I got this rooted cutting of Tephrocactus articulatus var.papyracanthus last night at our Society meeting. The wide paper-like spines are obviously eye-catching, but if you took them off it would look like a stack of tiny potatoes. This is a clue to its relatives. It’s in the #Opuntia group, which also includes a whole range of other segmented #cacti we refer to as “prickly pears”. Anyway, I’ve been wanting one of these for a while, so I’m super stoked.
Oh ladies and gentle sirs do I have news for you!!!
First! I now have beautiful and airy pots. Pots? Plant pots? Actually it’s a pencil holder! And they are sturdy!
So I was looking around online for some more orchids items to guilt myself into buying and I came upon rhizome clips. I don’t own any babies with a rhizome, but I was intrigued about a clip to keep them stable. I was using stakes but they warped the growth on bubblegum pop’s newest leaf. I took some craft wire for jewelry from my mom and made this! I wrapped it around the base to not only keep how stable, but also keep her above the media. It’s fantastic. They were wiggling around before so this is 2000 times better. I left space for root growth too.
Malbec is even growing a new leaf.
Here are my non tea soaking babies. They sit above a humidity tray (a party tray with stones). They also have the wire wrap. Kaleidoscope love hers 💕 she’s steadily growing a new root. Lime is doing great too. His little root is starting to curve towards the media. He’s just sitting right on top so I pick him up every night to spray him upside with a seaweed mix.
and after discussing the Just Really Big Corn more with the person in question, I have some more information about the offending Really Big Corn (the pic is coming up dont worry):
-for those who are new to Exactly How Fucked Up Corn Is, corn, or Zea mays, is comprised of many varieties (called ‘landraces’) native to central and south america. They were first bred by the native peoples in the region from an ancient grass called Teosinte that’s still around today. theyre really fucked up. i cant talk about it here but trust me there’s a reason some people devote their entire lives to studying it
-the lab in question is a maize genomics lab, and does a lot of work with these landraces. sometimes this work involves bringing various kinds up to their lab at my university in Iowa to grow in test plots for experiments. you can see where this is going
-so the supercorn itself. the supercorn in question is actually a collection of a few different landraces from the valleys of mexico and south america. they are naturally taller than what we would consider ‘normal’ corn in their native environment, but like corn generally is when brought to Iowa, they’re really fucking happy here and are a little bit taller than their natural height to show for it (we get longer days here then they get where they’re from, resulting in the plant getting slightly different growth signals, so on so forth)
-i got the height wrong in the tags on the original post. my friend is 5 foot 7, not 5 foot 5. this corn is over 20 feet (6 meters) tall. they were grown from seed in this test plot. she says the stalks are as thick as bamboo to compensate for the sheer height. behold the image that’s haunted me for literally months:
big.
In costa rica theres a single corn stalk thats grown 45 feet. it has it’s own greenhouse!
Kihaku-Gato's Garden Blog (tumblr import) 