BCSS - Forum

I find this much easier in a hanging basket, as I am less likely to knock the fragile stems off.
A pleasant surprise when I went into the greenhouse this morning.
Every few years I take off all the shoots and let it grow from scratch. I last did that 2 seasons ago.

What a wonderful display, I can see that it would work really well in a basket.

Wow! Mine never has more than one flower at a time, and a rather dingier shade...

Yes Ralph my 3 plants of P.tuberosus have not had more than one at a time, but then again they are down on the bench not hanging just under the glass.Not got a photo of this year the one below is of 2015. But shows what I mean.

This year I put most of my Corynopuntias into hanging pots and being up there they have all flowered really well, but most plants have flowered really well this year with the good weather


Nice plant and great show of flowers Ali

I find there is a trade off between number of stems and number of flowers and pot size.
As more stems develop each year you get more flowers, then at some point the plant runs out of steam and produces mainly smaller non-flowering shoots, at which time it is due a drastic haircut .
Mostly I get a lot of flowers in the season but only one or two open at once. The extra sunny weather this year seems to have provoked simultaneous flowering.
This plant originally came many years ago from DaveW labelled P. kunzei, so may be an extra flowery clone. It certainly has beautiful flowers.

Same as Ali. I left the top growth on mine for a few years and it had 8 buds on it this year. Unfortunately Windows 10 update messed up my Photoshop Elements and it flowered before I got Elements working again. I find if you prune it back you get "instant flowers", but if you let it grow it's energy seems to go into producing stems for a year or so and then commences flowering again.

See:-

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=166966&p=269573&hil ... us#p269573

This was probably the original Ali's came from (same plant as the tatty one in the link above) but one of the years it had a "haircut". The tuber in the pot is now pretty well as large as a tennis ball. They also like a cool winter rest but plenty of light, since Pterocacti come from cooler climes. Also maybe in midsummer, particularly this weather, our greenhouses get a bit hot for them and they would be better outside, but probably the cats would then do the top pruning for you!
Incidentally there is a form that looks identical to the above but has yellow/green rather than red stigma lobes, but I have not been able to obtain a start of it yet:-

https://www.kakteenforum.com/t6412-pter ... -tuberosus

An interesting quote from W. Phillips ("Not flowering Pterocactus") in an old edition of The Chileans 2005 (link below):-

Page 106

"The two plants that do flower have reddish-purple stigma lobes. Backeberg says that kuntzei has green
stigma lobes whilst decipiens has a reddish-purple stigma. Despite this, I am inclined to accept Kiesling
placing these two names into synonymy."

http://www.grahamcharles.org.uk/Chilean ... ssue63.pdf