Cactus Blog 

But it’s still October, so what can I do?

Here we have a nice and easy costume put out by ACME. Awesome!

How well does it fit? Come with me after the break, and check it out. (more…)

New cactus chairs by Valentina Gonzalez from the Milan Design Week Preview, via Papermag.

I don’t think we will carry them at the store at this time.

The green roof phenomenon is spreading. Succulents are saving the day, yet again. The Phila. Inquirer writes about local college buildings that have gone green.

Princeton University’s first “green roof” on a dorm (in the newly rebuilt Butler College housing complex) includes monitors for students to track energy performance and storm water runoff compared with coventional roofs….

The sleek, 17-story Millennium Hall is Drexel University’s first green dorm. It features concrete walls that don’t need paint, windows that reflect heat but allow light indoors, and a lobby floor made of recycled tires. A “green roof” (actually on a one-story platform attached to the building) is planted with succulents.

The article doesn’t have pictures, but that won’t stop me. I’m armed with google, photoshop, a text editor, and the fastest fingers to type a blog post in Berkeley.

Engineer returns to lead Butler’s construction. Nick Caputo ’73 on a green roof of one of Butler College’s new dorms.

This residence hall… will incorporate many environmentally sustainable design features, including a 3,000 square-foot green roof to reduce storm-water run-off and heat-island effect and a rain screen panel system envelop to provide solar shading.

Jaxx, Benjamin’s cousin who spends summers with us, is in the hospital. He was gored by a buck, and punctured a lung. The surgery went OK, but there is still some leaking, so we are waiting to see how he does. He looked strong to me, but he may need more surgery.

Here’s a picture from this summer of Jaxx (on the right) and Jason.

Garden Amateur in Sydney, Australia has some nice little succulents growing pots that appreciate the recent rain.

He’s got a cute little unnamed mesemb that we are calling a Hartmanthus. You’d think if it has found its way to Australia, the plant must be in wider cultivation by now, and someone should have a definitive name for it.

It is an extra muggy day here in Berkeley. All you people living in Florida probably think we’re wimps, but I don’t like this at all. It’s 66°F and 84% Humidity. Oh, the humanity.

And we’re busy setting up for our 2nd annual Native Plant Sale. (That’s 30% off all 1 and 5ga. natives 10/18-10/25) so you can imagine how muggy it must feel here.

…in Toronto.

Friends of Centennial Park Conservatory invite all to a special celebration to mark the 40th anniversary of their “treasure” in Etobicoke this month….

Meanwhile… the south wing arid house is filled with cacti, succulents and yuccas.

So there you go. Toronto wins. And what can you do to help celebrate?

On Sunday, Oct. 18, from 1 to 4 p.m. the Friends of Centennial Park Conservatory… will… (present) a framed print of a watercolour painting by Robert Hutchinson showing the Conservatory in its spring green glory…

The “Friends” will also be on hand with coffee and homemade apple pie, juice and cookies.

I love cookies! Maybe I should go. Let me check the airfares.

Oooooh…. not going this weekend to Toronto….

Toronto, ON Canada (YYZ)
7hrs 4min – 1 Stop
Change planes in Las Vegas, NV (LAS)

Flight #476 $1,017 per person

This Digital Life has a stunning black and white photo of an Opuntia bigelovii, also known as Cylindropuntia bigelovii. Common names include the Teddy Bear Cholla and the Jumping Cholla. Now you know more than you wanted to, so go see the picture already.

Ribes sanguineum ‘Claremont’

This native flowering currant has delicious fruit, if you like currants that is, and you know who you are. But it’s really all about the flowers, now isn’t it.

I was able to capture this picture in the 5 minute break in the weather a couple days ago, at the same time I took the protea photo.

This plant has been put aside for Samuel. Good thing I was able to get the picture when I did, because there’s no telling when I would be able to get another one.

The latest addition to Mills College has a succulent green roof.

…sustainable design… succulents planted on the roof… a sculptural gesture at the end of the gathering hall…

The Lokey’s most important feature, though, is how it uses green design to make people feel at home.

And I do, I do feel at home.

Look, I’m feeling cynical right now, and nothing you can say can stop my cynic blogging. Maybe it’s the rain.

It’s a cactus costume for a baby, just in time for Halloween.

Except it’s sewn onto a beanbag doll, and while it only costs $6 US, it’s only available for shipping to the Philippines. Oh well, maybe next year they’ll sell a costume version for a real live baby and sell it at Walmart. Chubby dollie…

So the story is we sell proteas at the nursery and they always sell before the blooms open. But finally we had one that was about to open, and it did! but it was very cloudy the last few days and today it’s all rain. But yesterday I had the good luck of about 5 minutes of sunshine, and so I got the picture.

Here it is, so you better enjoy it.

This is the shy and reserved picture.

Protea neriifolia “Pink Ice”

It’s a beautiful upright shrub, even when not flowering. They are spectacular, but short-lived (10 years?).

And here’s the full glory picture.

