CβL

Those are fantastic plants! The new carers are very lucky.

You can chop both of those pups if you want - as long as they are cut with a sterile blade, and then perhaps sulfur'd and allowed to dry relatively quickly - and then potted into reasonably small pots and not overwatered - then I practically guarantee they will make it.

Here's some photos for ya. http://www.cacti.co.nz/index.php/library/t/category/794-

/\ That's awesome Getafix! I think you'll have a huge garden in only a few seasons. :D Today (will include yesterday). My brother and I got 5 wheelbarrow loads of pinecones, and made a bonfire out of them. They were messing up the field, and I wanted the ash for my compost heap - so out came the flames. Was a very intense blaze with blue flames coming out the middle. Anyway, today I collected the ash into the wheelbarrow, and was going to bag most of it when I noticed a nail sticking out... So took the nail out, and just decided to sift a little bit more to see if there was no more. Quickly found another 5 nails. Then it was another 10 nails... More and more nails later, I roughly had between 100-200 nails. I must've dug some old ash from when some muppet family member burned wood without taking the nails out. With the now clean ash, I put some of it into the compost heap and added more stuff to it, and bagged the rest of the ash. I think in roughly a year, I'll have some decent compost, and the adjacent plants can start to raid the compost heap by growing towards it with their roots. :]

Enjoy your birthday man, :D

Fantastic plants, and now seeing this terrain I get a better idea of how much my cacti must miss home.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1904-Kunstformen-der-Natur-Art-Forms-of-Nature-ERNST-HAECKEL-antique-100-plate-/271100313300?pt=Antiquarian_Collectible&hash=item3f1ed67ed4 If only we could pool a few grand, hehe.

Bread Filter, I swear you've had more than your fair share of rotten luck. I think I can recall at least two other incidents of similar things you've been involved in. It makes me sad. Please don't buy in bulk from strangers again, is the only outsider advice I can give. Unless they're old people (who you've seen with your own eyes) - old people are legit. Secondly, grafts being upside-down do indeed work. They're not ideal, as the vascular tissue doesn't seem to like being upside down, but if the graft was done correctly, then they would have taken. But the fact you say the grafts were slices indicates that they were much less likely to take, especially if they weren't pre-calloused (i.e. let the top of the slice callous, before cutting the slice off. ) - then you can expect a lot of shrivelling, and for it to fall off. Some pictures would be really helpful to diagnose it further if you can suss them. Anyway, keep your head up man, and things will get better. :]

<Scene is any conversation, that meanders long enough> Person 1: <something something> dopamine <something something>. Person 2: OH! Dopamine! I, know that one!! That's the pleasure chemical! Person 1: >_<* .......... -_-

bogfrog: I have used one, but I don't own one that would fit into my cacti pots, hehe. I also prefer to pull weeds up by the roots, as I find that stops them from stealing all the soil nutrients, and then I feed the dead weeds to my "compost patch" after they've sat in a bucket for a week or so. Today I repotted 18~ seedlings, and it went pretty well. I will probably do some seeds later on today. :]

I'll try keep an eye out - sometimes I go hiking and find those rock lilys in the wackiest places.

It's not animal testing that's the issue. It's the slaying of them to calculate a poor estimate, of a meaningless number (see my above post, which I've now edited).

I think your maths is correct Stay Puft. But such a clock would only be useful if you knew how "off" it was getting (either the second a day), or if you had other clocks during the day to compare it to (if you left according to your clock at 8am everyday, and continually arrived at later and later times, you would get an idea of how far it was behind). If you were home alone, and that crappy clock, and were not an expert horologer, then I think it wouldn't be useful for much more than a silent egg-timer (that is to say, it's hardly useful). Still, I guess that it's indeed ever-so-slightly more useful than not having a silent egg-timer (the broken clock), and both clocks could still be used as frisbees. Secondly, the speed of light is not invalidated by your argument Stay Puft - the so-called 'speed of light' is actually the limit of the speed of light in a vacuum. It's just called the speed of light, despite being the speed limit. Apparently quantum entanglement can manifest over distances instantly, thus circumventing the practical speed of light. I can't really explain much more on this, as I'm still highly confused on the subject myself (and still a bit suspicious). But apparently it's highly confirmed by experimental evidence. The laws of entropy do not exist in the strict sense. They are manifested only due to the most probable quantum state changes occuring statistically at the same probability as the state change probability. It is possible for the least-probable quantum state change to occur every time, and this would manifest as entropy decreasing. A concrete example would be room temperature water spontaneously forming into ice - however the probability of this event is low enough that it could probably be regarded as "still so unlikely that even if there was further universes, each as ancient as this one - for each and every particle present in this one, we would not have found this behaviour". Astoundingly low probabilities. But allowing the 'laws of entropy' to be laws - then actually the description of macro-events as running backwards would be thwarted thwarted. The "law of entropy flow" says that events cannot flow backwards, due to "entropy must increase in a closed system". Secondly Stay Puft, the estimated age of this universe (17 Bn years), is nowhere as ancient as some atomic processes take to occur. Check here: http://en.wikipedia....tude_%28time%29 430 Ps: the approximate age of the Universe The half-lifes of certain things are more than 1,000,000,000 times (as in 1,000,000,000 * age_of_universe) longer than the 'age of the known universe'. As in after this ultimate long time, half is still there - just chilling out. Then there's a whole ton of thing that take way longer than the age of the universe to occur. Then there's the whole question of certain nuclei being called "stable", but can probably tunnel into a decay state. I think that this timeframe - when all stable nuclei have decayed (I suspect that quantum tunneling is the cause of radioactivity) - that the universe will either die or rebirth. So we're nowhere near that timeframe, so it's futile to assume that the current state is any indication of what the universe is up to. OMFG I just had a brilliant idea, brb

