the time has come to degraft the mother of all my grafts

[SirLSD]

this one was the one i bought for $5 a few years ago and i made all my other grafts from it. it hasnt been growing a great deal for the last year or so and has been putting out little roots from the underside. some of the newer grafts are biger than her so i decided it was time to degraft her and plant her. i cut it off a little below the graft and carefully tried to cut away all of the bottom cacti. i tried to drill away the woody stem as it was too hard to cut with a razor, but i slipped and drilled a hole in the graft . hopefully should heal fine. decided to leave some of the stem in it rather than risk it again.

pics of 28/5/05

and 05/04/06

and today

[zee_werp]

Nice work! I'm sure the cactus will enjoy its new life on its own roots.

It almost seems like the problem might have been with watering...the stocks in the middle pic look really dehydrated.

Edited December 17, 2006 by zee_werp

[nothinghead]

It will be interesting to see what type of roots it grows, whether it will grow a thick taproot at all and so on..

[SirLSD]

zee werp, yeah a number of my grafts have very shrivled root stocks but the scion is always well hydrated. and when i water them they dont seem to fatten up much. they definately havent been over watered though that is for sure. id rather underwater as i have problems with a bright yellow fungus/mushroom growing in several pots that i dont know how to get rid of. suggestions? there are 3 grafts in that pot. you can see in the first pic how big the middle one was compared to the others and now they are all about the same size. btw the middle one was on a m geometrans and the rest are on t pachanoi.

cough. yeah will be interesting to see if it is able to grow any sort of a tap root will keep you informed on any progress

[zee_werp]

Haha, those yellow cactus mushrooms. I'd be real interested to get an ID on those, as the same species of yellow mushroom seems to grow in cacti pots from Aussie, NZ and the USA at least, probably more places. I've had them with my juuls.

Personally I don't worry about them as they seem to be benign. They might even have a beneficial mycorhizial relationship with cacti. Pretty much I find that I need to keep my grafts really well watered during summer (as in, full saturation 2-3 times a week). Thats in terra cotta pots though. In the process of sealing them now.