virus issue, but i have found an excellent way to rehabilitate sick plants (plants that aren't growing well, plants that have gone yellow, and plants with scale) is to move them. On the other hand, I try very hard never to move plants that are growing beautifully.
  3. That will be fine. In fact, cutting of the tips will cause the pups to grow faster. It's a little hard to see from the photos exactly which plant is doing what but here's a hypothetical... If I had a 30cm trichocereus that was procumbent (lying on the ground) when it shouldn't be (not a naturally procumbent plant) but had a 10cm upward, healthy tip, but also had two pups coming from close to the base and looking like they were going to grow well and upright, I would chop off the 10cm tip and make a single plant (this will be the best plant). The I would cut out the middle section, say another 10-15cm. These I would lay down in a pot per HD suggestion, so it grew roots from the bottom. This plant would grow pups of its own, upright. This would leave another 10cm section, with a root ball and pups. This I would leave in its existing pots, so the pups could grow out, to a size where they could be removed (i.e. next season). This would turn one procumbent 30cm plant into - a healthy single column, a pup 'factory', and a healthy root ball with pups. Also it looks to me that you have one, nice already upright plant that is growing a small pup from the base. I would remove the pup from this particular plant (coz it's diverting growth from what appears to be your most upright plant), and repot the plant deeper than it currently is, as it doesn't look like it's sitting in much soil at all.
  4. Basically you did well to grow those plants, especially from 21 seeds! And whatever conditions they are in now are better than b4, otherwise they would not be growing upright, with healthy epidermis, and in the shape of club (the tip is slightly fatter than the middle/bottom). You have options now, being what I have said, what HD has said, or let them keep going as they are in these better conditions until they are bigger. You could try a variety of options as you have enough to test a few things. To answer the original question though - those pups are not large enough to grow on their own and if you cut them, you will need to graft them. Good luck!
  5. Micromegas

    SP health / scab

    well while i am at it, do you have a picture of the entire plant (because it matters how close it is to the bottom and top of the cutting with respect to what you do next) and is that black patch still moist and rotting? plants that get damage will sometimes rot like this, and then heal, and the plant continues to grow fine. for me, about 5% of my plants per year rot in one areole where the spent flower bud does not properly detach. this is rare (since I'm talking many plants and many flowers and just a few that rot) and produces an unsightly scar that never really grows out, but eventually the plant is so big you won't notice. but if the rot keeps spreading, you have to cut it. sometimes you can excise it, if you can get all of it, without cutting the column (like removing a melanoma). This works best on healthy actively growing plants when the rot patch is not too large. But sometimes, especially on cuttings that are not actively growing, you have to cut the column to produce a clean part that will grow into a new plant without rot (like amputation). thus, to give proper advice one must know - is the rot still active and where is it located on the plant and is it a cutting or an actively growing plant. to me it looks dry, is a response to damage, and if there is enough healthy tissue at the bottom, stand upright and plant it, it will grow. for me, rot usually starts as a response to damage (like flowers buds not detaching, frost etc.), and occasionally apparently spontaneously (in bridgesii esp.), will usually resolve on its own in a dry climate (but sometimes migrates into the base, then the roots, and kills the whole plant), but is ideal to chop out when small on particularly favoured plants.
  6. Micromegas

