For any plant enthusiast, whether succulent or not, planting is an extremely important point of arrival. An arrival point which, in many cases, soon turns into a starting point which accompanies the enthusiast for most of his life. It is undeniable that there is no comparison between a purchased plant and one we have seen born, grow and develop from a tiny seed, even more if we have collected that seed from one of our plants. This is somewhat the “magic” of sowing: closing a circle born of a flower with another flower, the one produced by the plant originating from that first seed that we have been able to germinate, become a plant and lead to full maturity. And all this without going into detail about the satisfactions that are obtained by trying to select particularly interesting species, from flowers of unique colors to peculiar or almost unique thorns or stem shapes. As regards the procedure for sowing cacti and succulents, many novice growers “get lost” in the proverbial glass of water right after the phase least subject to our control, i.e. germination: we cannot in fact force a seed to germinate, although there are good practices that favor the birth of plants.

For many, however, the critical issues begin after that moment, that is to say in the first months of life of the plants, which are indeed delicate months because the seedlings are still weak and easily subject to rotting or parasitic attacks. It is above all to these growers that the following article is addressed, with a little “trick”, to be understood as advice, on how… to make life easier for seedlings and how to let them pass the first winter unharmed. (…)

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L'articolo Sowing cacti: how to prepare plants for the first winter and the “trick” to help them in the first few months proviene da Il fiore tra le spine.

When many plants are grown in a relatively small space such as that offered by a greenhouse (however wide it can be), it can often happen to discover welcome surprises in the pots. Cacti whose flowers have been pollinated naturally by insects or self-fertile cacti, capable of doing everything by themselves, produce fruits which, once dry, split letting the seeds fall directly onto the soil at the base of the plant. This is how one can find specimens of a certain age surrounded by seedlings or small plants, in a sort of “potted” re-proposition of what commonly occurs in nature. In spite of what one might think by observing the precise procedures necessary for the reproduction of cacti, spontaneous sowing is a common phenomenon in cacti and is sometimes able to give real surprises, as has happened to me these days.

Here is a small report in the following article. (…)

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L'articolo Strange combinations of Nature: how did an onzuka end up in the pot of an old Thelocactus? proviene da Il fiore tra le spine.

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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L'articolo How to clean cactus fruits and how to store the seeds to reproduce our plants proviene da Il fiore tra le spine.

Ok, between one drop and another of condensation inside the bag we can see some tiny green dots. The seeds gave birth to the first seedlings, in short, our baby cacti. And now? How do we proceed with the sowing of cacti and succulent plants after the first germinations? Should we open the bags right away? Should we keep the seedlings in full light or is it better to place them in a sheltered place? Should we water regularly the seedlings or it’s better to let the potting soil dry out? And, finally, can we fertilize?

In this article, let’s see what to do once the seeds of cacti and succulents have germinated, in other words how to move correctly to help the plants grow and avoid making the work done with sowing in vain. (…)

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L'articolo Sowing cacti and succulents: what to do when the first little plants are born 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.

Speaking of cactus sowings, a classic question, and one not infrequently asked with a fair amount of (unnecessary) apprehension, is: after how long should seedlings be repotted? In other words, when do the young seedlings need to be repotted and perhaps divided into individual pots? Again, as with many other “cactophilies matters”, the answer depends on various cultivation factors. Based on experience, however, it is possible to give general indications useful to those who experiment with sowing for the first time.

Let’s see in detail, in this article, everything we need to know about this fundamental step for the proper growth of plants from our sowing. (…)

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L'articolo When to pricking out cactus seedlings, how to do it correctly, and what potting soil to use proviene da Il fiore tra le spine.

I usually sow between the end of March and the first week of April, always in natural light and heat. This year, given the unusually low minimum temperatures, I had to postpone it until mid-April. In these days I have taken advantage of the raising of the lows and the improvement of the days to sow some seeds that I obtained from my pollination last year and some recently purchased seeds. I sowed cacti exclusively: Copiapoa, Gymnocalycium, Pyrrhocactus, Astrophytum, Lobivia, Escobaria, Frailea, Leuchtenbergia, Ferocactus, Thelocactus and more. The seeds had been cleaned immediately after harvesting and stored properly. I have written several articles on sowing: you can find everything in this section of the site: sowing.

In this article I thought of creating a sort of sowing “tutorial”, photographically documenting all the various steps involved in my method. It’s good to specify it: it’s simply my method and I’ve been following it for years now, but it doesn’t mean that it can be good for everyone or that it can be comfortable for everyone (…).

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L'articolo Brief tutorial on planting cactus in natural light and heat: the various stages of the procedure proviene da Il fiore tra le spine.

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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L'articolo How to sow cactus and succulent plants: from pollination to the first flower, the procedure proviene da Il fiore tra le spine.