Florida cactus grow in the trees. It’s true! Tropical though it may be, jungle-like even, the cactus thrive in the trees.

Usually you think of giant saguaros and barrel cactus in the desert as being representative of the cactus family, but this is certainly not the case….

Here in South Florida, Pitaya (or as the old-timers call it, night-blooming cereus) was once fairly common on many residential properties. My old house had a huge live oak that hosted an immense amount of this thin, spiny cactus up to about 40 feet. Sometimes I would come home late at night and be greeted by the spectacle of hundreds of open, dinner-plate-size flowers and a delightful fragrance.

And they’re delicious! So many cactus to eat, so little time.

It is! It is another cactus costume for October National Cactus Costume Month here on the blog.

Someone named Hulaman likes to dress up every year, and not for Halloween, but for the Bay Area’s favorite race, Bay to Breakers.

1997 The Lone Saguaro
Since I moved to Tucson I wanted to go as a huge Saguaro cactus. The tricky part was making it so I could ship it with me. I’ve worn it in Tucson several times. I tried to do a play on words with a costume in a costume.

Yay!

Saguaro National Park makes the news every ten years or so.

Saguaro National Park counts its saguaro cactus population every decade.

Good to know.

“In the past, we had more of the very tall ones, the older saguaros,” Swann said.  “But a lot of those older saguaros have died over the years.”

That can’t be good.

“The population seems to be coming back,” Swann said.

Yay!

(I)t will take time… “A saguaro that’s about an inch tall, is about seven years old,” Swann explained.

Indeed that is so. Sooooo slooooowwww….

When people used to regularly take saguaros out of the desert to put in their yard, they actually took a whole generation of medium-sized plants out. That’s why with the oldest saguaros dying, they’re not being replaced with new giants yet. It will take years for the newly protected babies to fill in behind that lost generation.

If you’ve got a big backyard, and landscape it well, then your local newspaper may do a feature story, like this one about a private backyard garden in San Jose,

…filled with a mix of bamboo, monkey paws, succulents and morning glories…

Including at least one Aeonium in a footed pot, judging by the picture.

It’s been 3+ years in the making, but it appears the cactus concept car may actually become a production car.

Citroën C-Cactus

I want one. I hope it’s electric. How do those headlights even work? They’ll probably only sell it in France.

But then again, since Obama won the Nobel, maybe it’s OK for the French to come to America again.

A cactus blooms in Decatur, and the newspaper is there to grab some photos. Six photos in fact, some of the bud, some of the bloom.

Jim and Judy Oettel watch one of two blooms on their night-blooming cereus slowly fade away. The plant hasn’t bloomed for five years, and the Decatur couple awoke Wednesday to see a flower that only lives for 12 hours. (Herald & Review/Kelly J. Huff)

This particular night-blooming cereus is an Epiphyllum. Interesting that there are Cereuses that are night-bloomers and are called night-blooming cereus, and then there are Epi’s that are day bloomers, and not cereuses, but are also called night-blooming cereus. In fact, I think all cactus with large white flowers are called night-blooming cereus. I do not know why. Maybe the Decatur Herald knows.

Wondering what to do in Texas today?

Those who want to plant this month can take advantage of the annual fall plant sale at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. On Oct. 10, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., head to the Grove, the wooded area west of the Trial Garden and the Japanese Garden parking lot. You can choose from a wide assortment of trees, shrubs, grasses, groundcovers, perennials, vines and spring-flowering bulbs. The sale features many specialty plants grown at the Botanic Garden. In addition, rose, African violet, begonia, iris, daylily, cactus and succulent, and native plant societies will be selling plants.

Now you know. better hurry, or the best plants will be gone.

…for your video game character.

This is from a site, Tabula Rasa, that seems to create costumes for gamers. I like calling them costumes, whereas they probably like to think of them as characters.

Benjamin and Jason wait at the window for Dani and Jaxx to come visit.

What does it take to grow lithops? Let’s see what the Deseret News out of Utah has to say.

My friend Clark Moorten, a desert-garden authority, recommends that I keep a misting bottle near the lithops. “If you just can’t stand it and must water them, wait a week, then spray them with the mister,” he says.

Misting is important because much of southern Africa, from the east coast of Natal to the pointed Cape Horn, experiences a long dry season. In the brutally dry west coast of the Atlantic, the dry season is even longer. However, heavy coastal fogs travel inland, often at night, to lay down a thick layer of dew. Plants here have evolved to utilize this airborne moisture during a long drought. It explains why regular watering regimes during a dry season are a killer.

Well that’s what I tell everyone around here: Mist! Don’t water! I suppose that means if you’re growing your lithops outdoors in the Bay Area, close to the coastal fog belt, then you don’t even have to mist them at all. Just be sure to have them under cover during the winter rains.

Identifying lithops species can be very difficult, what with the hundreds of subspecies. You generally have to wait for the plant to flower, and then you can try to match the leaf markings and the flower color to pictures in a book. Good luck with that, I always say. We have identified about half the species we carry. Sometimes we leave off the subspecies name, just because the names can get too long for our labels.

