CβL

I think you're onto it. I think I also forgot how often I watered the plants last year , as it was probably more often than this year.

Today I repotted just shy of a dozen cacti that had been getting sick and tired of their pots being cramped. The mix was yet again some random concoction that I made up on the fly to what I thought would work well. I think I used roughly 40% CC normal mix, 33% compost, some blood and bone, and the rest equal parts very coarse sand (coarser than builder's sand) and fine pumice (3mm), with some 7mm pumice for good meash. I got a spine broken off in my fingertips again while separating a few bridgesiis that were in a single pot - not happy at all about that. I also gave some seasol + liquid ferts to almost all of the plants this evening. A few of my bigger Trichos are not too happy having used most of their soil and getting blasted with a very hot sun all day, two had black spots on the growing tip - guess I need to water more often in summer.

Be careful man - those look like they could be nasty to deal with if they get infected. I wonder if a dockweed poultice would do any good.

I got high germination rates from all of the nitrogen crosses I'm growing. I didn't count how many seeds I put down, but it seems like at least most made it so far.

It's possible they're smelling some hormones in you - some dogs (I think that it was only 10-20% of dogs that were trained develop the skill) can be trained to very reliably (more so than any invention yet) sense when their owner is about to have an epileptic fit, and alert them to it. In my own experience - when you're eating a lot of carbohydrates (bread, sugar, potatoes, pasta, etc) - then you seem to become irresistible to mosquitoes - but when I live on protein, fat and salad, then I'm no longer tasty to the mosquitoes. Someone told me about this a few years ago, that when your blood is very sweet (bread, pasta and potatoes etc still make it very sweet), you will get bit. The only thing I would question more would be why bees come when you're angry - to me bees are the best insects there are (I won't get started on why they're super-geniuses today, but they are), and I would be so sad if they only came when I was angry.

I don't think there's such an "Australian lifebox" would work very well. Australia has absolutely huge variations in plant species and terrain - tropical rainforest, arid desert, cold mountains, coastal scrubland - etc, and there is no way that a single box can contain the optimum precursors to life at every location (unless they're very hardcore, which is basically the alternate definition for a weed ). IIRC, even some Acacias are treated as weeds in some of the states those species don't call home. I think a good approach would be to roughly classify all the plant species in an area based on their 'roles' and lifespan. The seed of long-living forest ancients of an area could be collected. These would need to be interspersed with the transitional plant species (such as Acacias, and other shrubs and smaller plants that nurse these giants to maturity), and this then matched to the local micro-climate. As far as I understand it, many plant species cannot survive without established forest - so they won't succeed by putting them into the box. So in this respect, a single, simple box cannot contain the ingredients for re-growing the entire ecosystem at a certain point. In my opinion, the way that skin grafting is done is a lot closer to the best way to regenerate a forest than many people realize - I think we can learn a lot from skin grafting and apply the concepts to ecology.

I heard about that cyanofriscosa. It's interesting to see that they give it species status based only on a small genetic difference. On a related note, I hadn't heard the word Amplicon before - but now that I have, I'm buzzed out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplicon

I would leave them in the takeaway container, and slowly decrease the humidity (if you haven't already done that) by poking holes in the lid, and moving the container nearer and nearer to strong sun (with the lid off!, but not all-day long full sun, but partial full-sun if you know what I mean ). If you have already hardened them up, then you can just take them out with a spoon or something. While I haven't transplanted lopho seedlings yet, for other seedlings I actually just take out a plant (along with a huge clump of soil) and wash it with the roots in a bowl of water, and then repot. The future mix for your lophos depends on where you want them to live in your house, but it should be quite rocky (larger sand grains, maybe some pumice), and very little in the way of peaty organic matter. It should probably also have a bit of limestone pea-sized gravel in there too, and maybe even some gypsum. Some people might even use coco coir (I never tried it). They will last quite a while in the sand container, but they will end up recycling themselves (you can tell by squeezing gently - they will be soft if they're running low on nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium [among other causes] ) to grow taller - that's not what you want if you can help it. If you have any adult lophs that are growing really healthily - then I would try and reverse-engineer that potting mix, and read about some other people's mixtures. I'm lucky, because my local cacti nursery make great cactus mixes and I can use them as a base for my own variations (which I do) of potting mixes.

Sounds good man You can always cut it later if you have to, as it looks like the rot didn't spread very far if it did at all.

This is an awesome giveaway

This is the kind of thing that should be hammered home by a benevolent media - alas.

How squishy is the whole area? If it's mostly or all hard, then I would try dusting with sulfur (put some powder on your palm, close your eyes, and blow it into the hole), maybe fan drying with a blow heater, and then seeing if the rot stabilizes. I can't tell from the photo, but perhaps up to 50% of that cross-section of trunk could survive, maybe even up to 75%, and if that does happen - then it could probably almost fully outgrow the damage later on.

In my experiences, food, exercise and stress levels have the biggest impacts to my energy levels and ability to get restful sleep. I don't know what you're doing for these at the moment, but just because you haven't changed anything doesn't quite mean that you haven't been changing. There's other things I noticed, such as turning off the PC or TV maybe an hour before you go to bed. Not eating carbohydrates before bed. Using an alarm to wake up early on a day off, and then tiring yourself out on that day. Anyway, good luck man, I hope you feel better soon.

Sounds like it's relatively new species - but hopefully that doesn't make it difficult to find, as I wouldn't mind growing them either. :P/> http://species.asu.edu/2012_species07 Edit: Should probably have double-checked that the species was the same

Thanks mutant - but it seems it was either too late, or not to be. The flower seems to have withered a bit, and doesn't look like it's close to opening at all. There still might be some pollen inside though - will take some if the flower makes no progress.

Could be the start of something... hehe, but I don't think this time around. Edit: Extremely interesting article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

I hope you're still alive and kicking Greg - there hasn't been any word from you. I hope you have had some time to sit down and relax, as well as think about your achievements and future goals. Kind regards - CBL.

I heard from my Melbourne mates that it's sometimes colder over there than Auckland, hehe. But I heard the city is full of really kind, unique people, if you look for them hard enough. I think that regardless of where you go, the difference of being in a different location will open your eyes, and you'll just get a whole bunch more perspective that you didn't have already. Anyway, best of luck man.

I thought number 3 looked a bit like Mammillaria Campotricha, but I'm out of practice at IDing Mammillarias, so could be way off. Mammillaria Campotricha

I should have some Astrophytum Capricorne (I think) pollen either tomorrow or the day after if you'd like some bit. The plant has a red flower. Edit: After a quick search, it seems that most Astrophytum flowers are yellow on the outside. So not sure what's going on with this one - whether it's red, or just an immature flower.

Yesterday wasn't the end of the world - it was the beginning of the new age. For me anyway at least. I made an unordered list of things I should do, and just the act of writing things down, despite how random the order, helped me clear my mind a bit. It's a part of my new philosophy - which is to "just do something when there can't be a plan" And there's a lot of points really lining up in that argument there bogfrog - I think that you probably are onto something there. It's no secret that large parts of Christianity are copied directly from pagan rituals, and even other religions (kind of like selling smart-phones haha). The first few minutes of Zeitgeist is in a similar vein if you haven't seen it: https://www.youtube....h?v=oZgT1SRcrKE