FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

This is such a neat thread. Gah, I love plants!

Great idea with the prickly pear jelly, I see fruits just falling off plants around my neighborhood. Maybe I should do some harvesting. Haha

Good growing you two!

Got a question for you cactus guys, I was bequeathed a peruvian apple cactus and this year i tried to pollinate it out of 8 blooms two seem to have part of the flower stalk left. is this a fruit?



the flowers are big and only open at night, need to learn how to up the pollinate rate .

optique wrote:Got a question for you cactus guys, I was bequeathed a peruvian apple cactus and this year i tried to pollinate it out of 8 blooms two seem to have part of the flower stalk left. is this a fruit?



the flowers are big and only open at night, need to learn how to up the pollinate rate .

Looks like fruit to me!

Alrighty,
I guess I’ll add an update. The seedlings I’ve got have grown some, but I haven’t taken the best care of them and they’re a tad etiolated. They ain’t in the best shape, but they’re doing OK. At the bottom, you’ll notice a new addition to the thread: some Agave utahensis I grew from seed I got in AZ this summer. The plant they came from was quite dwarfed (I couldn’t reach any pods on a full-sized plant!), so it’ll be fun to see what they grow into. I’m already liking the spines on some of the E. reichenbachii. I’ve also got something fun in the works. I crossed two of my Schlumbergera (Christmas cacti). Here’s the pollen donor, a lovely white hybrid I got last year. Interestingly, it has a hot pink ring in the middle of the flower. Here’s the mother plant. This originally came from my grandmother and I’ve had it for basically my whole life. Who knows how old the plant was when we got it. A while back, it sort of rotted out, but we saved a bunch of branches and have like 8 of them now. This one gets absolutely loaded with blooms. I’m about a million times better at growing jungle cacti than I am at growing desert cacti, so I’m looking forward to the results!

Looking good! Excited to see what comes from that cross.

A lil tip on the cactus next time you grow some from seed. They like to be moist with high humidity. I grow mine in baggies. I know, sounds weird for cactus but that's how I've learned to grow them. I'll post pics after work.

Love the agave! Wish I was able to grow them outdoors year round, alas, stuck with smaller species that i can bring in...

Dionae wrote:Looking good! Excited to see what comes from that cross.

A lil tip on the cactus next time you grow some from seed. They like to be moist with high humidity. I grow mine in baggies. I know, sounds weird for cactus but that's how I've learned to grow them. I'll post pics after work.

I’ve got these growing in a bag with high humidity, but I do believe they’ve dried out some because the pots are so tiny. I’m pretty stoked for the Christmas cactus cross, too. I love growing those things.

Jeeper wrote:Love the agave! Wish I was able to grow them outdoors year round, alas, stuck with smaller species that i can bring in...

Agaves are great. The species of these seedlings, A. utahensis is extremely cold hardy and not super big. The biggest I saw out in the wild were only like 2 feet wide (though the bloom spikes were much bigger than that).

Here’s a couple of my other agaves. They’re all still itty bitty right now. Here, the biggest problem is agave weevil, which eats out the plant and kills it. There’s no cure. I know for a fact that it occurs in my neighborhood, but it hasn’t gotten to any agaves on my property.
A. nickelsiae A. parryi v. truncata I’ve also got A. bracteosa. I might get some bulbils off of my neighbor’s gigantic A. americana that bloomed this year (the rosette was nearly 10' tall before blooming ), but IDK if I want to deal with that species. If I get a big one, I’d much rather deal with A. weberi or A. ovaltifolia. I have some unknown medium-sized agaves in the ground that might be A. americana, but they look a bit wrong and are on the small side.

Here's a few cactus I grew from seed. I'm quite addicted as with most things I get into.
Couple of cactus grafts with pereskiopsis as grafting stock.

bananaman wrote:

Dionae wrote:Looking good! Excited to see what comes from that cross.

A lil tip on the cactus next time you grow some from seed. They like to be moist with high humidity. I grow mine in baggies. I know, sounds weird for cactus but that's how I've learned to grow them. I'll post pics after work.

I’ve got these growing in a bag with high humidity, but I do believe they’ve dried out some because the pots are so tiny. I’m pretty stoked for the Christmas cactus cross, too. I love growing those things.

Jeeper wrote:Love the agave! Wish I was able to grow them outdoors year round, alas, stuck with smaller species that i can bring in...

Agaves are great. The species of these seedlings, A. utahensis is extremely cold hardy and not super big. The biggest I saw out in the wild were only like 2 feet wide (though the bloom spikes were much bigger than that).

Here’s a couple of my other agaves. They’re all still itty bitty right now. Here, the biggest problem is agave weevil, which eats out the plant and kills it. There’s no cure. I know for a fact that it occurs in my neighborhood, but it hasn’t gotten to any agaves on my property.
A. nickelsiae

A21EF9F5-9A15-49F0-BA0E-A24EBBAFF1A4.jpeg

A. parryi v. truncata

AE2E70DE-AEBF-4D70-B0E7-53CFC51F8989.jpeg

I’ve also got A. bracteosa. I might get some bulbils off of my neighbor’s gigantic A. americana that bloomed this year (the rosette was nearly 10' tall before blooming ), but IDK if I want to deal with that species. If I get a big one, I’d much rather deal with A. weberi or A. ovaltifolia. I have some unknown medium-sized agaves in the ground that might be A. americana, but they look a bit wrong and are on the small side.

It was -11°f here this morning... Lol
I actually have both nickelsiae and truncata, I'd be interested in others if/when you have em available.

Jeeper wrote:It was -11°f here this morning... Lol
I actually have both nickelsiae and truncata, I'd be interested in others if/when you have em available.

A. nickelsiae is certainly my favorite smaller agave, but there’s others that are pretty cool, too like A. 'Blue Glow'. There’s a nearly blooming sized A. nickelsiae in the ground at the nursery nearby.

I think A. utahensis is good to zone 5 or 6, but like all agaves it needs to be bone dry when it’s cold.

I’ll certainly keep you in mind if I get any excess agaves.

Dionae wrote:Here's a few cactus I grew from seed. I'm quite addicted as with most things I get into.

Lol, you and me both :p When I get into something, I tend to get way, way into it. I can already see myself beginning to go into asclepiads (both succulent and not), orchids, and ferns...

Yours are looking real nice! Good job on them.