Quixote

There's still lots of sun and heat here, I guess enough for the seed to sprout and grow a bit (depends on how long it will take?) but I guess the seedling won't survive the winter even indoors?

Hmm... how about adding some radioactive minerals to Loph soil, what might happen?

Pachanoi x Scopulicola, I'd say.

HULK SMASH! Could it be that it grows too slowly, but keeps pumping in water, making its inner pressure increase and eventually causing pupping?

My darling little loph, "Gordita", recently had her first flower. I tried to make sweet love to it with a paintbrush, getting the pollen onto the carpel. But it doesn't seem like I was that good a lover, as the flower simply withered away without any fruit appearing. I thought lophs were self-fertile? So did I do something wrong, or do I have a self-sterile variety? I think I read somewhere that there are some loph species that cant pollinate themselves..

In my country, it's super-rare to find trichs in flower shops. Because they are banned for some reason I cannot understand. Yet today it finally happened. And after two years of studying these things, I'm pretty confident that these are Trichocereus Pachanoi. But are they PC or so-called "real" pachanoi?

Thanks a lot, that gives me hope Would it help to water a bit more and/or add a bit of fertilizer in this time?

Was in full flower on the 15th of June, so it's been about 15 days now..

It's not grafted, it's seed-grown (but I got it when it was about 1 year old I think). About 3,6 cm. across. Might it flower twice in one season?

Not all cactus collectors are 'spiny'. I see many friendly people on this forum, in fact nearly only friendly people.

Wondering the same thing myself. Haven't bought the things yet, as the shop was closed when I walked by. Also, I'm not sure I have enough room in my apartment for more plants. hurts to admit it

I'm wondering about how these cacti spread their seeds in the wild. Birds eat the fruits and carry the seeds to other places? Ants maybe? Or do seed pods just fall down next to the mother plant?

I read somewhere that the Aztecs called certain mushrooms "The flesh of the gods", which might imply that they considered the mushrooms themselves to be divine. Maybe different cultures at different times had different ways of looking at it. I find it very interesting to try to imagine how they were thinking back then. The Aztecs especially with their (from our perspective) absolutely grotesque rituals. All of this is conjecture of course, but there might be a fundamental difference between mushrooms and cacti: The cacti are clearly plants like other plants, they grow from seeds that you can see with the naked eye, they grow during many years, and they flower and set fruits. In that way, they seem part of the material world. Even without scientific education, we feel that we "understand" them in a way. Mushrooms, on the other hand, always had a shady reputation, at least in Europe, since they seem to appear as by magic. They grow so quickly that it looks like they just appear overnight, they don't have anything like flowers or fruits that we can recognise, and their spores are so tiny that at best we perceive it as a kind of dust. To create life from dust, isn't that what we also today call divine? So, my point is that mushrooms naturally lend themselves more to be seen as divine, something not part of our natural world. Well, something to think about at least.

With all respect for EG's argument, we could also say that none of us are human beings, we are just collections of atoms. But our human consciousness is built on generalisations, such as for example calling similar looking cacti, that can interbreed, members of a species. So why not focus on finding and describing the 'real' species, that is, the largest groups that are found in the wild, as a point of reference? I see no harm in that, and I would love to see the results on a map..

While I'm no expert, I think the answer might be found in the way they were thinking about the world around them. Nowadays, we say that a specific plant has a specific property, that the effect is inside the plant. To a shamanistic culture, I suppose the effect would not be seen as being "inside" the plant, the plant would merely reveal what was real all along: the spirit world. This was the important thing and the focus of their religious art. Just like the ancient Romans did not worship grapes, they worshiped Bacchus, the god of intoxication. The grapes merely made his presence felt.

Looks like PC to me.

Keep them in a bright place but out of direct sun?

Thanks Micromegas, for sharing your knowledge of this. It's really interesting.

Well, I guess a more plausible answer is: they don't want competitors. You might want to start up a new nursery with all those cuttings, right? No, that doesn't excuse them for giving you a hard time, but it might explain their behaviour. By the way, there are no nefarious ways to use a cactus

I did some googling and found this, maybe you saw it already?

I think it's interesting to see that all the cacti on that piece have exactly 4 ribs. Maybe it's just easier to craft, maybe it's because the cacti is a Bridgesii?

Is that piece from the Chavin culture specifically? It seems they were putting all kinds of stuff on their pottery, cacti were just a small part of the motifs. Heck, from what I see online, it wasn't a cactus-religion, it was a sex cult

So, how to keep my loph bright emerald green? Which conditions should I give it?

Very interesting. So the idea is to make cuttings root faster, or to make rooted cacti expand their roots better?

I'd say bonafide Pachanoi. The pointy top probably is because of etiolation due to growing while rooting.