Beginner Gardening: Burro's Tail, 0 by tapla

tapla wrote:
I hope Joyce will indulge my musing as I answer. That's kind of a hard question to answer w/o some waffling, though I've always had very good luck growing a wide variety of healthy cacti & succulents. Most of what I know about plants has come as a by-product of my study efforts in those areas of plant and soil science that help me in my efforts to become accomplished at bonsai. Fortunately, those areas of science very broadly overlap other types of plants as well. IOW, if you become very accomplished at rearing a particular plant or a particular group of plants, you've already mostly paid your dues and it's not much of a leap to be able to add other plants to the list of those you find easy to grow.

Becoming proficient at bonsai is not easy. The small volumes of soils we use and the stress that frequent manipulations of plant material impose on the plants make it imperative that we have a thorough understanding of how plants work, how to keep them healthy, and how/when to safely manipulate them in order that we might safely bend them to our will. All bonsai practitioners that have reached a fair degree of proficiency are, by default, extremely good container gardeners. They understand container culture intimately AND they know plants. If they did not, they could not be proficient at bonsai. I'm not talking about those that practice revolving-door bonsai or plant rearage, where their newly acquired plants are constantly declining until they finally expire or get pitched in favor of new; rather, I'm talking about those that can grow healthy plants through myriad manipulations year after year with complete confidence that the 3-10 year plan they have for, and the efforts they will expend on, a tree or other plant they're bringing along will indeed come to fruition because they also have confidence in their ability to keep their plants viable and healthy.

I guess I said all that so I can say that I know what it takes to grow healthy plants, and how to fix the sick ones. My greatest strength probably isn't in houseplants/succulents/cacti, but that doesn't mean that what I know about how to care for them isn't enough greater than the average grower for me to feel comfortable that at least some of my insights and thoughts are bound to be valuable or helpful.

So I guess in one way, I can't say I know a lot about the specifics of cacti culture on a species by species basis - I don't know the little idiosyncrasies and specialized cultural wants of every individual species/cultivar, but I do understand how, as a group, they function and grow and how to provide enough details to the average grower to make their culture easier - the experts don't need the help. ;o)

Take care.

Al