    Noob's cacti

    Nice start to your collection noob. I'm not sure what the problem is exactly with the virus stuff, but when my cactus are not doing well, I yank them out, trim the roots, and plant them back in a better spot (all my plants are in the ground but this method still usually works for resolving issues). I would try with the worst of them, pulling them out, cut the roots back by a third, and put them back into a better growing medium in a location that has more airflow and sunlight. I would also do away with the rock mulch you are using, at least for a while. The soil may be staying too moist especially if your conditions are already humid. It looks great but i am not convinced that rock mulch is good for cactus, especially or particularly if you are in a humid (subtropical) environment where you want the soil to dry out regularly. I think humidity might be your main issue so anything to assist in getting it down will be helpful.
  7. What! You grew these from seed? That's a good effort, but these have been inside, in too little light, in a too-humid environment, for a very long time. I don't understand the climate location Cfb, but in a decent temperate climate, I would chop off the nice, upward growing, undiseased tips, callous them, plant them in good soil and put them outside in a sunny spot but with protection from strong afternoon sun. All the upright ones will improve outside in good soil and will quickly surpass the current growth levels. The rest you can keep and lay them down in good soil outside, on their sides, they will grow roots from the sections touching soil and grow pups that stand upright - but some look diseased, scale or some such, so keep them away from your healthy ones. They will survive as they are but if you want healthy nice fat plants, basically get them upright, in good soil, in bright light, preferably outside.
  8. Micromegas

    What did you do to your cacti today?

    Ten years in and she popped for Christmas. I purchased this plant in 2007 or 2008 from SAB as a T. poco seedling. It went straight in the ground at the size of 250ml red bull can, never really provided supplementary water. Merry Christmas SAB.
  9. Micromegas

    Crested id

    it's a trichocereus, and a nice one.
  10. Micromegas

    What did you do to your cacti today?

    That's a beaut! how tall do you think the body will grow?
  11. Micromegas

    Visitation by birds

    I spent about 5 years having an intimate relationship with birds. With all birds generally, and with some species specifically. I had methods by which I could 'call' certain species to appear, and my thoughts were synchronistically linked with bird behaviour in general. As time went on, i refined my relationship with certain species and could understand by the context in which i saw them (i.e. in relation to other birds, their activities, or my own activities at the time I saw them), the quality of the decisions I was making in my life, which is to say, my level of 'agreement' with the 'flow' of the world. There was a time in which my ability to 'call' birds became dramatically refined, and the quality and frequency of the sychonristic moments that occurred begger belief. For a while, this ability progressed to terrestrial animals, especially snakes and lizards, sometimes dingoes. At a certain point, the path in which my connection to birds was founded, became somewhat anathema to me, as I became cynical, the level of synchronism ceased, leaving only a relationship to a few key species, and with far less frequency - but from time to time still delivers some MAJOR synchronisms. I also cured my cynicism and these days, I view the world through a 'theoretical' lens, but 'bird coincidences' are curious for sure and the topic of synchrony is one of the most pressing, ontologically. And birds themselves are perhaps more suited to act as 'messengers' than other animals, and maybe this is why we 'see' messages from them, as Levi-Strauss once said, “Birds are given human christian names [in mythic societies] in accordance with the species to which they belong more easily than are other zoological classes, because they can be permitted to resemble men for the very reason that they are so different. They are feathered, winged, oviparous, and they are also physically separated from human society by the element in which it is their privilege to move. As a result of this fact, they form a community which is independent of our own, but, precisely because of this independence, appears to us like another society, homologous to that in which we live: birds love freedom; they build themselves homes in which they live a family life and nurture their young; they often engage in social relations with other members of their species; and they communicate with them by acoustic means recalling articulated language. Consequently everything objective conspires to make us think of the bird world as a metaphorical human society: is it not after all literally parallel to it on another level?” In this, calling your magpie 'Claude' (Levi-Strauss) is curious! But one can see how natural it is to construct inverted and externalized relationships with ourselves via the perception of birds, a justification of the verisimilitude of our own lives. From here, as Alchemica noted, it is question of understanding what your inner world is expressing to you in objectifying parts of your life in the acknowledgements of birds - something that, as 'Claude' is pointing out, is something humans have done time since time immemorial.
  12. Micromegas

    Favourite Ethnobotany related books?

    yes me too, but actually the 4th book is the most important and delivers a fully articulated, cogent philosophical system that i suspect has its roots in transcendental idealism. a cactus odyssey is a rippa, and is freely available as a pdf on the web. Gathering the Desert by Gary Paul Nabhan, is a beautiful read. edit to agree that One River is superb.
  13. Micromegas

