Cactual Skin Problem

[Jesus On Peyote]

Hiyas,

i was gonna put this into the "help me" topic, but for the sake of documentation i thought ild make a new post since its about a different subject.

Well, the Pedro that the other thread referred to (that cut to the bottom right is where the big chunk fell off from but thats for the other thread.). Although apart of the accident that happened its been going pretty good, except lately iv noticed skin dying on cirtain areas of the cactus. (you can see how its healthly green,cept in the middle of the big main cahona)

It seems to start like this with dry whitish spots which spread out.

After awhile they end up looking like this & .

iv got no idea whats causing this,i havent changed anything in their growing style recently and havent really seen many bigs around em, though i dont check for bugs that often. would it be some sort of fungus?

Anyway, any help and opinions would be cool.

Peace

Edited March 8, 2008 by Jesus On Peyote

[Garbage]

Sometimes they do that and you dont really notice until a picture is taken.

It may be cold damage,heat damage,red spider mite,residual damage from cactus spines,slugs and snails grazing,handling.

I do know if they recieve some rough handling as you pick them up by the stem some can develop bruising that may become black and possibly weeping.

I had to cut some of that unsightliness away from several stems that had cold damage and scarring and had hence grown like a prickly pear with a reduced section and then thicker regrowth.

Whilst cutting through the scab i found some seemed to be developing what could only be a root tunneling outwards from well within the stem.

I cut several stems without the scab that had no such structures.

[Vertmorpheus]

How long they been there JOP? Given the forensic breakdown of that tan scar area... obviously caused by "circumferal" (resist urge to get mental pics of what a jewish feral would look like...) application of even pressure and width, probably some time ago... I'd say either it first happened when the cut was kicking around in a box, or stood up against a fenceline, in a tall drum or similar before taking a twisting tumble to the ground... or maybe just settling into a more laid back position... that, or someone has used that hosereel in the background and dragged the hose with its attached load of sand particles etc around the side of your plant.

Decent hard scar tissue on mine seems to take a couple months to go from initial damage> sappy shitty sections, necrosis > causterising and compartmentalisation> flaky dryness > hard scarring... a lot of cuts taken from bulk pickups show similar effects, albeit in more dispersed fashion and with smaller individual damage, from sliding around into the spines of other cuts.

But yeah... take a long hard look at whoever else uses that hose... I get the mental pic of hose sliding down to that "waist" section and then being hauled across it... probably to do with plants at the "3 o clock" of the image field... something about the damage AND the leaning nature that tends to reinforce it.

Course, I might just be entirely fulla shit too... but it's certainly the result of mechanical damage rather than typical bugs etc.

VM

[Garbage]

Also water lensing the sunlight,usually the scar is flat and not crusty like the picture.

In too low a light they can grow very dark green and etiolated,so much so that the stems fold over and reach downwards.

The nearby town of Milton Keynes in England is built about the shopping complex,this is a steel and glass structure over several acres that incorporates mature exotic plants,among the date palms and fruiting banana there is a cactus section with a twenty to thirty foot multistemmed Euphobia,Cereus and Trichocereus Pachanoi.

The main stems are quite fat but towards the top some became etiolated and folded donwards to head height,my brother and i reasoned that one of these would no doubt be pruned before it had someones eye out and so we helped out a little by taking several inches away.

Those inches are now a couple of blue/green feet.

I never rule out rescue of plants as sure enough the next time i visited the stems had been cut right back to about knee high.

It took an iron nerve and an ignorance of the fellow shoppers,i guess i became a chopper.

[XipeTotec]

application of even pressure and width, probably some time ago... I'd say either it first happened when the cut was kicking around in

I just got a cutting yesterday, with this sort of damage. There is no way though that before we hacked it off, that this plant could have established this damage from being a cutting. Therefore, I would disagree that the cause is that which you suggest.

[Vertmorpheus]

Ahhh... how enlightening it is when enlargements work! That did look mightly like dry scar rather than bubbly waxy fuzzy yeasty kinda damage... I was workin more from the overall shape and positioning before! Also thrown off by thinking I'd read "havent seen bugs around em"... I took that to mean "I've explored the bug damage angle, and came up dry"".

