While home in California I spent one Saturday working in the family cactus garden with my sisters and dad. While I was doing so, it occurred to me that (re)planting cactus is unusual in the world of gardening. It requires a number of tools and techniques unlike those used for plants in more water-rich areas. So I got out the digital camera, and we all took some pictures documenting the process.

The ways in which cacti and succulents, flowers and trees are alike and different are interesting. Like trees, some cacti change colors in cold weather, and others do not:

Some succulents are weird-looking all year long:

In the Andrews family garden we have both cacti and succulents. Well, that's redundant: cacti are succulents, so that's sort of like saying "the windows were shaped like squares and rectangles." You can tell cacti apart from other succulents by their small radial groups of spines. (More here.) Succulents as a group are just that: succulent, or juicy, because they store water to survive in hot dry climates. Some store water in their roots, some in their stems, and some in their leaves, like the one my dad is holding here:

Just because succulents store water, though, doesn't mean they don't need to be watered. Preparing the ground for a new cactus is much like doing it for any other plant: first you dig a hole,

then, to encourage the plant to put down roots in its new location, you add some water:

But like I said, the tools you use for working with cactus are sometimes different from "normal" plants. Some of them, like this one, look outright weird:

This little dinosaur-like nipper is used to grab leaves and other debris out from between a cactus's spikes. You'd get a lot of painful cuts and jabs without one, and if you were just wearing gloves you might just break the spines off and make the cactus look even worse (as well as damaging its defense against cactus-eating critters). Good thick gloves are still much more important in dealing with cactus than they are with regular plants, though. We all wore leather ones, and even then we got stabbed through them.

Another strange tool that came in surprisingly handy was an old rug:

When you're re-potting a "normal" plant, you can usually tip it over, grab it by the stem, and guide its rootball out of the pot. Obviously, that doesn't work so well with cacti. So we used the rug to catch the tipping cactus and gently lower it to the ground, then pulled off the pot:

Most of the cacti seemed to have pretty small rootballs (I love that word), so unpotting them wasn't hard to do. Then we'd use the rug to carry the cactus to the next location. Carrying the pots still wasn't easy, though. Cacti are HEAVY! Dad pointed out that while wood floats in water, because it's lighter than water, cacti are FULL of water, so they're as heavy as sloshing around a big old barrel of water (covered with pointy pointy nails, no less). So sometimes we used a dolly, like Dad did with this barrel cactus:

We replanted a lot of prickly pear cactus that day, specifically a large-leafed kind called "silver dollars." Silver dollars, like other cacti and succulents, don't need to have roots to be replanted. So when we decided we wanted another silver dollar in the back of the garden, we just cut off a part of the big one by the driveway with a big kitchen knife:

We caught it in the carpet like we did with the taller cactus:

The cutting left a fresh green scar which should dry and heal with time, though I don't know if the skinlike covering of the cactus will grow over it or not. Ariel said she found the scar fascinating because of her own scars from the surgery on her broken arm earlier this year. So she took a lot of pictures of it:

In the process of cutting the cactus, we knocked off one of its fruits. Like the prickly pear fruit you may be able to buy in the produce section of a fancy supermarket, these are kind of oval, about the size of a baseball, and dark red or purple in color. They are covered with spines like the rest of the cactus, only theirs are fine, yellowish and hard to see or remove (which can make cooking with them a real pain!) And as you can see, the fruit makes a violent-looking purple juice when cut -- cool!

We carried the cut piece to the top of the garden with the carpet, put the cut base in the hole, and poured dirt around it:

As you can see, the cut piece was buried pretty deeply. This apparently helps it take root better and keeps it stable.

In addition to silver dollars, we replanted a number of aloes. Aloes are great. What other plant will try to slice you up, then provide you with the medicine you need to heal the cut?! Plus, they they grow from little tiny plants

(My sister Arlo planting an aloe. To those of you joining us from the Boston area, these words may be indistinguishable.)

to great big honkers like the one Sylvie has out of the pot here:

I noticed something really neat on that last aloe: Aloe spines start their growth folded against the leaves, then eventually pop out. When they do, the grooves where they were pressed against the leaves remain. You can sort of see that in this picture:

We did not replant any fragile bougainvillea that day, but they are still my favorite plant:

Hope this was edifying. The one thing I feel like I can't convey adequately is what cactus skin feels like between the spines. It feels like dusty plastic, only plastic can feel like a lot of things. It feels like the skin of a dolphin, if dolphin skin was dry, but most of you probably haven't been feeling up dolphins. Cactus skin is powdery and firm and indescribable.

After we were done it was Sylvie's turn to clean up the limes. Our lime tree makes yellow-skinned limes with pale green insides which smell like roses before you cut them. There were tons of them, so I got this iconic picture of Sly with a boxful:

SunMaid, eat your heart out. Posted by Gus at January 17, 2003 03:02 AM | TrackBack