CactiGuide.com

anttisepp wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 6:51 am Hello, very nice healthy happy plants! I think you hold all of them all year round outdoors, not in greenhouse? Do you protect them from sun or rain?

Thank you anttisepp! My plants live outdoors all year round but protected from rain and strong sun by a covering of plastic and light shade cloth. I call this a "greenhouse", but it has no walls.
I moved recently to a new house so I have a new greenhouse. Things changed a lot since my first post of this thread. Planning to show it here soon..

Snowcat wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 9:48 am Hello, thanks for sharing your soil mixes... That's what I am still making experiments with. Not always successful ones

And I like your Fraileas very much! I really like those species but every one of the Fraileas I had passed to the better world. And I cannot figure why. Soil? Water? No idea so I stopped buying them.

Hello snowcat. My pleasure to share my mixes. I have learned a lot here in the forum.
I'm not any specialist but for Fraileas you should consider:
1. Try the mix for Gymnocalycium I have showed above
2. Give them lots of filtered sunlight. They like to be protected from strong sun but doesn't like to be shaded
3. Give them more water them you give for a Mammillaria, much more. Even in winter you should never let them bone dry. You can press their body and feel. Water whenever they are not turgid, but you have to rely on your mix.
These plants are from southern South America, growing kind of protected by grasses and bushes. Winter is not that cold and it is dry, but ocasional rains do occur, so plants do not stay too long without water.
Maybe you could try once again. Good luck!

mmcavall wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 10:05 am I'm not any specialist but for Fraileas you should consider:
1. Try the mix for Gymnocalycium I have showed above
2. Give them lots of filtered sunlight. They like to be protected from strong sun but doesn't like to be shaded
3. Give them more water them you give for a Mammillaria, much more. Even in winter you should never let them bone dry. You can press their body and feel. Water whenever they are not turgid, but you have to rely on your mix.
These plants are from southern South America, growing kind of protected by grasses and bushes. Winter is not that cold and it is dry, but ocasional rains do occur, so plants do not stay too long without water.
Maybe you could try once again. Good luck!

Thanks, I really appreciate this, maybe I really should try once more

mmcavall wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 9:55 am <...> My plants live outdoors all year round <...>

Great. Plenty of light and air makes wonders with cacti.
But you living in such favorable climate maybe don't understand how and why to grow them indoors. ))

anttisepp wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 3:42 pm

mmcavall wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 9:55 am <...> My plants live outdoors all year round <...>

Great. Plenty of light and air makes wonders with cacti.
But you living in such favorable climate maybe don't understand how and why to grow them indoors. ))

Indeed...I heard about cactus dormancy for the first time here and found it bizarre. I could grow my cacti (grow in size) all year round, but from what I've learned here, I prefer to kind of induce dormancy in winter to have more flowers in spring. Also, I like to grow them hard. So I keep some genera without water for 70 to 90 days in winter. For you guys from northern hemisphere, an average winter day here would (I suppose) be the ideal climate to provide a good soak on the cacti. But the nights are relatively cold and at any week there can be a cold wave, so it is better to keep them dry anyway.
My climate is good for cacti and Euphorbia but not very good for mesembs, because winter is not sufficiently cold. Also I would love to grow Tylecodon and others...

Didn't know that mesembs like cold. Here they usually much more sensitive to cold and if all cacti except brasileiros stay healthy in garage all winter dry at +5/+12C, mesembs, ascleps, aloes - africans - cannot stay it and all this group overwiners in the house at room temp.
Cumprimentos!

anttisepp wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 6:54 pm Didn't know that mesembs like cold.

Mesembs are summer growers or winter growers , with remarkable dormancy period in one of the seasons. They split and consume the old leaves in one of the seasons and there are right and wrong seasons to water them etc...something hard to manage when you don't have remarkable differences between summer and winter. The plants do things such flowering , splitting and get dormant randomly. I never know when to water them, and they are so slow that I never know whether they are doing fine or just surviving. I used to post tales about that in my thread "attempts at growing mesembs in the tropics". Some species are easy, some not. Next I'll post pictures of them.

So now I'm showing my mesembs. Well, only the good looking ones...these species are not difficult to grow...anyway I decided not to increase the collection of Mesembs. I'm much more into cacti now.

A year ago I moved to a new house and built a new greenhouse. Today I will show it.

It is very simple, basically to protect from rain.

It faces north, which equals to facing south in the northern hemisphere, that means the best face.
It takes sun all day long.
It is very well aerated, wind runs inside it naturally: I use only a very light shade cloth:
Half of the greenhouse has an extra layer of this shade cloth. So I have two different sun intensities inside it. It is also well equipped for nocturnal guided tours! Hope you guys liked the visit.

mmcavall wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2020 1:10 am
Hope you guys liked the visit.

Very nice! Thanks for the tour

A_G_R wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2020 5:39 pm

mmcavall wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2020 1:10 am
Hope you guys liked the visit.

Very nice! Thanks for the tour

Thank you for the visit.

Sunny Sunday, some flowers of the day today:

Such a great spot! When I built my tiny ''greenhouse'', just finding a good spot gave me headaches.

x_101 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2020 6:26 pm Such a great spot! When I built my tiny ''greenhouse'', just finding a good spot gave me headaches.

Yes, a sunny spot makes all difference. Sure. Thanks for commenting.

Some of my Euphorbias.
E. baioensis, stellispina, inermis, horrida, obesa, dichroa, greenwayi, schoenlandii, tulearensis, pulvinata, ritchiei, among others, not necessarily in this order:

A read-to-bloom Discocactus heptacanthus, two different Fraileas enjoying the hot sunny afternoon, and a particularly cool spined Melocactus.