No longer for sale on EBay, they went for only .99c each! Oh, what a bargain we missed out on.

That’s a lot of cactus. Shall we name them all? And if we do, should we use the antique names, like Trichocereus and such, or update them to current standard as indicated in Anderson’s The Cactus Family?

The Poughkeepsie Journal wants you to know where to store your succulents this summer in Poughkeepsie. In an outdoor wall planter.

Wallter outdoor wall planter works best for succulents and herbs.

It turns out the “wall” planter is a hanging planter. Nice enough, I suppose, but nothing I’d want to spend my money on. I wonder what those people at the Poughkeepsie Journal were thinking? And where is Poughkeepsie anyway, Long Island? No – it’s the Hudson River Valley. Nice!

Cactus in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier’s famous planned city? Indeed!

Panchkula, a satellite town of Le Corbusier’s verdant and immaculately laid-out Chandigarh, is home to the Cactus Garden, believed to be the largest outdoor landscaped turf of its kind in Asia. Also called the National Cactus and Succulent Botanical Garden and Research Centre, this seven-acre verdure is a major crowd-puller with its sheer variety of prickly greenery.

That was fast, no sooner do we walk out of the hotel than we come upon cactus in New York.

Not living, mind you.

Any clues as to which store this is? And just to make it more interesting, we just got a call from the head of VM for this chain, headquartered in SF, for plants for their 5 biggest stores including this very one.

Used in an ad?

It kind of looks French.

We don’t get such stunning winter cactuses around here, as found on twitter. Twitpic wants you to click the picture to see the full size photo.

From the Australian Noarlunga Centre’s Southern Times Messenger, comes this review of a History of Cactus.

…(S)urfing at Cactus, an isolated spot west of Ceduna on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain….

Oh, it’s a book about a beach.

I actually just blogged this piece for all the wonderful place names.

* Noarlunga Centre
* Ceduna
* Nullarbor Plain!!!

A new application for air plants courtesy of a customer.

We’re visiting family that just moved to San Diego and this is what you give for a housewarming gift when you have a cactus nursery.

The scene: A man is shot and leaps off a train into a cactus. How was it done? Hint: a stuntman.

“One of my favorite stunts was for ‘How the West Was Won’ in 1962. I was doubling for an actor who was shot. I had to leap off a train going 30 mph, hit a cactus and tumble down a rocky hill. A cactus is like a telephone pole. Hitting it dead on would have sent me back under the train. So I had to figure out the right angle to hit the thing.

“I also wanted the cactus to be flexible. I dug four feet down and cut out the tap root. Then I filled in the hole with the dirt so it would spray up when I hit. I also calculated the angle so I knew when to jump from the train. Next I took a blowtorch to the cactus needles where I had planned to hit to avoid being impaled.

“In the scene, the train sped along, I jumped, hit the cactus just right, the cactus fell over with me and I went down the hill perfectly.

They killed the cactus?!!!??

Nordstrom now sells cactus. Yay!

Oh, wait, it’s a cactus charm with words on it.Can you ID the 3 cacti on the charm? Looks like a Ferocactus, a Saguaro and… a blooming Echinocereus?

I suppose it’s better that they haven’t actually started selling live cactus – we don’t need the competition from a national department store.

Tip from Angie. Thanks!

Sedum spurium “Red Carpet”

I thought this one was Sedum spurium “Dragon’s Blood” but I was wrong. Can you see the difference? I can’t. These groundcover stonecrops can form a very dense mat, but they’re also semi-deciduous and will be thinner, more stemmy, in winter, if you don’t have snow to hide them under.

On Etsy, from Leah Sheely of The Ranch Design Group, we find these gorgeous clay canisters. Local, and very reasonably priced, I would add, if I were selling them myself, which I’m not, so I’ll just post a photo and leave it at that.

Lots of vendors send us emails asking us to carry their products. Most are things like compost. How much compost do you need, anyway?

From Portugal, we’ve now been asked to carry TH JANÉ’s knobs.

These are some really beautiful knobs. I would love to carry these. I wonder how much they would retail for? Ah well, in a future life when I have a boutique hardware store instead of a nursery, I’ll carry some Portuguese knobs.

I wonder how many horses are named after a cactus? Maybe there was a famous stud named Cactus. Here’s a horse that has won,

the prestigious First Citizens Gold Cup on Boxing Day.

Now that’s exciting news for the horse, Cactus Amour, who seems to race out of Trinidad and Tobago.

I’m back from Florida, and while I didn’t make it all the way to Tampa, I did get a comment on the blog from a garden writer there, Penny Carnathan.

She occasionally blogs about some of the great succulents they can grow outside in Florida that we have to bring inside.

Plant No. 5 – Desert rose (Adenium obesum)

This isn’t my desert rose, but it looks just like it. My blooms haven’t opened and, in fact, the leaves are curling up and dropping at an astonishingly fast pace. But that’s normal! It’s winter. This is dormant time for desert rose.