    What did you do to your cacti today?

    yes would be cool to see this flower.
  14. the dog is a samoyed and eats everything, but has given up on quandongs apparently. every morning she goes and plucks one carob off the tree sits down and eats it, to start the day. the tree is about 80m from the house, has trained my mum to let her out so she can go and get her daily carob. she also once got bitten by a brown snake, trying to eat it, and we rescued four lizards so far this year. has eaten socks, bits of string, dead things, once she came home with a fox that was freshly killed. but she looks so innocent. but anyway, i am surprised about the birds eating the fruits. or rather, i have been surprised birds don't eat my fruits, and I have all the general fruit eating culprits, parrots, cockatoos, wattlebirds. i also have around 10 sandalwoods, they don't fruit as prolifically and nothing eats these either.
  15. hey gimli what birds eat your quandongs? i have about 10-15 trees, about half make masses of fruit since about 3yrs old, some tastier than others (strangely i had a dream about eating quandongs last night). I have never seen a bird eat any of my quandongs, which has always surprised me since there's a decent number of bird species around (~25). i know they are eaten by emus in the wild but i don't have emus. our dog ate one once, got stuck in the intestines, had to be surgically removed. when the vet pulled it out was rather perplexed about what it was.
  16. Micromegas

    What did you do to your cacti today?

    that first plant is cool. keen to see what the flower comes out as. first time flower?
  17. Micromegas

    Alcohol, bars and drinking culture...

    tend to agree with the comments. but, this is more about australian culture than it is about alcohol. the use of chicha across latin america, for example, is instructive, and in pre-columbian times had quite the opposite reputation than toxicity to the body and poison to society. i just think it is important to keep in context, what bias is implied, in making alcohol itself out to be the problem. i would guarantee, if a berry had the same effect as alcohol, we'd be eating them by the bucket full. and indeed, what else is a fermented grape but a berry?
  18. Micromegas

    Psilocybe and Xochipilli

    that's great.
  19. Micromegas

    Complete List of Trichocereus Clones

    I concur that Helon, cordobensis and super pedro (and scop) are indeed different plants and are quite distinguishable.
  20. Micromegas

    Psilocybe and Xochipilli

    I'm a bit surprised you got no reply at all. But anyway, good one re: the perseverance. Hopefully the espanol does the trick!
  21. Micromegas

    Bosnian Pyramids

    Davidovitas' work is quite interesting and he presents a very cogent theory. It has some way to go, but I personally find it really innovative, and the agglomeration theory does have some potential for changing some parts of the archaeological paradigm with respect to ancient megalithic structures. I will keep an eye out for that in archaeological contexts I am more interested in than egypt. Thanks for pointing it out, I might have a further look into it sometime. The Copernican revolution might well be described as a paradigm shift. But it didn't just appear out of nowhere, there were other models of a heliocentric universe before this, several thousand years beforehand in fact. But this is, itself, only accurate in the context of the scientific paradigm of knowledge, which is not the only 'paradigmatic form' that knowledge can take. Human knowledge builds itself up over a long period and has and does pass through many forms. Inquiry and new developments are highly important in that context, and the current paradigm is a combination of new knowledge with superseded knowledge sloughed off, fitting the general spirit of the time, which these days in the western world is largely 'scientific'. But even this of course does not take into account the agendas that may be embedded in the production and acceptance of knowledge as truth - religion, politics, culture and so on. Sometimes old knowledge becomes new again for reasons not directly related to its veracity. Personally I am more curious about the history of ideas than the truth of ideas as such. Since I generally present my arguments from this angle, I have a tendency to confuse people when there is not enough time and space to draw out the details. That is almost entirely a fault in my delivery, and sometimes due to my characteristic of (incorrectly) over-extrapolating from small details. But, the confusion is also partly due to the parochialism of knowledge, which is more about its history than its truth. People get very sensitive about what they think they know because of how it informs their identity and can have disproportionately strong reactions to even minor challenges to how they think. I can understand responses like this because they manifest in history all the time, and to a point it is very important to look after knowledge that others might think is delusional (such as cultural groups maintaining their cultural forms in the face of the impacts of colonialism). Likewise, I do appreciate some of the startling discoveries that are made by rigorous research that have added to how we understand our reality. My own mentality, though my education, is greatly informed by the Copernican revolution and it took years to budge it enough to see the form of knowledge and its plurality more accurately. But this does not extended to accommodating every far out theory that I hear, and I suspect the Copernican revolution may indeed have caused some of us to spend too much time in the sun, trying to work out what does indeed go around what!
  22. Micromegas

