zee_werp

So did you end up taking pics of its flower Rev?

Sounds like a fucking awesome trip, I've just recently been thinking about going to somewhere where cacti are wild, that would be so great. I want to go to Peru or something and see some wild Trichs. That'd ring my bells! As for the limestone thing, I've been using about a hadful or two of dolomite lime per 10 litres of cactus mix with seemingly good results. But I've never tried gypsum so I can't compare between the two. As for a top dressing of it, I did that to a couple of my cacti that I had potted before I started adding dolomite, I just sprinkled some around the top of the soil then gave them a good watering. It seemed to all wash down just fine, but I can only see as deep as the top layer of soil.

Ashoka, I guess you are right the branches did gain 7x their height in a year. And come to think of it the entire Juuls was only a total of 6.6 feet (incl. branches) at the start of last season, now its 13.8 in total including branches so it has infact doubled its mass in a little over a year...I never even thought of it that way! The soil mix that the Juul's is in is simply 33% compost, 33% river sand and 33% dried crumbled horse shit, with a couple of handfuls of dolomite lime. Lately I've modified it, now its (roughly, no measuring involved) 35% river sand, 45% compost, 20% pumice and again a few handfuls of dolomite lime. Real nice and free draining but still rich enough. teonanacatl, haven't run into any problems with support so far, although I assume it's inevitable at some stage that the main branch will come down unless I plant it in the ground. At the moment it sways quite a bit at the tip when there is a breeze, but we recently have had some real strong winds and it stood up to them just fine. A couple of my C. peruvianus that are a lot shorter fell over though, probably thanks to their not-so-aerodynamic design. Any tips for stabilisation of the Juuls when he starts needing a bit of support?

Yep, its all about a cuppa with the cacti. My collection wouldn't be nearly as large if I didn't thouroughly enjoy the company of them. If I've got the time, i can easily spend an hour or more just hangin out with them, doing a bit of de-cobwebbing etc. Fungi are cool to chill with too - they are different. I definitley dig Pisgahs point about patience of cacti. Mushrooms are all over in just a few days from pin to rotting shroom. Whereas cacti are slow and solid growing, their thick symmetrical columns seem to slowly reach into the sky like some kind of ancient reptile. There really is something about cacti that just makes me never get bored with chillin with them.

Mmm, they definitley have that KK242 look to them. The TBM pup is looking real nice!!

Ashoka, this is the best I could do on a pic of the Juul's. It's 225cm (7.5 ft) tall from the soil level, the 3 branches around its base are 70cm tall...they were less than 10cm tall just over a year ago. And its tip...which I'm not going to be able to see for much longer without a decent ladder!

Faslimy, thats interesting about the short spined peruvianus thing. So how does that differ from what you call T. pachanoi? I'd like to see a pic of what your pachs look like, I have a couple of different strains of plant I call pachanoi. Here's a pic of the clone I've been thinking of as Short spined T. peruvianus. Its bluer than a lot of my other cacti. Check out the colouration of the pup in the bottom left of the macrogonus full shot, sometimes nearly freaking neon turquoise. Edit: Here's another one that I refer to as T. pachanoi. It's from seed, I bought it from an older guy down at the local market when it was about 10cm tall, the same guy I bought my T. chiloensis off. Interestingly he called the T. chiloensis "Trichocereus amazonia" or something like that.

Gollum, its a Trichocereus pachanoi that the double graft is on. Just your stock standard. Crested cacti are a result of a genetic mutation where the apical meristem (the growing tip) is linear rather than cylindrical, and it keeps continuously dividing. Apparently it happens at a rate of between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 100,000 seeds turn out to be a crested one. So its quite rare indeed! I've updated the original post with some species names of whats in the collection. And Ashoka, I'll try to get a full body shot of the Juul's, but its so freaking large that it will have to be from kind of far away! Its the tall one in the family photos.

Just thought I should add this note - when I say 'Neem', I refer to the locally avaliable brand, Neem 900 EC. On the packet it says "Neem 900EC contains neem and other botanical oils in an emulsifiable concentrate". In other words it does not need added detergent. If you are using just plain neem oil I think it'd be a good idea to add a few drops of dishwashing liquid, to help penetrate the mealys waxy coatings. I actually added a few drops anyway, just to be sure. I'm also about to email them to ask what the extra botanical oils are thats in it. EDIT: No need to email, it seems they've updated their website since I last visited. http://www.suntec.co.nz/neem.htm So it seems the ingredients are: Cold pressed Neem seed kernel oil - "Insect growth regulator" Indian Karanja oil - "acts as a synergist enhancing the effect of neem" Citronella oil - "general insect repellent' "These ingredients are systemic to affect pests not directly contacted by the spray." "Neem 900EC is non-toxic once sprayed on plants, and is safe to use."