The tips I’ve learned for this plant: Don’t water during the winter, when it’s natural to drop leaves and go dormant. (I take mine inside during winter rains.) In the growing months, it needs lots of sun, and water and fertilizer about once a month. Prune after it blooms and you’ll be rewarded with more branching and more blooms.

There are a lot of cultivars of this plant out in the trade all with slightly different flower colors, or completely different flower colors. On this trip we saw new Adenium cultivars growing as full blown shrubs with flowers constantly, and completely covered in glossy green leaves. Apparently if you live in the right climate, it can work! We grow them primarily for the caudex and the up to twice a year flowers.

While I’m traveling, I have a few more terrariums to share with you. This one is Ian’s favorite, a String of Pearls in hanging bullet shaped glass. And yet it hasn’t sold since Ian made it a few months ago. What is wrong with you people? Don’t you know quality when you see it?

Senecio royleanus

We made it to Florida and are at my parents condo where they don’t have a lot of plants.

Here we see they have a former tillandsia and an artificial echeveria.

Nice!

I’m off to Florida and so blogging will be light for a bit. But that doesn’t mean I’m not out working hard for you. I am! Cactus in Florida? Of course!

Maybe I’ll share photos along the way, you never know for sure with me.

And if you’re planning on being at the tropical plant show, I’ll see you there.

OK, so now I’ve gone too far. Cactus Medicine is a product that I should never be featuring on this blog, since I’m not a doctor, and this is not really medicine anyway but is a non-medicinal pill. And Freeze-Dried too!

Clearly I’ve gone too far. And they advertise it’s colon-cleaning power, oh the humanity. Someone should take the keys to this blog away from me. My fingers just won’t stop typing! Help me!

Meanwhile, in other news, the conservatives are in the middle of a schism over gay rights at their yearly conference.

It’s a plastic feeding dish with a plastic cactus attached. I suppose this is for your desert lizards, like Uromastyx, and not the forest lizards, like our own New Caledonian Crested Geckos who are a lot bigger now than when I took that picture.

Anyway, here’s the object in question, that I haven’t tried out, because I haven’t had any desert lizards in a few years. So once I again, I stand before you posting an object that I can not vouch for, that we don’t carry at the nursery, won’t ever carry, won’t ever buy myself, couldn’t tell you anything more about than you can see for yourself in this photo, and finally, wouldn’t have even noticed in this big world if not for the fact that I have this Cactus Blog thingy here that has a voracious appetite for entries.

Enjoy!

From the biggest Pistachio Growers in New Mexico, the Eagle Ranch. I’ll bet they have a really nice roadside farm stand.

It looks delicious, but all I know about it is the packaging, just like you. What you see is what we know.

I’d like to spread a little bit of this cactus jelly on my crackers. I’ll bet it’s especially delicious on crackers.

I think I’ll have to research these products a little more before I post them next time. Maybe I should buy one and taste it and then report on it? Maybe I should buy a case of them and sell them at the nursery. Maybe I should make my own prickly pear cactus jelly and share it with all of you. That would be nice.

Crushed prickly pear seeds do not work as a grit in a gardeners type soap.

Now you know.

Begonia “Irene Tapia”

These are big begonias, with big leaves and big bloom sprays. They should call it Bigonia.

It’s also a hairy plant, up to 3 feet tall. The undersides of the leaves are red. They should call it Begonia “Tall and Hairy Red Undersides”.

Saturday morning and the weather forecast is not good. Oh well, on to the rest of the day.

I don’t know what Etsy is for if not for finding yourself a nice sweet moss necklace. This is the alpha and omega of handmade online jewelry. The bees knees. This is the truest use ever of technology. The bomb. This is the one of a kind find of a lifetime.

I am blown away.

I think I have a tear in my eye, excuse me…

I’ve got a whole bunch of blog posts I was working on that never came to fruition. Do you like that word? Anyway, I’ve decided to bullet-point all these interesting points that I was working on ’til I gave up on them. See if there are any there that you like enough to want to put together a full post on for yourself, on your own blog that is. You can have one or two if you want, free of charge.

• Thorny plants are generally shrubby whereas spiny plants are more often columnar.
• National Health Care may help make cactus-collecting a more acceptable hobby.
• The Pacific Rim is the future of Cactus Production, through 2050.
• If you dream of cactus you are likely to have an outgoing personality, whereas people who dream of roses are more likely to be [edited].
• Cactus fruit are delicious.
• I miss the local shop where I used to get pasties in Boston. Warburtons it was called. I wonder if they’re still in business?
• Oregon or Auburn? The game is in Arizona at the Cactus Stadium next week.

It’s a nice sunny day and the Delosperma floribundums are attracting the bees.

Stunning is not the word.

Apparently this is rare, and worth a lot of money. Produced by Venini in the 1930s, they’re a current and respectable company producing very expensive art glass, and they do have a showroom in San Francisco.

In the meantime, you can oogle at this cactus glass.