Its been a year to the day that I wrote about them having cacti in Urban Outfitters. Decided to head back to Bluewater and see if they still do them and such.
First up was a look in M&S who seem to have a nice display on convergent evolution with their one cactus and one Euphorbia in a nice white china pot. We decided to head upstairs to Urban Outfitters and have a look to see if they were still selling cacti.
Guess I should say that they still were but everything was on sale. Everything on sale was on its last legs. Plants that had desiccated away to nothing, Chlorophyll less Gymno mutants whose grafting stock was just a mass of rot and stuff, thus dooming them to a early demise, and worse of all the little pots of seedlings were nearly all gone the same way.
Taking a closer look at the stuff they were growing in, it seems that the bigger £6 plants were growing in peat with a horrible glued on layer of dyed gravel. The thimble pots were seemingly just glue and dyed gravel, which accounts for the high casualty list I saw.
My advice for anyone buying of the cacti in the sale is get something healthy, that isn't leggy and if its one of those colour mutations that the graft its on is green, because that is the only way its getting any goodness to it.
When you get it home take it out of its pot and replace the peat its in with some soil based compost.
In the UK we have John Innes No3. as a good compost base, you'll want to add some grit to this (fish tank gravel is ideal although any small stone is good) about 3 handfuls of soil to one of gravel.
You can keep the clay pot if you will, unless its one of those thimble pots then you can put it in a 2" plastic pot which will be fine.
Put it in a south facing window or whatever place gets the most light and water weekly from Fools Day (April 1st) to the end of September (if you have central heating then pull this forward a few weeks if not this is fine). (Though this is dependent on where you live and climate too)
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