Just an update here. I have given my entire collection two neem oil treatments so far. What I did was firstly water the cacti so that the soil was moist, just so that the neem oil solution would soak in easier. Then I applied a solution of about 20ml neem oil per 8 litre watering can to them. I just added however much seemed adequate to soak through the root system of each plant. I then sprayed down the plants with the hose on sprinkler setting, to wash any excess oil from their skin. Since then I have repotted some cacti, including some that I had known to have mealy. Things were looking good. I only found one live mealy bug. I found a bit of dried out looking mealy bug sign, and overall things are looking healthy. One note of caution though - about 5 days after the first treatment, one of my scops developed some black blisters near its base. I chopped it, the tip is now rooting and I took the stump far far away to see if it pups or anything. I'm not sure if this is related to the spraying. Scops seem to be pretty vunerable to skin diseases compared to other trichs, which is unfortunate as they are nice looking cacti. Slugs also seem to target scops more than my other trichs. So overall so far things are mostly successful, my one note being use with caution on scops and be sure that any splash-up is thoroughly washed off on them.

So have any of you seen that form of cristate before, or got any theories on it? Unfortunatley I didn't have my camera at the time I made the grafts, otherwise I would have taken a pic of the mother plant they came from. It really did look quite odd having one half of it without spines. I'm just hoping it retains that structure in these grafts - the spined halfs are definitley faster growing than the spinelss halves. Also was wondering, anyone heard reports of crested trichocereus flowering? Any pics?

A couple of months ago I decided to check out my local cactus & succulent club, just to chat and see what people had, and do some trades etc. There are some really nice folks who are members and it was good to talk cacti with other enthusiasts in 'real life'. One of the members was a guy I now call "graft guy". He seemed real into grafts and weird cacti so I went round to his house to hang out one saturday arvo. He had every windowsill of his house and a couple of glass houses filled with various grafts and nice cacti, graft stocks, mother plants etc. And what was even more interesting was that graft guy turned out to be pretty much the cactus version of Steve Irwin, with his enthusiasm about various specimens. I saw some stuff that looked interesting and I had a few spare pedroes back at my place to use as graft stock, so we went and grabbed em and proceeded to have a 'Graft-a-thon'. It was a good afternoon, we shared info and different grafting techniques. His technique is one I was 'theoretically' skeptical of, but with the amount of nice grafts he had, and the fact that all of the ones we did on that day have been successful, shows me that theory isn't always true. Basically, he used a large unsterilized butchers knife (unless you count wiping on the T-shirt as sterilized ) to do the cuts. One thing that surprised me was how far down he made the cuts. The stocks of the crest grafts below were cut at least 10cm down from the tip, and some of his others had been cut down into 2 or 3 year old growth successfully. The cut is always made in one flowing motion. It makes sense for a nice even cell exposure of the vascular bundle. Of course extra bevelling etc. can be done first, as long as the graft site area is done in a nice swift smooth cut. Grafts were held down with 3 sets of rubber bands, for even pressure from all angles. We linked together multiple rubber bands so that each set was big enough to go around the base of the pot. I must admit after using the pantyhose method for a long time I am now converted to this method. Firstly it has the ability to apply greater pressure, and secondly it allows more air exchange than pantyhose, allowing the fresh graft cut to dry properly and not rot. And finally, when I went to go home with my freshly done grafts, he instructed me to put them in the hot water cupboard and forget about them for a week or so. I did this and it worked out awesomely. After one day I could see some orange colouring around the edges of graft sites, similar to oxidising apple flesh. I got worried about it and thought that the grafts probably weren't going to work, thinking it was due to the non-sterility of the knife. But after a couple more days the skin dried up some more and the orange colouring went away. Now all of the grafts have been growing for about a month and are doing good! Anyway enough of the ramble, sorry about that!! Here's some pics. The most interesting specimen we grafted was this crested T. pachanoi. It is unlike other one's I've seen, in that one half of it is entirely spineless, and smaller in volume than the other half which has normal spines. In the past week their growth has really sped up, the larger one especially. These things are rock hard. And some others: Gymnocalycium baldianum yellow, Lobivia silvestrii yellow, Gymnocalycium sp. pink & black...both the yellows are growing like mad, especially the Lobivia. The pink is slower but it was also a lot smaller to start off with. hildewintera aureispina cristata...this one wasn't curved at all when we made it, just a small flat section from the mother plant. I can't wait to see it in a few months time!

