nitrogen

Wow - never seen flowers like that on trichs.. Micromegas - if you really want to get the pollen you can always sacrifice a flower - chop it off right before it opens and go harvest the pollen safely away from the bees. Likewise, you can introduce pollen into a flower that has not yet opened by prying it open.

Holy sh!t!!!!

Seriously - pics or it didn't happen!

Personally I'd get the pollen off of them, then put the pollen in a container with a desiccant to remove the water content - the problem with those filaments is that the pollen will pull moisture, and the moisture will lead to the pollen going bad pretty quickly.. If you dessicated the whole filaments that would work too - but you for sure don't want them to be damp in a ziplock bag for long at all. There is a product in the USA called "Damp Rid" which is excellent for this purpose. In general I like to collect the pollen by putting a glass/cup under the mouth of the flower, and using a knife or any such utensil to fluff the pollen off the filaments and down into the glass - can also tap at the outside of the flower to get pollen to fall out into the glass.

Oh wow - those are spectacular! I gotta get going on the astrophytum cultivation here at some point

Wow - love the shadows in the 3rd pic ferret! Wish I was in a position to grow them in-ground like I see some folks here doing - looks great

I get the white ones that come off easily, but they don't seem to cause any real damage or slow down the growth of the cacti - I still try and scrape or wash them off though

"Serra canyon" is a bridgesii also -" serra blue" is a peruvianus - I grew out some Serra Canyon x SS02 a few years ago - nice bridgesii - only have 3 left and they have done very poorly due to being planted in a bad spot haven't grown in like 3 seasons - they were a good looking bunch of seedlings though I remember that..

The fruit can take 1-3 months to split IME - right before it does, a day or two before, it will swell up noticeably - def won't lose seeds when it splits, like Shruman said..

Wow - super gorgeous grafts, man! I've gott get into growing ario's and astros from seed - is it hard? Per the penis plant on pedro - I have never observed the "slow-growing TBM" phenomenon that others describe - In my experience TBM's - both clone A and clone B - grow about as fast as a typical bridgesii - once they get going the clumping variety will put out a flush of pups that will each grow to maturity very quickly. They just need to be watered and fed right and they can be quite vigorous..

I had a very bad result with white oil once - a homemade concoction of olive oil and dish soap if I remember - produced a horrific outbreak of weeping black rot on the trichos that got dosed.. Probably my ratios were off, but I decided never to use the stuff again..

You can hit them with a hard blast from the hose too - it's a good way to clean them off quickly..

Nice - that is a fat one you got there! BTW, the pics I posted are all of the same plant in the same pot - just at different locations and different times - it changes its appearance quite readily based on environment.. All trichos do, but I notice it quite dramatically with the Lumberjackus..

Halycyon Daze, the variety with the very fat cuts that went around might have been the T. "huarazensis" - I got a couple of those and they are indeed massive.. It grows fat in general, much more so than either Lumberjackus or Eileen.. It's a pachanoi type though - looks nothing like the lumberjackus...

That's interesting - I had not heard that about the thick cuts and over-hyping and so forth.. But I have heard very little actual info about the spirit of the plant in general - lack of data is what it amounts to.. I don't recall v. Lumberjackus ever being sold or traded en masse - here and there people have propagated it and sold/traded/gifted it - but there was never a large motherplant like Eileen - certainly never cuttings as thick as Ed's Eileen.. It is not particularly widespread in general either from what I understand.. If it is allowed to grow big enough though it looks like it would get thick - the new pups on my Lumberjackus are generally thicker than the new ones on my Eileen, and we saw how thick Eileen can get..

Nice pic MS! One of my favorite varieties also - I'm guessing bridgessi/peruvianus hybrid too.. Here's a few of mine - different years and different conditions - first pic you can see the spirit in the plant ;)

Love the blue pebbles!

Here's some updated pics - these are the (SS02 x pachanoi) x TPM - I grafted some of each cross but this cross I grafted first and they got a head start - they all look like they're growing a bit unusual to me, though it's too soon to tell for sure.. The one though in particular is all sorts of weird - it's putting out little pups at the end of each of the original areoles, and then in the center looks like it's starting to crest or some such.. If it turns out the crosses with TPM as father have a high freak rate as well as the TPM mother crosses that'd be awesome.. The last pic is a lone TPM x (SS02 x pachanoi) which is starting to look a little odd also - finger's x'd!

Wow - great pics - awesome cacti and the geography in the background is insane!

I sent some of this seed to Oz 2 years ago after my TPM flowered and a fellow nooker's SS02 flowered - the fruit from that flower was very small and had only 300 seeds or so.. I sent them out to several people and sowed 10 for myself - only 4 sporuted for me but all 4 are mutants.. I haven't seen pics from anybody in Oz who got the seed - how have the results been? All 4 of mine are mutants and each in a different way, so I'm fascinated to think of all the exotic morphology that is going to result when these seedlings get bigger! I'm hoping the plant flowers again this year - last year it flowered and we crossed it with an SS01 (SS01 was the motherplant - not sure how those seeds turned out) Hoping it flowers again this year! Post ur pix! Here are mine - pic is a couple months old - they're a little bigger and weirder now:

Shook fist at the snails/slugs - gotta get some bait going for them - the bastards are getting into my young pereskiopsis grafts at night..

Here's some pics of the Bruce x Sausage seedlings - I love this cross - thx Strangebrew! I'll get the resizing thing down in a bit here - these are just linked over from photobucket

Someone ought to snatch that thing up!

Stillman those sure look healthy whatever they are! That cross would have been TPM x SS02 rather than the reverse - not sure if y'all just say it differently in Oz, but I've always been under the impression it is said/written mother x father.. Anyhow, I reckon we'll have some interesting developments with this year's batch - can't wait! Here's a few pics of some of the (SS02 x pachanoi) x TPM babies I grafted onto pereskiopsis - they have just started to turn on the growth (grafted about a month ago). In the third pic, the larger scion on the right is actually a TPM x SS02 - I grafted a couple pups from that cross along with some of this years infants - I've found that larger seedlings graft to pereskiopsis with high success..

I've heard the bruce clones grow slowly - the bruce x macro "sausage" seedlings I've got are growing very fast though - the quicker by far than the super pedro x psycho0, scop x super pedro, super pedro x scop, and super pedro x J3 crosses I have going as well.. The bruce x sausage were planted a year after the other 4 crosses but are tallest of the bunch