Cacti

I usually blog on the weekends but lately my weekends have been fairly busy so I figured I'd try a week day evening for a blog post.  This evening I'm going to talk about cacti and my ability to grow things.
I think I've established along the way with this blog that although I love to grow things, I'm pitifully bad at it.  A year ago (yes, last January) I put a bunch of cactus and succulent seeds into a terrarium-type arrangement, hoping I wouldn't have to do much with it since it was a terrarium, and thus I couldn't screw it up as easily as a regular plant.  That was the thought process anyway.  

Lo and behold, the little things sprouted!  They started out as tiny green nubs and began putting out a spine or two here and there.  I carefully documented their progress with pictures at intervals, which I then lost all of when my hard drive crashed last summer.   So I don't have remaining proof that I grew them from seeds, but I did.  

Anyway, the terrarium part lasted only until the succulents got well under way.  They sent out long thin shoots which began being bent and curled by the terrarium, so I gave up, took the top off the thing and have been treating it like a regular plant.  That entails things like watering it when I think it looks dry and trying not to over water it, trying to make sure it gets sunlight, etc, etc.  Luckily, cacti can stand dry spells.  So despite my tender loving care (or lack thereof), the little things continue to grow.   As you can kind of see from these pictures the plants are perfectly happy and thriving. 

I have two types of succulents and about 10 different varieties of cacti in there.  The bigger ones came up first.  The tiny little ones at the base of the big ones and among the pebbles were slow to sprout and are small and low to the ground.  They also don't have the serious spines on them that the bigger guys do.  Most of them are getting to the point where I should be able to actually identify what type of cactus it is soon, besides using descriptive names like "roundish with long spines" "roundish with purple stripes and long spines" or "short and roundish".

I had a few seeds left so I started those leftovers this year, a year behind the original ones.  The new ones are struggling more, probably because when I was starting the first batch they were in the terrarium and the watering was via condensation dripping onto the soil.  This year they're just in a pot and when I water them I disturb the soil.  I think they've had a hard time getting started.  You can see a couple of pale green stalks in this picture below. That's what all my little thriving cacti looked like last year at this time.

Anyway, it does look like I am capable of growing cactus-type plants.  Of course, except for occasionally letting them freeze, I have managed to keep aloe vera alive, so I suppose I knew that.  It's just so much fun to watch things grow.

Speaking of watching things grow, I hope we continue to get some rain so that things will actually grow come Spring.  The drought from last year is supposed to continue this year.  People are saying they may not let us water lawns at all this year if it does continue.  We had about 24 hours of pretty continuous rain starting late yesterday, and it's supposed to be scattered showers tomorrow.  There was lots of standing water in places today as I was driving home, but unless we get more than an occasional, widely spaced day of rain, the outlook is not good.  The reservoirs between here and east Texas are basically dry . . . or were when I came through during the holidays.  Those won't fill with just a few days of rain.  So me, the sunshine girl, is actively hoping for rain. 

I guess that's all for now.