That also sounds like a good method. Did you use some tissue paper or something to stop the adhesive getting on the cactus?

When I saw the topic trichocereus snake cactus, T. thelogonus was the one that popped into my mind, although I've never heard it reffered to as that before, the name suits it. But a pic to look at would be much better for IDing it...or at least a description. How many ribs? What length / amount of spines? What are its growth tendencies? A lot of tricho's have a reptilian-like appearance to them so it could really be anything based on that name.

Lookin good! I wish I had some pereskiopsis to play around with. I've only tracked down one person in NZ so far who had it, but they said they killed all of it off a few years ago because it was too invasive in their garden - doh!!!! Good luck to those little guys I'm sure they will crank it in the coming months.

Here's the link to the ebay website siting these people as their 'suppliers' http://cgi.ebay.com/Peruvian-Torch-Trichoc...1QQcmdZViewItem And the link to the debate about it at The Nook http://www.thenook.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=38531&st=0 Just for interests sake.

Aren't these those guys that sell pre-brewed cactus juice on ebay ?? I remember there was a big debate about it I think at the Nook a few weeks ago. And the ebay ad had those same pics in it. Note the last pic - sliced & diced!

Anja, the plants in the pic that you linked to with the pink flowers are a coastal plant I beleive. Here in NZ they are all over the place around estuaries, at beaches, etc. Its hard to tell a scale in your original pic but those ones in the linked pic just incase you didn't know have 'leaves' about the size of a little finger or maybe a bit smaller. Your original pic looked to be a lot smaller than that, I have some stuff that looks similar that someone put into one of my cacti pots to be ornamental, but now I'm constantly weeding the shit out of everywhere!

Hmm, I have a few cacti which have shown decreased vigour and plumpness in their 'parent branch(es)' after growing pups. I'm not too sure why this happens. For instance my T. macrogonus was originally two large main stems. Then they had 3 pups at the base. The pups started growing like crazy but the two main branches slowed down a lot. Same has happened to a few others. I think its pretty much just that when a new pup forms, the vascular bundle (core) tissue forms new pathways to the new growth, perhaps over-allocating resources to those new areas because they have a nice new pathway for water and nutrients whereas the older limbs are using older more huckery systems. But this is just a theory, one day maybe I'll do some dissection to have a look at the inner structures of the vascular bundles in such specimens. So long as the new growth is healthy and the wrinkly stuff isn't actually rotting I think it should be OK.

Hmm, well thats a pretty small pic to see anything on, but it almost looks similar to T. thelogonus.

Sounds like your graft isn't gonna work unfortunatley. Its probably a fungus, most likely caused by keeping the graft in too humid conditions after you did it. Depending on the size of a graft, humidity isn't always good. If its any bigger than 2cm wide, chuck it in the hot water cupboard or some other warm dry place after you do it. I never thought that would work but it really does!!

Yeah it'll easily last 2 weeks, just chuck it in the fridge or something. I've heard reports of pollen lasting over a year and still being viable.

Personally I reckon it looks more like macrogonus than peruvianus, but I am pretty hazy on the differentiation between the two apart from 'intuition' from looking at quite a few pics and real cacti of each. Although I have also noticed that the two species can, from a novice point of view like mine, seem to overlap so I'm really not too sure. Not sure if this is a bung observation, or maybe even just my collection doesn't have a truly representative sample of each type, but I noticed that the macrogonus I have seen tend to have their main spine pointing downwards more often than not, whereas peruvianus seems to be the opposite. That and the colouration of this cactus, as well as the look of the new spines, is what makes me think macrogonus.

That second one looks to be a gymnocalycium. Sorry I don't know the species.

Hey man, great collection!! Really like those eileens, and everything else. That freaky bridg crested monstrose looks destined to become a real spunk bunny some day! Not too sure what your un-ID'd one is...what colour were the flowers? If they were white then it might be T. spachianus. Thanks for posting some nice christmas cactus porn