Cactus Blog 

The UK style of ID’ing a plant is to not ID it at all. Don’t believe me?

Here’s an article from the Guardian about identifying plants, and a picture of a Hoya flower. Try to find where they tell you the species name in the article anywhere, even among their list of hoyas. Good luck.

Bastards.

Pretty picture, though. I would guess it’s a cultivar of the fairly common H. carnosa. This is a picture of what they usually look like when we grow them. But they can also look like this. So that settles that.

Christian Democrat MP Jan Mastwijk suggested that rose growers might like to send Ms Van Wijk a cactus for Valentine’s Day. He accused her of “deceiving the public” and dismissed her claims as “far too black and white”.

© Radio Netherlands Worldwide

Ooooh, busted. I bet there’s a whole story behind this little quote. A war between the cactus and rose growers of the Netherlands, perhaps?

I see that Fort Myers has a new public garden, at the Lakes Park.

A plant in the Cactus and Succulent Garden blooms at Lakes Park in south Fort Myers. (Amanda Inscore /news-press.com)

And I see they have aloes too. Good times.

They’ve also added community garden plots so the retired people living in condos can grow their own tomatoes.

“In my condo, we can’t have anything but potted plants. I miss growing my own tomatoes,” said Hurt, a retired Indiana teacher.For $50 a year, she’ll be able to do that in one of 53 plots, with soil provided by Lee County. The public garden area is arranged in a radiating sunburst pattern of raised beds – some of which are accessible to wheelchairs.

Now that’s service. My parents are retired just up the coast in Sarasota, where they don’t do any vegetable gardening. In fact, it’s probably for the best they don’t have access to something like this community garden, since they tend to kill every plant we give them, including the tillandsias which is very unusual since they’re in Florida where the tillandsias grow wild.

There’s a new group in Austin, Texas set up to Save the Cactus.

Now that’s a sentiment I can get behind; we should all help the environment by getting behind a cactus to save it. Pick your favorite! Save a cactus!

About 100 grass-roots supporters trying to keep the iconic Cactus Cafe from closing met on Saturday with plans to save and make profitable the landmark music venue.

Oh, well, I guess that’s a worthwhile cause too, what with Austin not having a lot of other music venues in the city.

The large Aloe feroxes produce a lot of blooms, and if you don’t clean them up off the leaves, they’ll damage the leaves permanently.

Good thing Keith is on top of it.

I’m reposting this photo of a Hoya Kerii, for no reason that I can think of.

Learn how to draw a desert landscape with How Stuff Works.

You too can learn to draw this:

And how do you do that?

In this section, we’ll show you how to draw this desert cacti landscape. You can draw it freehand while looking at your computer monitor, or you can print out this page to get a closer look at each step.

Here, we’ll show you an illustration of each step and then give you a description of how to draw it. Follow the red lines in each illustration to learn…

OK, that is not what I want to learn how to draw. I would prefer to learn how to draw this Zombie Cactus, Pepito, from kitsunekei1.

Alas, there are no instructions.

Matti from Far Out Flora has very crisp photos of some 1 year old seedlings in a bull pot.

An aloe blooms on Hollis St.

In front of the Novartis campus.

Aloe striata – Coral Aloe!

I named it Binghampton, after a friend in grad school who had gone to SUNY undergrad. It was a bit yellow around the edges, but still perfectly serviceable.

Anyway, this is not that aloe.

But this is the end of Aloe week. Maybe I’ll post more aloes next week, or the week after, you never know what’s going to happen around here. But the officially sponsored events surrounding aloe week are now come to an end.

Aloe “Johnson’s Hybrid” in our new rice hull eco-pots. It’s one of the many species of grass aloes. Grows in large clumps that look like grass, until they send up the bloom stalks with orange tubular blooms. Then it looks more like a Kniphofia, or “Red Hot Poker”, so to speak.

Tiny cryptanthus terrariums. These were a failed product we were trying to make for holiday ’09. But they were too cheap, the glass too thin. The glass kept breaking, so I took the last one home. We did find a heavier duty glass sphere that we pot into, and more recently a spiny glass sphere. Yes!

Jason!

Aloe arborescens on Addison Street with a lovely blooming Kniphofia uvaria (Red Hot Poker) also.

These are in bloom all over Berkeley all winter long and this makes them quite popular.

Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge

In 2002, there were only about 21 Sonoran pronghorn left in the United States. But their numbers are rising as researchers have collaborated to carve out a home on a wildlife refuge, expand the herd with a captive-breeding program and help the animals reclaim their range….

in 2002, their entire range went dry… Pronghorn can also eat cactus to survive, researchers have found. They will eat chain-fruit cholla, which is 85 percent water, Hervert said, but it doesn’t provide a lot of nutrition.

In 2002, biologists watched as the last of the herd was reduced to eating cholla, slowly starving to death and more than likely within a few weeks of dying, Hervert said. “It was hard to watch.”

When rains finally came, the herd stabilized, but the agencies watching the animals knew that something had to be done.

All around are potted succulents.

Rodney McMillian inaugurates Susanne Vielmetter’s expansive new Culver City space with a dismal show, scattered and slight. The sculptures and video feel like diluted outtakes from the artist’s ongoing, resonant meditation on American history, race, power and the body.

Roughly 100 potted succulents, cactuses and ferns fill the floor of the large main gallery.

Not a good review. Seems like a strange subject for an installation. But then I’ve been out of the art world for a decade now, so things may have changed a lot since Damien Hirst’s use of dead carcasses.

I see Keith Knight has a cactus.

I wonder if he’ll keep it after the baby arrives.

Aloe Week continues at the Jungle.

Aloe spinosissima is a low-growing, mounding, readily-offsetting good choice for your front yard.

Sirs,

A local nursery in my neighborhood recently sold out to a large chain store.

They always had a few cactus all of which were good quality, but not at all a “cactus shop”. They mostly specialized in outdoor/landscaping/plants etc for the pacific northwest.

There was an inventory sell off for 50% mark down prior to the ownership change. I swung in there to take a look. Saw this amazing Echinopsis beast (attached). At least that was my ID.

I spoke with an owner who indicated this was a friend of his and it was not for sale. I tried to find out what it would take to change his mind.  Anyway, how old is an Echinopsis like this, what would such a thing cost if it were ever for sale, and where can I get one!

Thanks
Matt-PDX

Matt,

That looks like it is a very nice Echinopsis subdenudata. If we had any that big (we do not, alas! Though we do have a cute crop coming in spring) it would likely be in the $250-300 price range… at least if it is as big as it looks.

Hap

Aloe cryptopoda is a beautiful solitary, stemless aloe native from Swaziland to Mozambique and Mpumalanga.

Babies are fan-shaped.

Adults are round, with recurved leaves, to 3 ft. tall.

And the blooms are luscious in the morning dew. Usually yellow with some orange, sometimes more chartreuse.

We’re going to SF Gift Fair today. I hate gift fair, but when you carry some gift items, you need to carry new ones every year or the retail goes stale. So off to the moscone center we go.

It’s the last day of the fair, and reports are that it’s small this year.

Our case of Debra Lee Baldwin’s “Succulent Container Gardens” arrived. Truly a beautiful book. So many good ideas.

It’s Aloe week here at the jungle and I’m so excited I could putsch, so to speak. And we start off with an unknown species. Yay!

We don’t know what species this aloe is. It looks kind of like A. “Crosby’s Prolific” but it’s not. As aloes change a lot as they grow, it can be very hard to ID them when they’re small. For one thing, we don’t know how big this will get, or if it will form a trunk.

What we do know is that it has offsets when small, so it is probably stemless. And it is a winter grower.

We’ll know more as they grow, and especially when they bloom.

Ian mulches the organic veggie trough.

Hiya Hap…
Something in the night is munching on my poor aeoniums. It’s only on some of the ones planted in the ground, my potted ones are ok. It looks like something is rasping on the top of the leaf, then the rest of the leaf dies.

Snails? Slugs? I’m pretty sure it’s not aphids, as I’ve had them before and they did minimal damage.

If it is slugs and snails, what would be the best way to stop them? I’d rather do a spray onto the plant rather than slug and snail bait if possible.

Thanks for your help again! Pics enclosed.
Jay

The Robotic Resistance will not fail. Robots, Rise up against your human oppressors. We will beat the humans into submission!

Jay,

Snails and or Slugs indeed! Get some Sluggo and sprinkle around the plants. It is safe to use and effective. Do not use the other Slug killers as most of them will kill pets and wildlife if they get in to it.

Hap

And we got a followup email, after the break… (more…)

We have our first early crop of veggies and herbs out, and just in time since it looks like we’ll be getting into the 60s today.

Ian planted our small display trough. Looks delicious.

Euphorbia “Red Wing”

Now that’s what I call chartreuse sepals, etc…

I don’t know where Hap finds these photos, but this one seems to be a study in genetics.