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Post by Yoris on Jul 25, 2018 1:48:38 GMT -7
So, apparently, cacti like to grow in containers on our property. They hardly grew at all in the ground, but we put them, using the same soil (I believe), in small containers, and now they're flourishing by comparison.
So, a while back, we ordered some cacti from coldhardycactus.com. Following the instructions, most of the cacti didn't root. I found that in our soil, you can't just lay them on the soil and expect them to root (for most of the cacti we tried); they just dried up and began to die instead (they didn't die by rot). However, they do seem to root in our soil if you actually bury part of a vertical pad (rather than laying the pad flat). There must be something pretty different about our climate and soil vs. where we got the pads. Whatever the case, they seem to love containers more than the ground. I'm not sure why. I kind of feel like they dried out too fast in the ground (that soil did dry quickly outside of a container).
So, now we just have three cacti left:
1. East Meets West (a cross between Opuntia fragilis and Opuntia humifusa; I got this from coldhardycactus.com—this rooted according to the instructions I received)
2. An unidentified wild Opuntia from an area in Nevada with a similar climate
3. An unidentified wild cactus from southern Idaho somewhere. We've been growing it as a houseplant, but I rooted a cutting in soil in a container outside (we still have the main plant in the house, which probably grew from seed).
We had other cacti from ColdHardyCactus that were damaged from nearly drying up, or such, but which had rooted after a change in how I was rooting them. I believe they would have survived (especially if transplanted to containers), but they were destroyed due to some landscaping (and not moving them before it happened).
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