Remember, we have heard elsewhere that careless hose use caused a closely located specimen some snapping damage... and a thick cac is easily tough enough to support a bit of hose if its just laying still... its the pulling/dragging that fucked it to start with, the broken smaller cutting I mean... so I reckon I'm onto something anyway with the hose dragging causing some problems earlier on...probably AFTER the fuzzrot started off the back of the "cactus rash" from other spines typical of transported cuts, some bug bite damage to boot and you have a nice lil setup for some fungal/bacterial action... give or take the presence of scale and other sapfuckers. The specific layout to which I was referring DOES correlate to the action I described, even with the fuzz I didnt see then... the dragging spread the bacteria and tiny critters around the cactus... Couldn't tell you why your cut has it too Xipe, and I assume you mean the waxy fuzz rather than the specific layout of the injuries underneath or what is obviously scratches from spines and chews from creepy crawlies... unless theres some kind of cactus ghost that runs around at nighttime beating up cacti just to leave intruiging damage in places where no damage of any kind could possibly have occured... unless someone is growing cacti in a vacuum, just about all of em have some kind of spots, bites, scratches, bruises by the time you get them home... and it takes a few weeks usually for the damage to really show up. You can break a rib now and it might now bruise up clearly until midnight...that doesnt mean the rib wasnt broken before hand though. It's also just about impossible to rule out things like birds perching on them for a moment, doing a lil slide and then taking off again... I see a lot of bats in large cereus plants sometimes, for example. Unless you had your parent plant under 100 percent supervision from seed to the day you cut it, SOMETHING got to it. Plant damage and illness doesn't just happen, there has to be a reason even if its not real easy to work out.

I've seen similar stuff (the "fuzz" I mean, not the layout of the damage... I use hoses only to care for plants ) on sappy new growth of solanums, some Apocynaeceous things and a couple cacs, frangis get it quite a bit in some areas. . bugs have a nibble but give up, then things get a lil more moisture in em than previously used to, they spring a sap leak, leads to something fungal taking up residence and working away on the sugars in the sap.. ends up looking like "wooly aphids in a can" for want of a better term... kind of a flaky puffy waxy spun-sugar looking stuff, a bit like honeydew on a euca leaf x100... I think of it plant thrush, lovely or what? I can see (larger image sizes, woohoo) a mix of spine damage, probably from other cuts, sequential bug chew damage (small "lines" composed of tiny dish shaped wounds) AND that overall damaged section DOES seem related to something being dragged around it... which has since gone from simple mechanical dmage to the brewing mess we see before us...whats more the trajectory of the "wraparound strip damage" matches up quite nicely to where I imagine the hose dragging caused that other previously mentioned specimen some grief. it certainly doesnt match up to say being flogged with a golf club, or hit with a brick...

Check the last image, then look at the hose on the reel...I suspect I can see where Mr Hose has run over the waxy sugary shit, it still has what looks like similarly coloured plant spoof stuck on it in places...I usually find it to be a combo of tiny exoskeletons and waxes, the former from whats been munching on the sugars and the latter just left behind as waste deposit plus plants attempt to seal back up. Maybe just cobwebs or maybe JOP loves his hose a lil too much...but I'd say its been rolled out to take care of whatever is to the left of the image frame as you look at it, then taken across the back fenceline or whatever is "behind the viewer" so to speak... sure JOP could fill us in on the details. The ground looks like its seen some recent action from a pest called "tradies"... these are notorious for trashing gardens to achieve their own ends, give them a few moments alone and theyll bury semi toxic waste under your bark mulch too... pyrethrum wont work on em, you need something called "supervisor" or "happy hour" to be rid of them with any kind of certainly

Being whipped with a length of hose won't make you start fermenting on the skin either but I'm sure if you got flogged with it til the skin broke, got some germies in it and then they ran amok on the nutes under your skin... it might not look entirely different to what we see before us. The cause of the damage isnt the cause of the "rot" (for lack of a better term) but it certainly contributed to how it looks now... expect the scratch n bite damage elsewhere to do something similar too, especially if youre going to keep using it as a hose peg which is the botanical equivalent of kids scratching chicken pox or playing with their bums then picking their scabs, really.

A cut I recieved a while ago had similar stuff break out on it, i nailed it with an old soft toothbrush and a mix of kelp mix and ti tree oil, dilute of course.. with all the crap removed and something whiffy to keep the bugs away for a while, they healed up nicely and went on to grow quite nicely... a couple of the "impacted" looking aerioles even "deflated" after a couple months. Take a look at the residue under magnification, even a digicam on macromode... i bet its made up of tiny tiny lil bubble-bodies and spunwax looking shit.

Poor things.... time you got put on restrictions and used a bucket like I have to, then you just fuck your spine not your cacti

VM

edity bit... after staring at the close up hose reel til i went crosseyed, I now cant decide if I see cobwebs, cactus spoof or a sideon glimpse of a cracking section of hose... not the spider egg/spiders lunch looking thing at about 2.5:4.5 (dodgy grid ref, based on 10:10 )in the image, but the lengthy deposit that starts just above the line of the white powdercoated rim of the reel and runs along the the hoseitself...

Edited March 9, 2008 by Vertmorpheus

[Garbage]

It may have allergies.

It will be fine,a distinguishing feature.

