Cactus Blog 

It’s about time those Stanfordies got with the program and developed a homegrown sedum green roof.

“We were coming from a home with no insulation, and the idea of a green roof — literally a succulent garden growing out of a horticultural mixture spread directly onto the surface — eliminating the need for air conditioning was a huge attraction,” Melissa said….

(They) chose several varieties of sedums and simper vivums, both of which spread, as well as non-invasive miniature ice plants and aloes. “I wanted to create an imitation of a larger landscape,” Schneider said.

“It takes about a year for everything to fill in,”

Alas, no photos. I think they meant Sempervivums, not that there’s anything wrong with simper succulents too.

Malacothamnus fasciculatus

Our lanky mallows are blooming. They were suppose to be yellow, but as you can see, clearly they are not yellow.

Also, they look more like M. palmeri to me, but our source has told us they were locally collected seed in southern cal., and definitely from Malacothamnus fasciculatus, so who am I to argue? All the native mallows here are so pretty anyway.

From the BBC News comes a heartwarming story of making money off cactus in  Sbouya, Morocco

It is just after dawn in the hills above the Moroccan hamlet of Sbouya and a group of women are walking through the thousands of cactus plants dotted about on the hillside, picking ripe fruits whenever they spot the tell-tale red hue.

But these woman are not simply scraping a living out of the soil.

The cactus, previously eaten as a fruit or used for animal feed, is creating a minor economic miracle in the region thanks to new health and cosmetic products being extracted from the ubiquitous plant.

We’re setting up new systems to track our growing stock, and are putting together low tech binders with plant pages in them. So the question is should we use regular paper, or go for the weatherproof papers that are out there, but cost at least $.15 per sheet. Such are the conundrums facing the nursery business in the 21st century.

Cylindropuntia whipplei – The crew have taken to calling this one “Cowboy Cactus” because it looks like it belongs in a classic Western. However, these are going to get only 2 to 3 ft. tall. And yes, for the first time, I am using a Cylindropuntia designation, instead of Opuntia. I’ve fallen into the trap of renaming all the chollas, although I’m feeling wary of the Austrocylindropuntia name. I don’t like this idea of dividing the genus based on North vs. South America.

I should also say we’re not really sure that this is C. whipplei – it’s out best guess. I actually thought it was A. shaferi, but we have some other chollas that are definitely A. shaferi, and they don’t look like this. So I got voted down. This is our best guess at this point. We’ll know better when they bloom.

Waterwise Santa Barbara offers a cdrom (really?) telling you to plant succulents, natives and other drought tolerant plantings. I wonder if they have the same information posted to their site? That would be easy.

I love featuring this cactus. Baby photos of the “Old Man” cactus are doubly cute – baby old men! Who can resist!

The chubby little thing will eventually grow to be a 2ft. tall clump of basally branched stems. I thought it grew taller, but that’s the O. celsianus I was thinking of. I better check the labels on the 5ft. tall plants at the nursery. We wouldn’t want to mislabel anything.

I’ve always thought of Ventura County as a nice place to drive through on the way. Now we find out there’s a spectacular cactus and succulent garden.

Juan Carlo / Star staff 06/23/09 in Newbury Park: Frank White of Newbury Park has a garden in the front and the back of his house including some 1,000 succulents, about 200-300 of them in pots. Many, which are blooming now, and it is a great way to save water.

Don’t miss the photo of the crested Pachypodium.

Could you help me identify a cactus I have in my yard? PLEASE :-))

I have been looking all over online and it seems to be a cereus repandus, trichocereus peruvianus or echinopsis peruvianus. But ultimately I have no idea other than seeing similar pics online and want to care for many cactus I have on a property I have purchased recently. The blooming of the flowers is beautiful at night. Thank you for your help

Yvonne

Yvonne,
You have a night-blooming cereus, which we identify as Cereus peruvianus. This is a synonym of Cereus repandus, so you did figure it out. Also, Trichocereus peruvianus and Echinopsis peruvianus are day bloomers, and are synonyms for the same plant.
Peter

Hey! It’s my backyard!

Hello. Just wanted to share my Clusia orthoneura story with you.

