My baby cactuses are turning white --- I have them under a plastic enclosure outside in the sun. Are they getting too much sun? Is this what happens when they get too much sun? They were definately a much healthier-looking shade of dark green earlier today.
cactus seedlings need to be kept in indirect lighting for at least the first year. i mentioned this in your other post. also, they don't need to be under plastic at this point - the plastic is only used during germination and the first month or so of growth. after that, too much moisture is bad for them. they need good air circulation at this point and they need to be protected from full sunlight.
OK. But is this what happens when they're getting too much sun --- they turn white? Well, you know there is a large amount of material on the net that advises giving small cacti lots of sun, sorry, don't want to sound belligerant, and this is certainly not an area that I'm familiar with and want to continue getting advice from you more knowledgeable cactus-people, but yeah, there seems to be a large body of opinion that thinks the more sun the better, and that high heat and sun is ok as long as the moisture is high (as in an enclosed, under-glass or plastic container). I think the trichocereus ones could be more sensitive to sun than the other ones, and I haven't separated all of them, which I should.
Too much moisture! My little ones look just like that when there's a freak week of rain and the humidity goes over 70%. If you want them to survive, get that celo off, and get them into a well-ventilated area with indirect light. Don't water again until the soil parches. Trichos are only delicate in this very early stage of life; later on you'll find that they won't die, even when gravely abused.
OK --- I've probably been over-watering them, "killing them with kindness". Despite my wanting to help them along as much as I can, I should really just leave them alone, eh? Thanks for the advice --- I appreciate it. ;)
By the way --- any suggestions on where to get some pereskiopsis (for grafting)? I'm located in Vancouver, BC.
I stopped watering and they seemed to have started turning green again, from the tops down. Thanks. I keep thinking I'm helping it when I water them but I guess not. Just wish they would grow faster.
i'm so glad they're recovering!! i was worried they were goners they were so pale! cacti and other succulents can be hard to adjust to...we're just so primed (with regular plants) to water them regularly and that water will fix whatever the problem is. it takes a bit to stop doing that!! i've lost at least a dozen plants (probably double that) over the years because i couldn't help being helpful and watering them! in fact, i completely gave up on them years ago. just started with them again in the past couple of years and am having very good success with them! (i guess older is wiser is more patient, huh? lol) when dealing with succulents and whether or not to water, generally the rule of thumb is to wait a day. and if you still have doubts the next day, wait another... the exception to the rule is the seedlings...when getting them to germinate and for a time after that, they do actually need more moisture...as they grow a bit and hit around the one-year mark, you can slack off on the moisture a bit. still need a bit more than they will when they mature a bit (around 2 1/2 -3 years). at that point, you start really going sparse with the watering...by three years of growth, it's an adult plant and can be treated according to the basics for that species. hard to see in the pics with nothing to reference for their size...i'd say they're just about a year old...so, still need more than the usual amount of moisture although not as much as they needed as true baby seedlings. watering once a week should be plenty. they do need protection from the harsh sun...you can use a piece of cloth - an old t-shirt, a curtain, etc to provide protection...just from the direct sun. leave most of the area open/uncovered so they get plenty of air circulation. please update in a month or so, too, i'd like to see how they're doing! oh, 'nother thing about cacti...most are very slow growers...so patience is definitely needed! to be able to keep track of it, i'd suggest putting something in the pics so you can track the growth...because the growth can be slow and imperceptible at times, having a reference object there makes it so much easier to see that there is a difference.
Joc, yeah, they're definately recovering. I read somewhere they need more water and high humidity when very young so I acted accordingly. Another thing was that these are supposed to have evolved in an extremely wet environment (for a cactus), so I figured I should water them more because of that. It's good to see them turning green again.
What they don't normally mention is that the soils where these evolved are almost pure sand and volcanic grit! It might rain torrentially, but it drains even faster.