[Jesus On Peyote]

Hey thanks for the replys guys,

Vert, its funny that you should say that it may have been leaning against a fence, because when i first got it a few years ago i had planted it near the back fence,(after about 6 months of super care growing under a 400wt hps indoors) note at that time it was pretty healthy looking. As it got bigger the affected part was getting wobbly unstable-ish and occasionally i did notice it learning against the fence side post thing,thats when i first started noticing the problem, though it was smaller and pretty much just like the second picture,but more spread.

(also note that when it was round the fence there where some other plants crowding it, so there must have been some sort of bug suckers hopping from plant to plant and maybe having a party or 2 on the pedro. )

I had moved it from its old spot to the new spot a few months ago where there is alot less plants to cramp its style and let it have its own space.From there it kept getting a little bigger to the point of the 3rd and 4th pictures,but growth ontop of cancer has kept going pretty okish. As for the hose,i love my hose, its gives me much pleasure however the watering hose is a problem at times also. i water the garden mostly and try to avoid the bumping and weaving you get when u water, but i do occasionally bump it now and then when i have to get to the far side of the backyard. When my mum waters the garden i dont think she really takes any notice of it and goes about her business watering,so i can imagine what takes place if shes not taking particular notice of the dmg it can do. (even i dident think it would cause too much damage,but try to avoid)

K so im coming to the conclusion that its a mix of bumping\handling, and possibly some buggery bugs (from the old spot) or night bugs that i dont usually see. (or the godamn cacti ghosts)

Course of action? i will try some kelp mix and ti tree oil like you said Vert,( dont really know where to get them, bunnings? or a more specialized garden shop?

If that doesent seem to work, im split on weather to keep it as it is, like garbage said, might not really be a problem and just continue growing,or to CUT a few inches under and over the cancer, and repot the top of it or give it away even.

(to a member of this community, iv gained much over the years from you guys,enough to start to proliferate natures finest gifts to mankind)

Peace

[Vertmorpheus]

no no, it can't be that i take it all back

Kelp from bunnings (better yet, from a family operated local hardware store... if you can find one ), ti tree from woolies or whatever... basically add a few drops of ti tree to a small jug of boiled but cooled water so u can just taste it if u dip a finger in, but not too strong, then use it as the basis to make a half strength batch of kelp juice...then wash away early in the day so it can dry out by nighttime... NOTE...thats only what i do if it gets that scabby powdery scaley shit in conjunction with flaky scarring underneath, the scarring itself isnt a problem just the foetid shit above it that provides a haven for critters and germs. After a quick scrub up, get a spraybottle on jet fulla boiled water (not boiling, boiled...mostly sterile) and use it to clean the shit off it... then after it dries, next day I'd personally pyrethrum the fuck out of the plant, the soil around it, and anything else within pissing distance. Then let it and the soil dry right out (be getting cooler in a lil while anyway I spose). I have some cereus n whatnot inground where my veggie gardens are, in what would normally be a fairly moist spot, so I planted some jalapenos n whatnot around it, about 2 feet away from the cacs, so theyd take up any excess moisture running around. As long as they look slightly thirsty, the cacs seem to get just the right amount... I know a pach can take more water than that, but itworks for me.

It should go fine, if in doubt u can always make more cacti out of it i guess but i dont personally think id be breaking the skin on purpose for a while if its got dodgy pathogens hanging around it. Give it a clean and a cuddle and tell it to shape up or fuck off... works for me.

As for the hose.. you can either educate your Mum (dangerous pasttime...) OR just whack in a few tomato stakes or something around it (I like star pickets, theyre manlier and much more rigid) maybe a tall skinny tripod but WELL hammered in otherwise theyll topple and fuck em more than they are now... then the hose can ride over or around the stakes, you can relax and you dont have to start nagging your Mum. Or move the hosereel. Or move your Mum... probably a bad idea... Mums are great despite the odd pesky habit. Making a teepee of sticks around it might also encourage some spiders to take up residence (esp if theres a nighttime security light somewhere above the cactus patch) and they might take out some of teh bugs getting around... then u can look at the webs in the mornign to suss out what has been around overnight.

Hardto tell just how close to the reel the cactus patch is , perspective n all... but I find the soil under hoses n taps tends to have a hard time every really drying out... good for mints and ceylon spinach, cress n stuff but I don't know if I'd put my cacs in the ground there... just me. They look lovely otherwise.

Lookin at mine, the longest time for manifest from damage to hard scarring could be a year and a couple months... others scar a month after impact... no rhyme or reason, just weird shit indeed.

best of luck

VM

Edited March 10, 2008 by Vertmorpheus

[Jesus On Peyote]

Thanks for the help Vert, ill take a few steps towards making the area clean and unharmful,starting with shipping my mum to an old folks home (just kidding ) then ill apply some of the recipe an advice you gave me.

The house in pretty close, but kinda hovers over an empty space when its hang properly, round 30 to 60 cm away from the base of sir pedro, though just to make sure ill see if i can move it a little further away.

Anyway, thanks again, ill keep you updated on its condition as time goes on.

Peace