2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The procedure for self-growing cacti at home is very painstaking and time-consuming. A favorable time for sowing is the beginning of spring
To plant cactus seeds, purchase a special substrate and drainage, which can be broken brick, pieces of ceramics. The drain should be sterilized. Steam the earthen mixture and drainage in a colander over boiling water for an hour, cover the bottom of the colander with a cloth. Boil ceramic bowls. All these procedures are done just before sowing.
Preparing for landing
Soak cactus seeds in a weak solution of potassium permanganate for about a day. If you want to sow seeds of different types of cactus, then soaking them in one bowl, wrap each seed in filter paper. There are varieties of cacti, for example tephrocactus, which have a very thick shell, which prevents rapid germination, therefore it is recommended to soak such seeds for 4 - 5 days. After soaking, we proceed to sowing.
Do not cool the sterilized soil too much, its temperature should be 30 degrees. Do not use wooden boxes, sticks for writing numbers and species for planting cactus seeds, as disease-causing fungi that are detrimental to young shoots multiply at a rapid pace. When sowing several varieties of cacti in one container, delimit the space with strips of plastic, which should also be disinfected. Mark each variety with a separate marker with numbers written in pencil or indelible marker. Use this strip to make shallow grooves in the soil. Before sowing, carefully inspect each grain: if the remnants of the fruit have adhered to them, be sure to remove them. Place the seeds into the grooves using a needle or glass stick. They should not be covered with earth; you can sprinkle them with steamed sand a little.
Moisten from a sprayer with boiled water, cover with a disinfected glass and install in a greenhouse with underfloor heating. Soil temperature should be around 25-30 degrees. Constantly monitor the moisture content of the soil mixture - its overdrying is unacceptable. Watering can be done in two ways: from below by immersing the box by 1/3 in boiled water or from above, gently using a pipette. Frequent airing is acceptable - if possible, 2 - 3 times a day.
Seedlings appear at different times, it depends on the type of selected cactus. Most often, seedlings can be seen 2-10 days from the day of sowing, they are very small, so take a closer look. Always monitor the temperature, do not let it drop below 25 - 28 degrees, at a lower temperature regime, gray rot develops. This type of disease is the worst enemy of cacti, especially for their tiny sprouts.
Growing
Inspect the seedlings every day so that spiderweb threads of fungi and algae do not appear on the surface of the earthen mixture. With the development of fungi, remove them mechanically, remove the threads and treat the soil with a chalusole solution. With blue - green algae, the fight is more difficult, in this case, resort to a dive, after clearing the seedlings from the upper infected layer of the substrate, shaking off the soil from the roots. Frequent picks, after 1, 5 months, have a good effect on the development of the plant. Dive the seedlings into similar dishes and the same earthen substrate.
It is best to use tweezers with thin curved ends or a stick for a dive. Place a thin plastic or rubber tube stopper on one of the tweezers to avoid crushing the seedling. You can make a dive stick yourself, taking the holder from an art brush or a twig as a basis. To do this, sharpen one end, sharpen the other flat in the form of a spatula, making a sharp cut. Sand the stick so that no roughness or sharp corners remain on the wood.
When picking a seedling, loosen the ground with a sharp end, then transfer it with a fork to the prepared hole. Never pull the sprout out of the soil as this will damage the young and thin roots. Gently dig in the seedling, it should come out of the ground freely. If the root is long, you can pinch it. After picking, the plant is placed in a greenhouse without watering for 5 days; light spraying can be done from 3 days.
Next, grow the cactus in one of the options: at the last pick (second half of August), to retain moisture, sod land is added to the earthen mixture, and the top layer is covered with fine gravel, which will prevent rotting of the root collar; in early spring, dive young plants into a lighter mixture without turf, shade them, gradually accustoming them to sunlight. In the first method, the seedlings are provided with the usual cold cactus wintering with gradual watering. With this option, the death of the shoots is possible.
In the second case, grow cacti in a backlit and heated greenhouse without a dormant period for two years. Only after that they are transferred to a normal regime, but they must gradually get used to sunlight. With this method, the death of cacti is less, and the grown plants are much larger, but bloom later.
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