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This is exciting for me. I rescued 2 pots with multiple Tephrocactus Paper Spine from my Mothers house 4 years ago. In the process of moving and repotting a lot of the segments fell off of the plants. I was able to root all the segments with time. In this case I was left with this sad looking plant. The epidermis itself had a dark color to it, the spines turned black, but the roots stayed intact. It basically never died,. It just sat looking sad for 4 yrs. Sunday morning while watering the plants in the greenhouse I noticed that the epidermis had turned green. And then Monday morning I saw this new segment. Weeeeeeeee.

Cool

It's like somebody who wakes up after years in a coma.

Great It shows that one shouldn’t give up on plants as long as there is hope. I like your enthusiasm over the ‘awakening’ too, even though you have lots of plants and arent a beginner.

No matter how many plants or how many years, when an unexpected event happens, its always exciting Mrs Green

I do love the look of those dark spines. It just started growing all of a sudden or did you recently repot?

Sorry, I lost track of this post.. It has been sitting in that pot from the beginning. No repotting. It just started to grow.

How about an update from a few days ago.

What a cool survivor story. Great that you never gave up on it!

nice story, I have a similar one. Tephrocactus take root easily, but they are also prone to rotting, so be careful with watering. They are among my favorite cacti.

Pd1973 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 10, 2022 8:22 amTephrocactus take root easily, but they are also prone to rotting, so be careful with watering.

Depends on one's local climate -- Tephros are almost impossible to kill in SoCal.

They seem to like heat - at least, my inermis doesn't start to grow until the weather gets quite warm, not as early as most of my cacti. I think they can take quite a bit of water when it's hot enough for them.

Maybe it was the extreme heat that revived this one

of course, everything depends on the climate, in California it will grow in spring and autumn, in my location new segments grow at the end of summer and autumn, if spring is warm then new segments will grow, due to high temperatures in summer there is no growth. Tephrocactus are one of the few that I do not expose to rain, because I want to have control over watering, it can be very rainy. Right now, it's raining every day.

The growth pattern is similar here, except it's late spring before it produces new segments. No more develop through the middle of summer, whether it's hot or not. It's rarely warm enough at night here to cause heat dormancy but growth pauses in summer anyway, even when it's still taking up water and clearly not dormant. I guess it just stores energy then.

It may produce another segment or two in late summer, but these usually don't get very big before the weather gets too cool for them to grow. This year we had an unusually cool spring and it made no growth early. Then we had some severe heat waves, no growth. Now it's growing a couple of new segments - I hope they grow fast from the energy it's been storing all this time. Right now the days still fairly warm and dry - we would have had a hot day yesterday, but the smoke from the fires in the mountains blocked the sun's heat - while the nights are only moderately cool. No rain in the forecast until next weekend.