On Sunday I was checking my garden and to my surprise I saw this Astrophytum Asterias Shinshowa with these marks on its skin, it will surely die and is one of the reasons why many people prefer not to grow Astrophytum they say they rot easily and although it may be true, in my case I haven't had many losses.
And while I was still checking the garden I started to feel bad, I got a headache and also my bones started to hurt too, soon after I started to feel fever, but that didn't stop me from my mission, I had in mind what I had to do so I kept on working, it was time to pot these pitahaya cuttings, I put them to root in water, so it was time to put them in soil.
I didn't freak out about how I felt, in fact I'm surprised I went this long without feeling sick, I have three nieces that love to be with me at my house and all three were sick with the flu, I knew I would get sick at some point too, but what can I do? I'm the cool uncle and I couldn't tell them not to come to my house.
As you can see some cuttings were too big so I decided to make a second cut and graft some Astrophytum, I have done it this way before, it's like buying time, I make the graft and then the rootstock grows its root.
Cacti are stronger than we imagine, so they resist almost anything we do with them very well.
Almost all grafters remove the spines from the rootstock, for safety, for aesthetics, but also for other reasons that I will explain below.
I leave the spines because they allow me to hold the graft tape, such as when I do this type of grafting.
As I was feeling bad enough I decided to stop grafting for safety, I don't want to make a mistake and kill the scions before their time. Once I feel better I will make more grafts here, although I have no idea where I am going to put them, again I have no more space in the mini greenhouse so I urgently need to make the new one, or sell some grafts.
These are the grafts I did over the weekend, also including Obregonia Denegrii.
Now it is time to check some of the grafts, I definitely see that they are growing, you can see it in the color of their ribs.
I definitely love this cactus, Astrophytum Capricorne, which by the way, I need to graft more so I can produce my own seeds.
I am sure this one will also be one of my favorites, it is a micro graft of Astrophytum Super Kabuto, and as you can see it looks like it will have an interesting shape, time will tell, but for the moment it has already started to grow.
It's time to check one of my biggest failures as a grower, out of 400 Lithops that I planted only a few survived, but we can see that they are growing quite well, besides they are not supposed to molt until they reach the first year, these are only about 7 months old and they have already started to do it, so I will surely buy more seeds.
Now a gymnocalycium that I grafted more or less a week after its born, as we can see it has a good growth and the color indicates me that it likes the place where I have it, zero stress.
Now talking about the spines, when you remove the spines from the rootstock you do it to prevent new shoots from coming out of the plant, that way all the energy goes to your scion, in my case I leave them because it is a good way to harvest new rootstock and my scions still keep growing.
See? It's still growing without problems, by the way that black stuff on the rootstock came out because they were under the night breeze for a long time before building the greenhouse, I need to take something like a toothbrush and start cleaning.
Same with mytillocactus, I leave the spines to harvest more rootstocks.
This is an Astrophytum cultivar, it came out of a mix so at the moment I have no idea what type it is, but it is grafted on Pereskiopsis.
Lophophora on pereskiopis.
And astrophytum on pereskiospis, as you can see micro grafts are more effective on pereskiopsis, although if you noticed I have done micro grafts on pitahaya and myrtillocactus too, so everything is possible, thanks for seeing the pictures and reading the post, I hope to get better in the next days because the truth I still feel like shit.