What the fuck, this has to be some kind of nefarious scheme. I cannot support this type of testing for something indeed as frivolous as party pills. Give me a waiver form, and I will test the limits. This just can't be serious - there's no way that the politicians have 180'd from "no tolerance" to "let's kill all the dogs, yay legal highs!". Maybe they want the public outcry directed such that they never test any drugs - making the legal route of releasing these chemicals - an orphan floating on a piece of ice in the arctic. Calmer Additions: The LD50 will not help to set a safe limit whatsoever. It's well known what the LD50 of ethanol is for example, but knowing it has done nothing to prevent its abuse and resulting rising death-toll. Obviously a 'safe' limit needs to be determined, but we don't need to kill half of a group of animals to find one. The moment that one animal dies is probably the moment you've gone way past where you needed to. How about the moment 10% of animals have dangerously high heart-rates? How about finding that limit, and testing a factor-adjusted (for weight, and enzymatic pathways) amount on humans. Something like that would be a lot more useful. Besides, the LD50 is not even useful. It's not as if you can say: Safe = LD50/2, as the therapeutic index (http://en.wikipedia....erapeutic_index) varies for each chemical. After reading that article, it says that it's not even used in practice, and that the human trial version based on toxicity is better. I don't think it's worth selling a legal high saying "If you smoke just less than a brick's worth, then you won't die" while excluding the fact that your alveoli will still pop like pop rocks if you did [smoke that much or less]. I think it's justifiable to deliver only the Protective index (the level you can consume without toxicity, which is well before the deadly level), as the people who will exceed such a dosage [safe dose] willingly, will willingly exclude the fatal dose too (i.e. with alcohol, prescription medicine, etc).

Those globular cacti took a beating, but in good time you'll have some huge cacti. Did the guy mention how he looked after them?

Well, I don't actually see a reason that there can't be two groups formed, if someone wanted to form the complementary group, and then these two groups together, hosted a direct campaign against this particular legislation - then the net of support would be cast a lot wider, as people could choose the organization to their taste, but still support the same campaign.

Wow, that cross there is indeed awesome. Look at the angle of the spines, as well as the more obvious rolling-wave sides. The last two could hold surprises yet too.

Hey man, welcome to the board. Your seedlings appear to be doing quite well indeed - have you grown seeds before? Are you been watering once every third or fourth watering with some extremely dilute fertilizer? This speeds the growth up, as the same compounds that dissolve so easily in your water jug will be the same ones that wash straight out of the soil. As I understand it, Lophophora have some special mechanisms to break down the soil by themselves, but I have no idea how. The Trichocerei do have beneficial micro-organisms though, and their "job" is to break down the surrounding soil compounds (these cannot be absorbed by the cactus) and "chuck" it into the roots of the Trichocereus. Maybe you already knew this. But where I was going with this, was that in coarse sand, the micro-organisms have nothing to break down, and don't really provide much benefit to the plants, so you have to provide the nutrients in "easy-mac" form. For the Lophophora, as long as some of the matter in the soil contain the vital nutrients, it'll be okay. Sand is mostly quartz (natural glass), and it's really the other constituents that would benefit the Loph, so as long as there's some way for it to get at the main nutrients (Nitrogen,Phosphorus,Potassium [N,P,K] and the trace elements) it can stay in sand. But I don't think this is so with just ordinary sand. Secondly, that pachanoi with the black spots should be okay. Just make sure you let it dry out somewhat in the sun, without letting it get sunburned (large bright yellow patches appear in the green parts facing the sun). The squishyness you are mentioning comes from the plant being nutrient deprived (probably phosphorus, as this one is directly involved with cell wall integrity - this doesn't mean your soil is bad, it just means the roots haven't gotten hold of what phosphorus is in the soil yet), and it breaks down its own cell walls to get into its nutrient supplies. Healthy plants should be firm to the touch all over. In cuttings that have sat for a long time; it's normal - as the plant recycles itself to make roots. You also shouldn't need to mist a Trichocereus at night either. There's usually enough vapor in the air, and misting it might actually slow its absorption down (just guessing here). I also seem to notice that extremely hot days (where the hot air raises a lot of moisture into the air), then a cool night where all that moisture drops down - seem to make the cuticle wax grow on my plants. Lastly, what type of soil are you using for your Trichocereus? Kind regards, -CBL.

