Digital Photography Diary - Cactus Diary - Page 2
I was surprised how easy it was to get it to grow. We just cut off the top off the plant and brought it home and threw it in a short barrel of sand mixed with potting soil. I do mean I threw it literally, I was holding it with a pair of pliers and my hand was full of spines and I just wanted to get rid of it. :)
When I first brought it home it was covered with purple fruit about the size of plums. The fruit smells very sweet and has a beautiful deep rich color that the native Indians still use for dyes. Somehow or other, my Rottenweiler puppy ate all those fruit, including the spines. He even took a few chunks out of the plant, which you can still see. The next page has a close up of one of the tooth marks he left.
A few days ago, I noticed what I thought were new fruit from a distance. Yesterday, what I thought was fruit started to turn vivid colors that changed as the day wore on. They were incredibly bright beautiful flowers. Early in the morning the flower pods are closed and are a pale pinkish mauve color. As they grow they begin to turn orange and start to open. When the sun starts to set and the temperature starts to drop, this amazing transformation reverses itself and I got to watch the flowers close and change from orange, then bright pink, then finally back to mauve as they prepared for the coolness of the desert night. When the blossom is mature the orange slowly turns to deep vivid yellow as the flower opens wide to the sun.
I will tell you more about it as I watch it grow. I wish I could send you a real barrel of cactus, but for now, this will have to do.
Several hours later the vivid yellow blosson is turning orange again and the orange flowers are turning pink. The sun has moved to the other side of the house and it is now shady in the backyard.
I have seen these plants reach 6 feet high with that big paddle looking thing being quite huge on the bottom of the plant. Maybe one day mine will be that big. It has grown quite a bit in the year since I got it. The small paddles that still look a bit curled are new growth since last year.
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