I bought the last one you had a while ago. It was exactly the one that was photographed for your newsletter and Web site.

After keeping it all this time about five feet from an east-facing window, I began wondering if it was plastic. It changed not one bit from the time I got it, and still looked exactly like its photo.

Finally, I decided to move it directly in front of the window and put myself on alert for any signs of sunburn.

It has been a month, and in that time, every branch has sprouted a pair of new leaves, and I even see a flower bud.

I’d say the plant needs very bright light. It now gets direct morning sun and seems to have no complaints.

Best!

Joe

If you look closely at the enlargement, you’ll see Joe also has a bloom coming!

Jaxx is visiting the nursery for the summer.

The UC Davis Arboretum has a bunch of good programs.

Saturday, August 15
Guided Tour: California Native Plants in the Garden
10 a.m., Buehler Alumni & Visitors Center
Tour the Mary Wattis Brown Garden to see great native for your home garden.

And in case you can make it over there in the next hour:

Friday, August 7
Folk Music Jam Session
12 p.m., Wyatt Deck
Pull out your fiddles, guitars, banjos (you name it) for an acoustic jam session. Campus and community folk musicians play together over the lunch hour. All skill levels welcome. Listeners welcome!

Oh well, I guess my fiddle will have to stay put away until another day.

Now this is exciting news – a cactus cooking contest down in Monterey.

D’Arrigo Bros., Salinas, Calif., is holding a nopalitos — cactus leaves — cooking contest Sept. 16 and is seeking submissions for the event….

The company is asking for recipes to be sent by Aug. 29….

First prize is $750; second prize is $450; and third prize is $150, and photos of the winners and their recipes will be posted…

Dust off those nopal recipes, and despine those pads. I’ll be sending in my cactus fish sauce with capers recipe.

We let our cactus grow to 4″ size (nominal) before we’ll offer them for sale to the public at the nursery. Here we have the perfect specimen of a 4″ cactus.

Cleistocactus strausii

We grow these in sufficient quantities so that each year we can sell some small plants, and then grow the rest on to larger sizes, and the next year we sell a few more larger ones, and then grow the rest on to larger sizes, etc. We tend to grow them until they’re about 4ft. tall with many branches – that’s about the maximum size we would sell. Then we stop the growing. How do we do that? We sell them off post-haste so that you can finish growing them to 10ft. on your own time. These do incredibly well in Berkeley. They bloom heartily.

Here’s a photo of a mature specimen at the Berkeley Botanic Garden.

I suppose I should have a comment on these sedum mats being developed by Altman. Maybe when they’re ready for sale and I see one in person I’ll write something. In the meantime, here’s a photo from the LA Times.

At the Mariposa Street offramp, which lets onto Pennsylvania Avenue, there’s a new garden locals are calling the Pennsylvania Garden, and they just got a bunch of large agaves installed.

Those sure are big. I hope they don’t bloom too soon.

A customer has sent us some very clear photos of aphids in action.

Hi,
I came by Tuesday when your store was closed and showed you a digital photo of some bugs that have infested a cactus I bought. You told me they were “scales” and that I should clean them off the plant w/ rubbing alcohol and a q-tip and then spray down with neemoil… Here are the pics in case you notice that they are a different pest.

Thanks again.

Christine

Christine,
Actually those are aphids – and they’ve infested the bloom stalk of your echeveria plant. They like the flowers. It looks like the blooms are done, and so the easiest way to deal with aphids at this point is to cut off the bloom stalk, and toss it.

You should still spray the plant with Neem Oil to help kill any strays.
Peter

Another closeup (more…)

Coreopsis verticillata “Moonbeam”

This small perennial groundcovery thingy is very low water, drought tolerant, xeriscape, etc…

And yet, look at all those pretty daisy flowers. It’s so easy, even a novice could grow this.

No LOL on this cat, yet.

Cactus Cat by tiki god
from My[confined]Space, which posts user-submitted photos.

We have a lovely new crop of baby cacti and succulents. I’m photographing them today, and should get them up on the blog over the next week or so. As the nursery has grown, we’ve had to regularize the crop cycles. So here’s one group of small cute plants coming your way. I’d watch especially for the baby Old Man cactus – oy, it’s to die for.