That was cool. Those birds reminded me of two other cool birds. The birds looked a bit like Hoopoes, and their nests reminded me of the Hornbill's nesting habits. Hoopoe Great Hornbill

Hey everyone, Here are the latest photos (hot off the press) of my Trichocereus. They've been moved into the sun, and mostly weeded, and once I've fertilized them - then we can sit back and enjoy the sun. :)/>/>/>/>/>/> We'll begin with a sunset from the farm. The sun "setting" is just a sun-rise from another perspective. ;P Here's the eight-pupper bridgesii I talked about. There's another pup on the other side too. Really weird. I'm guessing it had some BAP exposure? If not, then this plant could be a bushy brancher. These are the bigger columns; growing doggedly. Peruvianus 'Martin' on the left fore, the bent one is a Pachanoi 'NZ Yowie', 3rd to the left is my vigorous Ecuadorian Pachanoi (my favourite clone of Pachanoi so far), on the far right is a Peruvianus (presumably hybrid) that grows quickly and fatly. 2nd Bridgesii to the left rear might be distinct enough to get a name, and if it keeps growing like that - I'll call it 'Nailbat' (it was seed-grown by bit). Centre Peruvianus is 'MB' clone. This is a nice bridgesii hybrid, long yellow spines (has the ordered spine-layout of a bridgesii hybrid), and a blue coat. My Peruvianus 'MB' clone. Really dark blue, wonderful spines - it's a real fetcher. The pale color is because I've taken it out from under the shade of the Cyprus tree and it's a bit shocked my the full-sun. Some more plants chilling out. The smooth pachanoi on the right was my first plant, and all this growth here was grown by me (this was a cutting from the original). The back left plant is a distinctive Peruvianus clone that I'm waiting to 'blue-up', as it's got fantastic golden spines - it was sold as variegated too, but none has shown yet (if it was true). Pach 'Omar' x Peru. The cross was done by Hellonasty (thanks again good sir), and the seedlings are all wonderful. The tallest three were potted up the earliest, and as you can see benefited greatly. They also fell off the deck and got wasted up from a 3m fall, but came back strongly. The plant on the far right was originally grafted to a Selenicereus, and was the biggest originally. But once it transitioned to its own roots, it was quickly overtaken - - it looks like the derp of the group, so I'm hesitant to invest much more in grafting as a result. Some seedlings from early last year. Mostly SS hybrids, each pot is a different cross. Growing really well, and just about to take off in these pots (full sun). Sadly (for you guys) there's nothing funky from this lot, and they'll all normal - albeit exciting plants. Under the tree I. These have almost all come from cuttings, and are the Trichocereus with larger areoles (mostly). Peruvianus 'Martin' apparent in front right. Couple wildseed-sourced bridgesiis growing in the back. Some macros in there too. Some mutts as well. Under the tree II. Another view. :)/> Two fat tersceckii are easy to spot. There's a T. Candicans in the middle I think?, Chiloensis, Taquimbalensis and Werdermannius at the back. SS02xBridgesii hybrid on the far right. Some Qat babies. Getting used to near full-sun. Some leaf curl and such going on, but otherwise they're doing well. I'm worried about winter though. ;o Assorted Trichocereus from above. :] In the foreground, you can see just the tops of both of my Terscheckii open-hybrids. They're very fat, areoles are not circular, little squat yellow spines in the shape of Tersceckii but the length of Pachanoi. Some bridgesiis in the middle, and some of my better Pachanois on the middle right. You'll be able to notice a square pot with a plant that is curving - that was my attempting at side-rooting, and persuaded me to never ever ever waste my time with it in a pot again. :P/> It was put in that pot at least 2 years ago. The longneck herd from afar.

;_; I think it was the organic matter probably. I can give you some seeds (Tricho) as well.

Thanks for appreciating them everyone. I have also noticed that it's a bit of a hoard going on hehe - so I'm trying to thin them out and only keep the ones I want to breed together, it's hard when they're so small though.

Trichocereus pachanoi 'NZ Yowie' Hopefully this guy gets someone to mate with, hehe. Won't be fun otherwise.

Those black areas look a bit dodgy, I wouldn't rule out black rot (black rot, or weeping rot is a rampaging fungus that can kill the entire plant without much effort). If those spots are squishy to the touch (as if the skin is just dangling on what feels like chewed-up grapes), then it very well could be. I would still rub (gently) some sulfur on there (as those areas were possibly opened via bug bites or scratches), and wait a few days to see if the blackness spreads. Don't water the plant, and give it as much bright sun as you can during the day (try to let it dry out a bit). If it starts to spread, that's when we up the DEFCON. :] EDIT: Just noticed the OP from Europe, which probably suggests that it's cold damage this time of year - in which case, it should be fine. Just try and let it dry out some more, as that'll stop any possible infection spreading, and give more cold hardiness to the plant in future.

How about something that "No further plants be banned, and the existing banned ones are investigated for their potential to aid mankind"