Cactus Blog 

A modern dresser (well, maybe it wasn’t so modern, but more like moderne, before the makeover) is transformed into a multi level apartment complex for succulent families.

On the Grizzly Bear Modern blog they also include lots of DIY instructions with lots of photos in case you wanted to do one of these yourself.

Matti and Megan are leaving San Francisco so they have a massive number of succulents to sell before they go. All those mad California gardening skills being left behind too. Go check out their plants if you’re in the city.

Benjamin tries out our new nursery cart.

He doesn’t think it’s quite the right thing for a whippet

No, no way down. What’s a whippet to do?

Keith has brought out all our new plants for April today and I photographed them all, put them on the website here, and sent out our monthly email for those on the email list here.

Here’s my favorite this month.

Olneya tesota

It’s been 7 years since we’ve featured this plant at the Cactus Jungle. You can see the older photo from 2005 if you click the link above. So much has changed in 7 years. Including my name. You can now call me Bob.

Thank you and goodnight.

Carole sends along a link to some cactus notecards by R. Nichols.

Cute lizard.

More Echinocereus bloom colors opening today.

This one is called “Bright Pink”. A subtle name for a subtle color.

Hello,
I was desperately googling after finding my favorite little cactus in a sorry state and I found your blog. I attached a picture of my cactus. Two days ago it was perfectly fine. I have had it for 1 year, I water it every other week and it has a drainage hole. Do u know what has happened to my poor little cactus? Anyway to save it?

Thank u!

Sara Beth

Sara Beth,

I can’t really tell what went wrong from the photo. While usually watering every 2 weeks is fine for most cactus, assuming it’s in a sunny window and you’re drenching the soil and letting it drain away so it never sits in water, for such a small pot you sometimes have to water a little more frequently. On the other hand, the soil looks too rich for cactus, so maybe it wasn’t drying out between waterings in which case it could have been overwater.

Peter

Dustin, who you should be following at CactGuy, sends along some plants to help with ID’ing.

Hi Peter,

I was hoping you could help me ID this random assortment of succulents that I have received from various people – I really am hopeless on the non-Cactaceae front!

 

Thanks,

Dustin

With help from Rikki and Brian we came up with these:

Dustin,

The large purple plant is Kalanchoe ‘Desert Surprise’, and those are surprising colors for a desert, so I guess the name is apprpriate. To the right is an Echeveria “Topsy Turvy” and then Pleiospilos nelii. Around the back under the large leaves is Crassula ovata, and the small red-leafed plant is another Kalanchoe, probably Kalanchoe blossfeldiana.

Peter

And now the Echinocereus grandiflora buds are ready to open into “Sunrise Yellow” so you know it has to be good.

More colors opening daily. More blog photos often. More happiness guaranteed.

Along the street in SOMA are debris boxes with tree ferns in single parking spaces. Nice!

These are some very pretty Icelandic Poppies we got in.

Icelandic Poppy Candles, in a 2-pk.

That’s a nice Tillandsia aeranthos clump in bloom. It was hanging in the Houseplant Room for ages. But it’s so nice, you might say. And I would agree. So why didn’t anyone buy it you might ask? No reason that I can think of. Glad we could have this conversation.

Rikki builds our custom succulent wall panels using a LOT of Sempervivums. And then I asked her to look up and took a 2nd picture.

You can see her face!

The first Epiphyllum bud has opened this spring. And it’s a beauty.

I see my sister’s Yucca is in full bloom.

She lives in Austin Texas where it’s been warm recently. How warm? Mid 80s, so warm enough.

Prickly pears are delicious. Atlantans eat them too.

If you’re enjoying a cactus pad salad, are you eating leaves or are you eating stems? Just looking at a pad, it’s hard to know. I’m talking about the fleshy oval pads of Opuntia, the prickly pear cactus, also known as the Indian fig for its rosy oblong fruits.

Stems or leaves, leaves or stems. Hmmmm. Stems? Leaves?

Nice, and it turns out there’s a class for cactus salad prep in Atlanta coming up.

9:30 a.m. Saturday, April 7. Chef Ron Eyester, Rosebud. Morningside Farmers Market, Atlanta. www.morningsidemarket.com

Papago Cactus Salad
Hands on: 15 minutes
Total time: 15 minutes
Serves: 6

And finally, the answer that you may have been waiting for, but probably not….

Stems.

If you haven’t started your organic garden yet this spring, today is the perfect beautiful day to start. Hap’s at home planting ours.

I don’t normally trust the NY Post as a news source, as they’re not, but I like this story anyway, so have at it.

