Potting Up My Pencil Cactus Cuttings
by
Joy Us garden
(IC: blogger)
From California to Arizona, this pencil cactus found a new home.
I loved my 8′ Pencil Cactus and had it for a very long time. It was a cutting that I took in San Francisco and it traveled with me when I moved to Santa Barbara. I 1st laid eyes on it when I was installing the Macy’s Spring Flower in the late 80’s and it was part of 1 of the window displays. Succulents were very exotic back then and I had to have it! I just moved to Tucson and couldn’t take the plant (see the pic below to discover why) so I took a few cuttings. Today I want to share with you how easy it is to pot up and propagate Pencil Cactus cuttings.
This is the mother plant from which I took the cuttings. The plant in itself is very heavy but then you add in the large terra cotta pot & all the soil & there was no way it was moving anywhere.
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I ended up putting all the cuttings under a cypress tree in a shady spot in my garden. The temperatures were consistently in the triple digits and these cuttings were looking a little bit sad so I decided to pot them up on June 29. The crazy monsoon rains had arrived so the cuttings had gone from experiencing high heat and dryness to pounding rains and a bit of humidity. Besides, I was leaving for a week in San Francisco the next day and wanted to take off knowing my Pencil Cactus cuttings were happily planted up and on their way to rooting in.
Here are the 3 Pencil Cactus cuttings waiting to be potted up. The white marks that you see on them are bits of dried up milky sap along with some scarring. I want you to know that large Pencil Cactus cuttings will propagate easy just as smaller ones do. I’ve propagated the individual branches with great success by the way.
Growing aeoniums is a crap shoot here in the desert because most are native to the Canary Islands where the average temp is 71 degrees all year long. I decided to take a cutting of my beloved Aeonium Sunburst & give it a go. It needed potting up too so into the pot it went too.
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Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
Published July 8th, 2016 1:31 PM
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