Lor, really? Hmmm. I wonder if I should just go to the beach and put the grab on some sand instead of paying like $5 for a bag of "cactus soil"? By the way --- these trichocereus peruvianus, I read that they evolved on the upwind (west) side of a Peruvian mountain range near the ocean, and the prevailing winds are westerlies (like they are here). On the west side of our maountains there's like a zillion times more precip than the east side. In fact, once you get past a couple ridges of mountains near the interior of BC it's a desert with rattlesnales and scorpions. Anyway, I was just wondering, how much moisture do these cacti actually get? Is it just a heavy fog once a day that leaves everything wet or are we talking meters of precip every year? Just curious. And do they only occur above a certain elevation and blow another or are they all over like weeds? I wish we had weeds like this.
So long as you sterilize it in your oven, you're on the right track!!! Well, I've been to those deserts. They get about a meter a year of true precip, and heavy fog every other day or so. Elevation does not seem to be a factor - they grow just as happily on the beach as they do in Quito (2840 m more or less)
Lor, There's beach near English Bay where the sand granules are extremely small, almost like a powder, and there's another beach on Pitt Lake where the sand grains are much larger, almost a miliimeter across --- which do you think would be better or doesn't it matter? Just curious ... ;)
Yeah, their green color is clearly coming back --- and they're growing. Must have gotten longer by at least 2/3 of a millimeter. My desmanthus plants grew a couple cm day.
We've been having a really sunless and cold early June up here in southern BC. They even re-opened a ski-hill for a weekend because the freezing level descended to 1000 meters and there's a ton of snow up there! We've had maybe an hour of patchy sun in the last ten days. So, I'm thinking, under these conditions, maybe the "keep baby cactuses out of sunlight" maybe doesn't apply because the clouds are doing that anyway, and since they are cactuses, you'd think they should get SOME sun even if its sun broken by the shade of other plants or by almost completely continuous cloud cover. If we get a decent high pressure system move in and threaten to start scorching them, I'll put them back in the shade. Hope I'm doing the right thing, the whiteness still hasn't all gone, maybe need to dry out more...
That sounds about right. Just watch 'em for signs of stress. And on the weather front, it's both gratifying and scary to hear that the climate is behaving oddly for June in Canada as well. Down here, it's traditionally the beginning of the hot/dry season, but it's been raining harder than it did in the heart of wet season, and it's only cleared off in the last couple of days....
Really? Yeah, it's scary the way everything is changing so quickly. Actually, though, June sometimes is like this up here (cold and wet) --- weathermen sometimes call it, "Juneuary", lol. I found some people to trade seeds with and I have a bunch of cactus seeds coming --- looking forward to starting them. My cactuses that swelled and turned white, however, now are turning green again but have shrunk drastically. I haven't watered them again, the soil is really dry --- you think I should water them a bit? The echinopsis seem a lot more sensitive to water than the lophophorias --- no matter how much or how little water there is, the lophos always look the same, its just the echinopsis that act wierd and swell up and blanch and then shrink and all that. I'll have to seperate them all and give each one it's own pot I guess when they grow a bit more ...
I'd give them the teensiest of drinks - not even enough to drain out through the bottom. You don't want a reapeat of the white-swellies.
I never do (give them enough for it to drain out the bottom). I figure most of the moisture they get in their natural environment is from fog which just wets the surface (which is why they're supposed to have a flat, diffuse root system instead of a deep taproot, I guess), so I just spray a bit on the surface. But, yeah --- OK, I'll do that. Thanks for the advice. ;)
I spoke too soon. One of my trichocereus has shriveled up and died, the rest of them have shrunk to half their size previously, and look like a bug has chewed half of them off but it isn't a bug, they've simply shrunk. Also, one of my Lophos has turned a very unhealthy shade of yellow and I can tell, it's on the verge of death --- what am I doing wrong??? I'd post photos but my camera is in the pawnshop till next week. :( I'm not happy about this. Sniff.
