I guess I’m a cactus farmer now

When I was a teenager, I got gifted a cactus. I didn’t know much about it and had never really had any plants of my own. More than a decade later I looked it up, and it seems I received a cactus of “Mamillaria” family, which is somewhat amusing once you learn what that name roughly translates to.

Estonia isn’t known for being an environment where cacti thrive. We have a nice spring, short and sweet summer, nice and chill autumn, and the car-rusting winter season. And yet mine did, eventually.

The cactus started growing in length. It continued until it couldn’t continue vertically, and then it started slanting sideways, eventually falling over with its pot. That was annoying to deal with. One day I woke up to my phone alarm ringing, reached out to it only to find that the cactus had fallen over it and I had just found where the cactus was.

The cactus also survived a lot of abuse. At one point I put a bit of sawdust from the cage of pet mice that I had (adorable but difficult pets by the way!), and it actually liked it a lot and started growing even faster.

Once it had grown horizontally for at least 20cm, it decided that now is a good time to fork it and to grow in more than one direction.

I left the cactus alone, occasionally repotting it when necessary, and keeping it from falling over all the time.

Then an acquaintance mentioned that hey, you can actually pop those forks off from the cactus and grow them separately.

That’s when things got out of control. Once I popped one off, new ones would start growing from the host cactus nearby. Not long after, I had 37 cacti. I started giving them away because annoyingly these things are actually very cheap in gardening shops and I ran out of physical window sill space to put them on.

These cacti also bloom in a really nice way, usually once a year near April or May in Estonia, but sometimes again in July-August.

All the warnings about over-watering cacti are also very relevant and I suggest looking up the correct behaviour.

With age, it has become easier to handle cacti with my bare hands. Sometimes the needles stick in, that is a bit annoying.

A few years ago, I had gifted a bunch away and kept some for myself. Everything was going well, until a succulent that I brought in as an IKEA store rescue started having some white things appear on it, and not much time later it got to my cacti. Eventually, most of my cacti shriveled away and the few that were in a different room were not doing great either. The original cacti that spawned this decade-long adventure was now dead.

One of the cacti that I gave away had started growing a lot. Ridiculously well. And just like its parent, it spawned baby cacti on it, about a few dozen of them at a time. Things got quite unwieldy and we agreed to a trade: I get the big boi and I will give a smaller one in return.

I am once again in possession of a large cactus that loves to grow horizontally, and this one spawns babies like crazy.

The trick is to try to wiggle them off, then leave them to sit for a few days to a few weeks away from direct sunlight until they start showing signs of roots, pot them into soil, and grow them within natural light, but not direct sunlight to avoid them drying out. If you’ve done everything correctly and have avoided overwatering them, you will have a bunch of new cacti!

I’ve also learned that these plastic growing thingies are great for the first potting as it’s much more space efficient compared to giving each an individual pot.

Is that the right way to grow cacti? Probably not, I’ve been winging it this whole time and only have a vague understanding of what to do. Not cacti advice.

I guess I’m kind of a cactus farmer now. Send help.

Or at the very least clay pots and cacti soil, I’m running out.