Segway From Succulents: Hidden Mickey Cactus

When I first moved into my house my brother brought over a lot of plants he had literally pinched from larger plants and then grown from the cuttings. One of the pieces he brought over was a cactus, but I'd completely forgotten about it until finding it this morning while cleaning out a large planter where I'd had a large amount of ground cover choking the other plants.

This cute little guy is rotting away.

  After removing a very large patch of applejack, I found quite a few little plants that had been nearly overwhelmed by the dense groundcover. This cactus appeared this morning, and I have no idea how it was not only still alive, but it hadn't been squashed when I pulled out the oppressive applejack. It was, however, quite rotted from sitting in mud.

With a sharp knife I sliced off the rotting tissue.

  The convenient bit was that I had just read an article on how to potentially save a cactus in such condition. The only chance was to deadhead the cactus, slicing off the top portion of healthy tissue and treating it as a cutting. With a cactus, however, one can't really give them time to callous, so the next step is to place the plant top on some soil and leaving it to develop roots. This truly is an experiment; so little healthy tissue was left it seems unlikely the remaining body can produce more plant.

Here's the plant sitting atop the soil in my cuttings nursery.

  I've also read that a cactus should be placed in soil low on organic material, so my window box nursery with its groundcover of mineral and glass beads should keep it fairly clean. The cactus is barely an inch wide, so it fits perfectly with the other small plants around it. It's like a dangerous teddy bear head right next to the 1:12 baby cradle!