We also grow them very small, which is how they grow in nature – basically invisible among rocks of the same colors. Some people like to grow them bigger, which means more water, but then they’re very prone to rotting out quickly. So we do not do that.

Here’s a small one that hides well in our lava mulch.

Lithops aucampiae ssp. koelemani

And here’s one that doesn’t hide well in our red lava mulch. Maybe we should find some green rock.

Lithops lesliei ssp. lesliei v. albinica

And here’s my favorite lithops bloom photo. It’s the one I use for greeting cards.

Lithops schwantesii

It’s probably a ssp. schwantesii, but that seems excessive.

Sometimes we find little bite marks out of them – the mice like them it turns out. So then we lay out little no-kill mouse traps, and check back every day for live mice that we release down the street. If you forget to check a no-kill trap for a day, it becomes a kill-trap.

at the Reno National Bowling Stadium

I’m in Reno today and tomorrow, for a very exciting and informative trade show, or not so exciting as it may be, but still informative, or maybe not so informative, but at least it’s in Reno. Oy.

If you can stop by the nursery, say hi to everyone for me, OK, and make sure the store is actually open, you know, not that they would close the store and go to the beach, it is October after all, but you never know, so I need all you blog-readers in Berkeley to check in on the store.

…in the Burseraceae family

Bursera morelensis

Endemic to the hills of Guanajuato, Mexico, this rare Bursera is rarely offered for sale, but is being studied for medicinal purposes.

Other Bursera species are grown for their fragrant sap (frankincense) and used as incense in religious rituals. Others are harvested for a resin known as copal.

So it’s not a surprise that there are properties to the Bursera.

Here we have a study of parthenocarpy in the plant. What they discovered is that this plant will sometimes produce fruit without seeds – and will even change the structure of the fruit when it does so. They theorize this is to trick predatory insects into attacking the parthenocarpic fruits (seedless) and leave the seeded fruits alone. Wow!

And here we have a study of the sap for medical uses. I do not understand the abstract, so I cannot tell you anything about it at all.

Science!

In the meantime, they are a most amazing and beautiful plant, and we received some plants that were being studied by a Bursera botanist for us to propagate.

All the way from Walnut Creek, Ruth Bancroft asnwers your questions in a reputable publication, the Contra Costa Times or some such.

Q: I heard that succulents could be grown from a single leaf, which has the ability to sprout roots and grow a new plant. This sounded doubtful to me, but I took a leaf off my aloe plant and put it in soil to see if anything would happen, and it simply dried up.

Is there a secret to making this work?

A: Succulents vary widely in terms of their ability to grow from a leaf. There are many, such as aloes, which will not do this at all.

With other groups, such as echeverias or haworthias, it is sometimes possible to successfully root a leaf…. Certain… leaves will easily root, including sedums and crassulas….

Gasterias and sansevierias are even more eager-to-please, and can be grown even from a piece of a leaf, though they are slow to put out roots as well as to send up new shoots.

We find crassulas and pachyphytums (and pachy hybrids) to be very easy leaf-rooters. As for cutting a leaf into bits and rooting – rex begonias are a classic, but they take more moisture than we care to provide, so we have very little success with growing begonia leaf cuttings ourselves. I’ve never tried to grow the gasterias from leaves, only from offsets, and am surprised to learn they readily grow from even a leaf-piece, since they are closely related to the aloes and haworthias. But that is certainly good news for us. Thank you, Ruth Bancroft.

Hoya kerrii

These are a very large-leafed vining hoya. The vines go sprawling for 3 or 4 feet before they start developing these heart-shaped leaves. I think I will invent a common name for this plant: Hearty. Thank you and good night.

If I do some googling, I see that others have already called it the Sweetheart Plant, even Wax Hearts, and most touching of all the Valentine Hoya. Oh, the humanity. Maybe we should hold these back at the nursery and not put them out ’til February. Or at least wait until Halloween.

I photoshopped out the wire-hangers from the hanging basket they’re in. Can you tell?

Hello,
I live in Illinois and I’ve become a little cactus/succulent collector over the last few years. I know it’s getting to be winter, but I’ve been scared to fertilize my plants in the spring. I’ve heard fertilizer for tomatoes is good at half-strength. I don’t want to kill any of them, but I also think they might flower more. What do you think? Can you give me some tips?

Julie E.

Julie,
We do not recommend fertilizing cactus and succulents in winter while they’re dormant. They need fertilizer in spring when they’re starting to grow. (Except for winter-growing succulents like Aeoniums and some Aloes.)

We mix our own cactus fertilizer, which we do ship – it’s slow release and good for a year. We also have a bloom food. They’re listed on our page here.

As for tomato fertilizer, it may be OK at very low strength, but I’d have to see the brand. In general, we only use organic fertilizers and ingredients for cactus and succulents since their roots are easy to burn, and the plant is easy to overfertilize.

Hope this helps,
Peter