    Bosnian Pyramids

    not really. new discoveries generally have as their substrate the content of older discoveries. for example, work on the content of the limestone blocks used in the pyramid of cheops used chemical analysis that itself was the result of thousands of years of research into chemistry, microscopy, etc. Furthermore it was only the highest level blocks that were cast from the limestone concoction, while the lower blocks were hewn from nearby quarries, as per the standard theories of 'conventional' (i.e. paradigmatic) egyptologists. Thus a new discovery was integrated with an old discovery, and the paradigm didn't shift completely (as it would if it were discovered that the pyramids were made by aliens). Mind you, it is still under debate (and some egpytologists don't like it all, which at a local level is indeed a paradigm shift), but seems like a fair hypothesis, not like the bosnian "pyramids". the 'limits' to investigation are what falls so far outside the scope of provability and probability that the theory can add nothing to existing knowledge, such as the pyramids being made by aliens. sometimes knowledge evolves rapidly. The theory of evolution was a fair whack to the paradigm for example and Darwin himself struggled with integrating it into his theological mindset. so I don't disagree that some new discoveries fall outside existing knowledge paradigms and there are some discoveries that defy 'limits'. but typically, humanity claws out small bits of new knowledge from a mass of accumulated knowledge, and 'new' knowledge requires the substrate of 'old' knowledge even to be expressed. You can't even make a new discovery if you don't know what's come before - think for example of describing a new species of animal if linnean taxonomy had not evolved out of prior notions of taxonomic inquiry, such as the Aristotelian system, that has turned out to be imprecise. Yes in this case genetic taxonomic inquiry may rewrite much of what we know but the paradigm of taxonomy (classifying living organisms) won't get overturned as such, and will still be reliant on thousands years of investigation, some of which will remain accurate and which we have a fair idea occurred because it has been written down. i tend to suspect those with bizarre conspiracy theories have their target set on something other than the topic at hand. it is important to gather a certain level of baseline knowledge.
  23. Micromegas

    Bosnian Pyramids

    i'm all for questioning the 'mainstream' and it's important to do so, but there's limits, because the 'mainstream' is actually the product of hundreds if not thousands of years of investigation. paradigms don't get frequently overturned, they are slowly evolving. For example, the sphinx won't end up being 20k yrs old, but its state of preservation may indicate a period of rapid erosion by water during recent fluvial period of short duration (such as the medial climatic optimum), and this fluvial period may end up being politically important, a marker of its own paradigmatic importance... and these Bosnian pyramids won't end up being made by humans. if something is too far outside the paradigm it is not usually accurate, because the 'paradigm' is a collaborative effort where these speculative theories are left field. But the interest is commendable. my general feeling, read all the standard stuff first because it's the best approximation.
  24. Micromegas

    Post your native plant pics

    @ tarenna, looks like pituri to me. also, superb aussie plant hunting man. my contribution, bombax ceiba seeds seeking new home. edit: and halcyon and bardo. i never looked at this thread b4!
  25. Micromegas

    Bosnian Pyramids

    i didn't watch the vid but the wiki article pretty much says it all.
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