My collection in Finland

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Beautiful display. Can I ask, are you down to one plant now? Did you lose it or just need to make space for others?

Any tips for getting fragilis to flower?

[Pia]

About three or four years ago, the winter was extremely warm and wet. In spring the plants were very soft and looked rotten. Although also in previous years after very wet and rainy winters, the plants had been quite soft and dark but then had become hard and green again, this time I though that they were too rotten to survive. Thus, I threw them away. However, I found one small offspring rooted in the soil, and that was healthy. I don't remember if I had planted the detached offspring ('leaf') in the soil earlier or did that happen naturally. This small offspring has flowered since its first summer and grown very fast. It has now a few branches. As I wrote, it produced 23 flowers this summer. I planted the original four plants in 2015. In 2018 three of them was left, and as written, now one quite large offspring still surviving and flourishing.

From my prevoius posts and Cactus World 2018 [Vol. 36(4)] you can see the details of how I planted them. They have been totally unprotected around the year. Thus, there are no specific tips for flowering. They have flowered very abundantly each year, maybe due to the very cold and long winters in Finland (excellent resting period). They can tolerate very heavy frost and a lot of snow without any problems. The only threat seems to be warm and wet winters. My flower bench has very good drainage in the rockery. Water can drain from the bottom of the bench between the large stones, under which there is a few tens of centimeters of air between the bench and the ground. The soil in the bench is covered with small pieces of granite so that wet soil does not accumulate at the base of the stem. In very hot summers (in Finland it is often between +25 and +32 degrees Celsius for several weeks in summer), I may water them a few times, and I had used liquid fertilizer for indoor cacti ones in the summer. That's all I have done.

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That's all I have done.

Well it's working very well - I think I am going to build a cold frame for mine to try and get mine to flower. I'll plant them in the ground then and try to keep them dryish over winter and help get them warmer in the summer.

[Pia]

I ordered this Tephrocactus geometricus from Poland in 2016. This picture shows how it looked then.

Tephrocactus1x.jpg (92.24 KiB) Viewed 164 times

In 2017 the bigger ball at the bottom started to soften, and so I removed the upper smaller ball and rooted it. Now in summer 2023 it has produced its first new ball! Considering how incredibly slow-growing this variety is, this new ball is growing amazingly fast.

Tephrocactus2x.jpg (103.13 KiB) Viewed 164 times