My totem pole cactus (Lophocereus schottii) is doing great! Well, fine at least. It didn't put on much growth last year...
I've had a decent (too big for my climate?) Agave collection for a few years, ever since several were gifted to me by a downsizing gardener. This is the first year that I've really been blown away by one though.
No, I didn't finally get around to cleaning the leaves out of the cactus bed -- it's the Opuntia that was being attacked, not doing the attacking! The attackers looked like this:
It's almost summer (feels like it already at least in St. Louis) and most plants have already pushed out most of their new growth. Sure a few bamboos are still shooting, but pretty much everything else have finished their spring growth spurts.
So nightmare area number two (aka my cactus bed) has gotten much better...
Continuing the theme from yesterday, here's the second nightmare area in my garden right now. It's my "cactus bed".
It's the brief time of year when the Opuntia in the cactus beds turn from an interesting yet subdued mat of prickly that can get overlooked...
One thing I've learned after several years of overwintering plants indoors is that there is a balance that you need to strike between growing and not. The "not" is semi-dormancy and this is what I want for most of the plants, but some of them I actually want to push out new growth.
One benefit of having to bring so many non-hardy plants indoors for the winter is that I get to look at them a lot more than I did when they were out in the garden. One plant that I'm looking at a lot (and loving what I see) is the totem pole cactus (Lophocereus schottii f. monstrosus).
It's time again for my annual (or biannual?) terrarium refresh, where I do some pruning, digging, planting. I have to warn you, the images in today's post won't be so pretty.
Last week I talked about the leaves in my front yard, and how I needed to get them out of the cactus bed at least -- even if I wasn't going to rake them all up right now. Gerhard agreed that the leaves had to come out of that bed to protect the cactus from winter rot. (They're all cold-hardy but only if they stay relatively dry.)
Of course I've been acquiring new plants recently, why wouldn't I? Just because it's the hottest part of summer and I have literally dozens of plants still in their nursery pots on my driveway, doesn't mean that I shouldn't continue to feed my obsession, right?
I haven't been talking about the cactus beds as much as I normally do in spring. Last year I posted about them several times, as I was curious about which survived the brutal winter. Since this past winter wasn't as harsh and probably also because the cactus bed isn't as new, I haven't been as concerned.
This weekend my wife and I made an impromptu decision to visit the Missouri Botanical Garden after meeting with our accountant, a way to end the day on a fun note. Neither of us has been to the garden at this time of year, so we weren't sure what to expect in the outdoor beds.
As the calendar year comes to an end, winter has been quite mild so far here in St. Louis, with the notable exception in November of the few days of arctic air. That blast did something that's been causing some extra work: it froze leaves to some trees.
I mowed my lawn for only the third or fourth time this summer -- one of the few advantages to a drier-than-normal season.
It's almost universally agreed -- but not unanimously so -- that the Kosmik Kactus that I saw last winter at Home Depot were an abomination. Those dyed cactus and succulents just looked too wild, and their colorful tones would soon fade. Would their owners lose interest and let the plants suffer, or get rid of them entirely?
It was a long weekend of gardening for me. I spending many hours on Saturday getting things ready for Sunday's tour, then it was a long, humid day showing the garden yesterday. We had 75-100 people visit, and it was fun!
The weather has finally returned to normal (we had been in the mid-to-upper 80's for a few weeks), but I just haven't been in the mood to do much in the garden the last few days. Rain and maxed-out humidity levels probably didn't help, but as a result today's post is a bit of a mashup.
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