Quite old now but if you can get them I would recommend The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Succulents by Gordon Rowley. A superb primer on cacti & succulents even if paper/print not as good as today. For just cacti lots of photos in Cacti the Illustrated Dictionary by Rod & Ken Preston-Mafham. ...

Welcome to the club! Over Christmas my index finger became infected because of a spine tip that did not come out. Finger swelled up like a sausage and I could feel it spreading to my hand. Extremely painful. A course of antibiotics solved things. First time that has happened in nearly 60 years of gr...

Haha. So do I. Depends on what is flowering. Or not as the case may be. I like everything I grow.

I think I have a new favourite.

What about spiders and cobwebs, there must be more than a few in that space. My 8x8 greenhouse looks like something out of an Indiana Jones film. I normally ignore the spiders as they may well be beneficial although had to free an orange tip butterfly from the web this morning. I am a little more wa...

This is the first time I have seen ‘black spot’ mentioned on the forum. Can anyone say what it is? A few years ago I had an epidemic of black spot that ran riot through Aloes in my conservatory. The black spots grew bigger if left alone, dried out the black area and often had a yellow edge. On the a...

Thanks Juster and Herts Mike. Will give it a go. Next problem - I hate throwing plants away so will have lots of potted up cuttings.

I recall seeing a post by Colin Walker about removing Agave offsets to create a well balanced plant. What do members think about using this procedure for Aloes? I have many caespitose Aloe plants and although my natural inclination is to let the plants do their own thing I do not have room for the e...

I don't believe that this is the same. The Tesco product was made from molar clay, the Aloe Vera product doesn't mention molar clay. I would be very wary of cat litter that is NOT molar clay (for Cacti anyway - it's probably ok for cats). A suitable replacement would appear to be Sophisticat Pink ca...

You may be interested in this post from 5 years ago (where has the time gone?). The plants are still flowering, I have never removed the seed pods, all looks very messy now.

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