Let’s talk about cacti and diseases starting from a simple photo. The plant that inspired this article, and which you see above, is (or rather, was) an Ancistrocactus (=Glandulicactus) mathssonii. I had obtained this specimen with my sowing about ten years ago and fortunately eight or nine other “brothers” of this plant are still in perfect health, growing and flowering regularly. This particular plant, although treated exactly like the other specimens of that sowing and planted in the same type of substrate in which my other mathssonii live (clay, marl and 60% aggregates), a couple of years ago took a fungal pathology and within a few weeks it was dead. I think it was fusarium, but today it doesn’t matter, because the disease has run its course and what remains is… the armor of this cactus, that is a beautiful interweaving of thorns that embraces the void left by the stem which, over time, it dried up until it decomposed and disappeared altogether. The observation of what remains of this plant, which for a couple of years I have kept along a low wall not far from the greenhouse, where I usually move the diseased plants (by diseases, in this case, I mean generically pathogens and parasites) to prevent them from infecting other specimens, led me to some considerations on the cultivation and treatment of plant diseases.

Considerations that I have condensed in the following article an excerpt of which was also published in the British Cactus and Succulent Society newsletter. (…)

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L'articolo Cacti and diseases: stop anxiety, sometimes we can’t help but let Nature take its course proviene da Il fiore tra le spine.

Why damn yourself with sterilized soil, perfectly clean pots, fungicide, transparent bags and so on, when you can let our plants do everything related to sowing? Exactly as it happens in Nature, in short. Jokes aside, those who have many plants know well that finding themselves with perfectly formed seedlings inside the pots, next to the mother plants, is far from rare. Generally we notice it during repotting, when we can observe our succulents with particular attention, because the spontaneously born seedlings are small and tend to “camouflage” themselves with stones and aggregates in the substrate, or they are found so close to the stem of the mother plant to be invisible to a superficial look. Over the years, in the pots of my plants, I have often found germinated and autonomously grown seedlings, in particular of genera such as Astrophytum, Epithelantha, Thelocactus, Mammillaria. A couple of years ago I even found a small plant of Euphorbia obesa already well formed, grown among the pebbles outside the greenhouse, in the shade of a large pot containing an Agave. Today the Euphorbia is in a 5 centimeters pot inside the greenhouse and continues to grow regularly. I had to reluctantly remove it from the outside and place it in a pot to prevent the cold and damp winter in North Italy from killing it, otherwise I would have gladly let it grow where it was born.

In these days, during the repotting of some Astrophytum capricorne of my sowing, I have found many seedlings and various seedlings born and grown independently in the pots of the mother plants (you can already see some of them in the cover photo, above). Hence the idea of ​​documenting and analyzing “spontaneous sowing” in the following article. (…)

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L'articolo Spontaneous sowing: when cacti do everything by themselves, just like in Nature proviene da Il fiore tra le spine.