Learn
Growing Trichocereus, in plain English
Everything here is written for someone who has never owned one of these. No jargon inside a definition, no assumed knowledge, and where growers genuinely disagree I say so instead of quietly picking a side.
Read these first
Meet Trichocereus
What these tall ribbed columns are, where they come from, and why the way they grow is not like anything else you have kept on a windowsill.
Start here · 8 min read
Cutting, rooted or grafted: what turns up in the box
Three listings, three prices, three completely different first weeks. What each one actually is, and what you do on day one.
Start here · 8 min read
Rooting a cutting, step by step
Six weeks of watching it look worse, and one afternoon of decisions. The whole sequence, week by week, including which of the alarming bits are normal.
Propagation · 11 min read
Start here
- Meet TrichocereusWhat these tall ribbed columns are, where they come from, and why the way they grow is not like anything else you have kept on a windowsill.8 min read
- Cutting, rooted or grafted: what turns up in the boxThree listings, three prices, three completely different first weeks. What each one actually is, and what you do on day one.8 min read
Growing
- Sun, water, soil, potsFour things decide how your cactus does, and they are all connected. The numbers for each, and the order to change them in when something looks off.10 min read
- Pups, cresting and monstrose formsSome of the most valuable cacti in this hobby look wrong. One thing that looks very similar is a contagious disease. How to tell them apart.8 min read
Propagation
- Rooting a cutting, step by stepSix weeks of watching it look worse, and one afternoon of decisions. The whole sequence, week by week, including which of the alarming bits are normal.11 min read
- Grafting basicsSlice the top off one cactus, sit a piece of another on it, hold it with two rubber bands, and a week later they are one plant. What is actually happening, and why you do not have to do it.10 min read
- How these cacti flowerA bud is a grey smudge for weeks, then a white flower the length of your forearm that opens after dark and is finished by the next evening. What triggers it, how to read the three bud stages, and why some plants never do it at all.8 min read
- Why a clone cannot pollinate itselfLine up a hundred cuttings of one named clone, flower every one of them on the same night, and you will not get a single seed. This is the fact the whole hobby is built on, and it is the reason named clones exist at all.7 min read
- Hand-pollinating, step by stepTwo flowers, two different plants, one night. The work itself takes about a minute a flower — the rest is timing, labelling, and two weeks of waiting to find out whether it took.8 min read
- Fruit, and the seed inside itThe green lump behind the dead flower: what tells you it is ripe, why you cut it off instead of pulling, and the fifteen minutes of washing that decides whether your seed is still alive in two years.7 min read
- Sowing seedTen to fifteen years to the first flower, and the first six weeks decide most of it. What to sow into, what field capacity feels like in your hand, and which of the alarming things inside the box actually mean something.11 min read
- The first year from seedEverything after the lid comes off is one long ramp: more light, less humidity, more room. The order matters, one change at a time matters, and at the end of it none of them will look like either parent.7 min read
Buying
- Buying smartHow to read a listing, which words on it actually promise something, and the ten minutes after the box arrives that matter most.10 min read
- Clones, names and why they matterWhy two 12-inch cuttings that look almost the same can be priced worlds apart, where names like TBM and SS02 come from, and the two ways a name can mislead you.9 min read
Reference
Look something up
126 terms
Glossary
Every word growers use, explained without using another one of them. Areole, callus, mid cut, NOID, monstrose — all of it.
4 species
The species
Pachanoi, bridgesii, peruvianus, scopulicola: what actually separates them — ribs, areoles, spines, skin — and which of them is growing here.
42 questions
Questions and answers
Short answers in the order people actually ask them: what to do with the box, how much water, why the tip looks thin, what ships when.
749 names
Cultivar library
TBM, Eileen, SS02, Bruce's Dragon — what each name means, where it came from, and how much anyone really knows about it.
Sources
How this hub was written
Nothing here is copied. Every page was written from a fact list I built by reading, watching and cross-checking the sources below, with each fact tagged to where it came from. I keep that fact-by-fact record on my side of the counter; what you read here is what held up after checking it against my own plants.
The community wiki, written by many growers and published under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 licence. We use its facts and reproduce none of its text or pictures.
@sanpedromastery6262 on YouTube
A hobby grower filming the same collection through two very different climates, which is where a lot of our seasonal numbers come from.
A one-person nursery in San Diego County filming its own practice in the open, in a climate close to this one.
Where growers argue things out in public. Useful for what actually goes wrong, and for seeing where opinion is split.
A Southern California nursery whose buyer guides and posted policies are the clearest record I found of what a cutting in the post should be like. They are also a competitor, and I read them as one.
And checked against
Growers know things nobody has written down, and those five are where that knowledge lives. But anything that can be checked against somebody who publishes under their own name and answers for it has been.
University of Arizona Cooperative Extension
A land-grant university's extension service, on sunburn and acclimation, freeze damage, planting depth, drainage, over-watering, rot and pests. Where this site and a forum disagree about water, this is the tiebreaker.
The Royal Horticultural Society
A national horticultural society's own growing guide: the watering year, the cool dry winter rest, mixes, pot size and how long a cut takes to callus.
A botanical garden's pest advice, written for cacti and succulents specifically — what mealybugs, scale, spider mites and root mealybugs look like, and what actually shifts them.
The International Plant Names Index
Kept jointly by Kew, the Harvard University Herbaria and the Australian National Herbarium. It is where the species names on this site were checked against the record of what has actually been published, and by whom.
Haseltonia, the yearbook of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America
Peer-reviewed taxonomy. The argument about macrogonus, pachanoi and peruvianus is settled in papers like this one, not in a comment thread, and this is the paper that made the change.
Nine more sit behind these pages the same way — extension horticulture from Illinois, South Carolina and two California counties, the Caryophyllales Network, the Desert Botanical Garden, a society’s grafting article and a journal paper on the family tree. Every one of them, and how much of this site rests on each, is on the sources page.
Every photograph on this site is of a plant grown in this yard — nobody else’s. The teaching pictures are drawings rather than photographs: a drawing can label the one thing it is teaching, hold two plants in the same light, and leave out everything that would only distract. And I will not tell you what your cactus is from a photograph: light, age and water change every feature people identify these plants by, so a photo is a hint and never a verdict.
Written from scratch off a cited fact list, never copied. Learned from the sanpedrocact.us community wiki (CC BY-NC 4.0), @sanpedromastery6262 and @IMDAVESBUD on YouTube, r/sanpedrocactus and medicactus.com's buyer guides, then checked against university extension horticulture, botanical gardens, cactus and succulent societies and the published botanical record. I will not name a plant from a photograph.
Every source behind this site →