“I really did think to myself, ‘Someone is going to say cut in a minute. Oh my God, no one is saying cut,'” shared Winslet. “I thought, ‘The wind machine is really good, but that rain is going to look so fake because there’s way too much of it. And this fire — it looks so real.'”…

“Nobody was hurt, except Richard, who woke up and saw the house across from his, with us and all his family in there, and got up and ran, naked, right into a cactus,” said Winslet. “He got this huge cactus needle stuck in his thigh.”

I see one of our Aeonium arboreums has a new sport rosette that we should be able to take a cutting and grow a new plant from this offset.

If we succeed with this rosette, turning it into a whole new Aeonium cultivar, what do you think we should name it?

Pretty!

Dina Arevalo | Valley Morning Star

Vibrant spots of color amid the brush-lined paths of Hugh Ramsey Nature Park in Harlingen — seen Monday, March 19, 2012 — herald the arrival of spring. The spots are mostly lemon yellow against the verdant backdrop, but in hidden corners the rare prickly pear cactus displays bright red blossoms with fiery hints of orange and pink seemingly set ablaze in the glow of afternoon sunlight.

Those are some gorgeous colors there in that there cactus bloom prickly pear flower. I’m impressed and I see a lot of prickly pear cactus flower bloom inflorescences. I wonder where this Harlingen, Texas is? Let’s us all go and visit since it’s cold and rainy here and it’s partly sunny and 90 right now in Harlingen, Texas. Although they do have the chance of thunderstorms tonight, so let’s not stay too long.

Yucca getting ready to bloom in Harlingen, Texas.

Aloe blooms at sunset in Harlingen, Texas.

Flooding in Harlingen, Texas.

And my favorite from the City of Harlingen’s own website:

Harlingen Thicket
Amenities: 40-acre tract of native brush in the city center, restrooms, parking, and extensive trails.

That’s a mighty fine stand of cactus.

Life on the Balcony‘s Fern Richardson has a book out, Small Space Container Gardening. And judging from this video she really does have just a small space to garden. So small that she’s planting herbs underneath succulents. Interesting!

Where can you get the book? We carry it. Not that you have to come all the way down to our store on a rainy day to buy a book, but you could.

I get a lot of spam comments on this blog. Spam! Usually it’s pretty obvious and the spam filter catches it. Sometimes it makes no sense at all like this little bit of spam comment:

Way to go on that 5k! That takes a huge amount of discipline even when youre feeling great, and you did after being sick all night! Awesome! That raw restaurant actually looks pretty good! What a fun night!

It got through the automatic filter, so I guess that was the point of it. It didn’t get by me though, so none of you were subjected to it in the comments. Only here on the main part of the blog.

I used 4 filters from 2 separate photo apps to create this lovely composition.

Our first 4″ Achillea is in bloom for spring, and the cultivar is….

“Paprika”!

I always recommend mixing in some yarrow with native grasses. They disappear into a meadow look with their rich green foliage, easy to forget they’re there and then, boom… they bloom, and these very brightly colored sprays of small blooms pop up right above everything else. Nice!

Mammillaria elongata

These are grown in many different cultivars, and we have a number of those cultivars, but we don’t label them as such. It’s a philosophical difference with those who do label all those cultivars. But we have 3 cultivars out right now if you look carefully, not that you need to. On top of that there are also two subspecies, although I’ve never seen any of these plants with the subspecies labels in the trade, so they may not be available.

It’s also often called the Ladyfinger Cactus, however that common name is also used for an Echinocereus we carry, so I won’t use that common name here for this Mammillaria.

As you can probably guess, it’s from Mexico. The cylindrical stems can get over an inch in diameter, but tend to get sometimes even 4″ in length. The fruit is pink. You can figure out the flower color by looking at the picture. But of course they also vary towards a more pinkish color too.

These are reliably hardy down to 25F, but are often grown in much colder locations if kept dry.

This photo has nothing to do with this blog, but at least there’s bamboo in the background.

It’s probably a seasonal business.

Mason City-area residents who are fans of Stillwater Greenhouse soon will no longer have to drive to Orchard.

JEFF HEINZ/The Globe Gazette.
Daniel Zimmerman of Stillwater Gardens, Orchard, says that succulent plants are popular this year. Zimmerman was at the Gardening Seminar at North Iowa Area Community College on Thursday.

The greenhouse is opening a satellite location… “It will be a portable greenhouse, like the grocery store does,” said Stillwater Greenhouse owner Daniel Zimmerman.

Daniel does look excited in the photo.