The Fish Peppers are coming in very nicely. They’re a very attractive plant, and the peppers are variegated! I hear they’re a hot pepper – I wonder what I should cook?

At the Clark County Fair, i.e. Ohio, the winners have been announced in the Springfield News-Sun:

Open Class Flower Show
Mary Kate Picolo, cactus or succulents (more than 1)

No pictures were taken, so we’ll never know what Mary Kate won for.

Will gophers go after succulents planted in the ground?

Here in So Ca I’ve had to rely on plants that gophers dislike (daffodils, oleander, brugmansia, etc.) but since we’re being encouraged to use more water wise plantings, can you think like a gopher and tell me if an aeonium looks tasty?

Thank you.
Susan

Susan,

Gophers are sort of like deer, they will eat pretty much everything, at least at some point. However they seem to leave Aeoniums, aloes and most other succulents alone… at least if there is a few more lush plants to feed on and there is a water source in the area. All though I have to admit I have seen a huge old jade collapse because the inside of the trunk had been eaten out, to just a hollow tube from below by a hungry or perhaps thirsty gopher. Considering most Crassula are toxic in one way or the other, tells you that Gophers are pretty tolerant of plant toxins. However they do not seem to be able to ignore the nasty latex poisons of the Euphorbias, so as a general rule of thumb, whenever we install a succulent garden in gopher territory we mix in ample Euphorbia (both the bushy spurges and cactus-like). The nasty sap that is in all the roots seem to deter the gophers quite well and perhaps even protect the more tasty plants since their roots are all intermingled.

Good luck,

Hap

First, you paint it yellow, then you plant it up with succulents.

BaldManModPad has created the definitive filing cabinet planter.

So I was adding to my blogroll this morning when all of a sudden the entire sidebar disappears. If you know what I’m talking about, then you know that this is a frightening thing. Fortunately I had a backup from a few months ago, and I figured out what the sidebar file name was, and where it was located, and got it back in there. So now all I have to do is figure out what went wrong, fix the problem, go back into the sidebar, and update all my links from the past few months. Oy.

I think Saturday is a good day to reprint a longish excerpt of a trip to Peru.

(T)he Atacama Desert is not entirely barren….

Tall, columnar cacti, similar in form to the saguaro of our own Sonoran Desert, become increasingly common north of Lima, Peru, and south of the line that marks the Southern Hemisphere’s winter equinox. Trichocereus [Ed: Now called Echinopsis] cactus is one of the giant cacti I encountered and in places it was abundant….

Individual cacti approached 24 feet in height and were often the dominant plant species across vast areas….

I noticed the giant cacti rarely contained woodpecker nest cavities though both the striped woodpecker and Chilean flicker are known to follow the giant cacti into the Atacama….

At both the southern and northern edges of the Atacama succulents are easily the most abundant perennial plants…. One of the most abundant succulents was a agave-like plant that belonged to the pineapple family.

Nearly all of these succulents have shallow roots, lying within an inch of the surface, indicating they can utilize moisture from light showers or heavy fog. This adaptation, however, is not the only reason for their abundance….

For hundreds of years domestic goats have been used as a source of milk and meat throughout Peru and Chile…. The normally rich variety of water-loving plant species found around desert springs and streams is absent in the Atacama. Nearly every spring has become a home site and the immediate vicinity has become completely defoliated by the owner’s livestock. Over vast areas the only vegetation remaining is represented by those plant families that are unpalatable to goats.

So the key to cactus success is that they are not delicious to goats. True enough.

Sometimes an article says it all, without me needing to add anything. This is an article about the dangers of running in summer in Texas.

When you see a steer start to paw the ground and lower his head I was informed that he might charge….

Unfortunately, my foot caught the edge of the dirt… and… the dirt had a number of those small cactus plants…. I tried to get up and continue running but my legs would not stop churning and kept pushing me forward on a four-point crawl on my hands and feet through this dirt and cactus….

The steer was so astounded by my actions that it stopped and I am sure was puzzled to see this human crawling through the cactus.

Unfortunately there’s no video to go with the article, so we will have to imagine this ourselves.