Succulent Soil Suggestions and Transplanting Tips

Hello gardening friends.  Welcome to backyard basics.Another one of the many questions came in about succulence and cacti.  You know they’re very popular these days.    And so, in dealing with them, you may want to learn about feeding them and it doesn’t take much.  These guys are real slow growers.  You might use a fish emulsion at maybe a quarter of its recommended application, so it’s a very subtle amount.

Some of these guys can live in the house on the window sill, a real bright window sill.  Others can be planted right out in the garden, and those are the kind of plants we need these days, as you can imagine, so they work both ways.

Now, they’re tough to transplant.  When you buy them they’re in a small container, they’re all prickly, and so you’ve got to get them out of there without tearing them up because you lose the cosmetics of a good-looking cactus.  Even though they look kind of rough, when they bloom they’re like orchids.  They’re just really gorgeous.  So one of the ways that I can transplant them, and I recommend that you do this too, is to grab them, but put a newspaper between you and the cactus.  So one of the things to do is to fold it over, and fold it over, fold it over making a little belt. There you go.  You’ve got a nice little belt right there.   And so, the crown of thorns isn’t too bad, but these little guys, they’re tough. So you take it and you wrap it around the thorns and everything.  It’s not going to hurt the thorns nor you, see.  So I’ve got it wrapped up very nice.  I can pick it up.   And so one of the things to do before transplanting is to go ahead and turn it over.  I put it there so in case it falls I don’t break the crown.

Look at the roots system. Nice, healthy roots system.  This plant is a very nice, healthy, vigorous plant.  So there we go.  Look at that. How easy it is to work with it.  These guys are just super when you do something like that.

Succulent Soil Suggestions

Well I want to pot them up.  You need a very well-draining potting soil.  I mean that’s essential.  If you don’t have that, these things are about to rot.  So what you do is get yourself a pot and not one that’s too much bigger than the cactus.  They can rot in that too.  It just stays too moist, so there’s several ways of making a potting mix for cactus.  One of them is to use a little bit of compost.  Another one is to use a little bit of the vermiculite and a little bit of perlite. These are both minerals, and they’re heated up and exploded, and they hold nutrients inside of them when they’re in the mix and they provide the drainage that you’re looking for.  So those are two of the ingredients.

Another couple of ingredients are basalt.  Basalt is a volcanic material, and this volcanic material provides a type of energy also.  And it’s like the perlite in that it’s porous.  It’s nice and open.  It holds nutrients.  It provides drainage as necessary, so I like to use basalt.

Another one of them is to use lava sand.  The lava sand is mixed in here, it’s that red stuff, and that has a little bit of energy of its own.  So between those two things and the nutrients that actually come from compost, these guys are very nutritious.  You can make a great soil; look at this.

So we put a little bit of it in the bottom.  There we go down in the bottom and get that ready, and then we go in there with this guy.  You don’t want to bury it too deep.  You don’t want it to rot up around the crown.  There it is.  It’s well placed. It’s a little bit high in the soil.  That’s what you’re looking for and you just fill this around it.  You water it in a little bit, and you’ve got yourself a great potting mix for cacti.  Now there are many mixes out there, so do the one that works for you. This one works for me, but you can certainly find many of them already made at garden centers and nurseries or on your computer.

For Backyard Basics, I’m John Dromgoole. I’ll see you next time.