How to clean cactus fruits and how to store the seeds to reproduce our plants

Reproducing cacti starting from seeds is one of the best ways to get to know these plants in depth. Through sowing we can in fact observe the entire life cycle of the plant, from birth to the production of the first flower, to aging and death. Without forgetting the great satisfaction that the birth of seedlings is able to offer to those who practice sowing for the first time as well as those who have practiced it every year for decades. Not to mention the first flower: getting to see that the plant that we have given birth from a small seed, after two years or after twenty years depending on the species, finally opens its flower… it is priceless, there’s little to do. But before getting to all this – with regard to the sowing procedure, remember that on this site there is an entire section with at least fifteen articles dedicated to this topic at this link – you need to get the seeds. Banal, obvious. But without those you go nowhere. And there are two ways to get the seeds: buy them from specialized retailers (now almost exclusively online) or produce them with the manual pollination of your own plants. Or… simply collect the fruits that our plants have produced thanks to some pollinating insect, accepting the fact that two plants not of identical species may have been pollinated (and therefore we will be dealing with future hybrids), clean the fruits, store them and sow them in the spring.

In this article and in the related video we see how to clean and prepare the seeds for storage for future sowing. We sholud always remember that the seeds must be stored correctly, on pain of deterioration of the seeds and the consequent drastic drop in germinability. (…)

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How to sow cactus and succulent plants: from pollination to the first flower, the procedure

I confess: I do not have the skills nor the desire to build an artificial propagator. You can find detailed instructions and all the necessary information online, but I’ve never put myself there. This doesn’t mean that you can’t achieve good results even with traditional seeding. For over fifteen years, in fact, I have been sowing in spring with natural light and heat, using the classic “method of the bag”. I sow above all Cactaceae and, at the cost to being banal, I fully confirm what all plant lovers can tell you: it is from sowing that we can get the most satisfaction if we have this “disease” of cultivation. Moreover, it is only by the sowing that we can appreciate the different stages of development of a plant, follow its evolution from birth to flowering (a small-big event!), and get specimens able to adapt from the beginning to the conditions we can give them for the rest of life. For myself, another basilar aspect of sowing is that in this way I can have more specimens of the same species and genus, born in the same conditions, on which to test different growing regimes. In short, you start all, democratically, from the same point, then you see who arrives and how he arrives through different soils, different exposures, and so on. In short, different cultivation practices. So it’s clear that since the starting point is the same (the seed, which obviously must come from the same fruit) if the plants after a few years show significant differences between them, this will be mainly due to the different soil, the exposure, the irrigation and fertilization regimes used. And from this, empirically, useful lessons can be drawn.

Let’s explore the topic in the following article, describing sowing step by step. (…)

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