The flower spike is appearing right on cue Stewart but will probably not have open flowers until about May, by which time the main leaf will probably have died away. Because the flowers are fairly large, it is fairly easy to pollinate. The difficult part is trying to separate the small seeds from th...

The Two Wests standard staging is fine for small pots, but if you plan to have large heavy pots then their commercial grade staging is probably better. Even then, I have found that it needs an extra brace inserted in each section to prevent sagging. I use solid staging rather than slats because I ha...

But magnesium sulphate and calcium carbonate are inorganic too!

As well as the mesembs, I have lots of cacti and haworthioides too. They are all grown using the same materials, although different groups are obviously watered at different times and mesembs get less liquid feed than the others. One thing to watch out for when using inert substrates for growing you...

The question was "can one graft seedlings onto Pereskia in the same way as you can graft them on to Pereskiopsis?" The speaker seemed to indicate that there was some hollowness in the stems of Pereskia which made it unsuitable for this purpose.

So that is its name 'Shou Jin'. You can transcribe a cultivar name from one character set to another, but you are not allowed to translate it.

But if Border Force had found your seeds Mike, they would have destroyed them if lacking a Phytosanitary Certificate. You are having to take that risk.

I understand that the BCSS seed list is essentially sold out. There has been unprecedented demand for them this year, perhaps because it is increasingly expensive now to buy seeds from outside GB because of the documentation required.

Some of you might have read the note on Kleinia galpini i that I provided for the most recent BCSS Enewsletter. Since I wrote that, I have realised that it is almost invariably sold as K. cephalophora in the UK with cultivar names such as ‘Mountain Fire’, ‘Fuji’ or ‘Amke’. They even have PVRs under ...

The plants seized in New Zealand appear to be cultivated material of course. Even though most of what we can see is South African in origin, there is no way that tourists can visit that country at the present time. The people arrested recently in RSA would have been locals who probably do not get th...