There have been a lot of questions about the
cute little cacti from Monday, so I thought I'd give everyone the 411.
Andrew got the growing kit from a friend who'd been on a trip to Arizona. The kit included a 2-inch pastic pot full of rocky dirt, a clear plastic dome lid, and a packet of seeds. Supposedly there are all sorts of cactus in the mix, but all the seeds looked exactly like poppy seeds. I couldn't find anything like it online.
We completely wet the dirt in the tiny pot, sprinkled all the seeds on top, and snapped on the clear plastic lid. It only took a couple of days for them to start sprouting. After a couple of weeks (or maybe a month), the sprouts started growing white spiney prickles and we were allowed to take off the dome lid.
We started growing them last autumn. They didn't grow at all during the winter. As soon as spring came, they started growing again. I felt so bad for them in their little pot because they were all jumbled together on top of one another.
I used tweezers to transplant them, and I gently water them with the oral syringe you see in the (crappy) photo above (hey, it's way-early here ... gotta blog while I can). Should have saturated the soil before I transplanted them, because the first couple of weeks when I'd water them, the dirt would shift and settle toppling them over or burying them. There was a lot of delicate tweezering to keep them all upright and on top of the dirt.
They seem to have settled in now. The biggest of them are visibly growing day to day. The smallest aren't changing at all. I hope there really are different cactus varieties. It'll be so much fun to watch them all grow up. Of course, I don't know what we're going to do with so many cacti ... 85 rice-sized cacti are fun now, but 85 fist-sized cacti are a whole other thing. :)