Cactus Pad Update

Back in early April I turned my backyard spotlight on the bud that had sprouted from a one of three dismembered cactus pads that I’d found last summer and thunked into some soil.

Immediately after that first post there was some drama I never reported about. See, I moved the pot atop a fence post so that it could get more exposure to the sun and not long after that — maybe a few days or a week — damn if the pot hadn’t been knocked over into the neighboring yard, either by cat or squirrel or wind.

Peering over the fence down into the out-of-reach abyss where the pot was still intact but the cactii were strewn about it, my first thought was that unless I wanted to trespass into that backyard (which I didn’t) I’d just have to reconcile that my cactus dreams weren’t meant to be. I was appropriately bummed.

Then the next day, I got out of my wahmbulance and MacGuyver’d myself a trespass-free solution. Using the long arm of an old tree-branch trimmer I tied the pooper scooper to it and also knotted a long piece of twine from the handle of the scooper with hopes of being able to extend it to the ground on the other side of the fence and retrieve the pot and pads by pulling the twine and opening/closing its poop-scooping jaws.

Well it worked for all three cactus parts, but the pot proved to be too large and heavy for the scooper to handle (I’d later retrieve it when I opted to trespass into that yard after the incident with our cat Jiggy and the baby opossum that turned out to be a baby skunk).

Though I wasn’t sure if the fall and the prolonged exposure hadn’t damaged the pads, I still went ahead and re-plunked them into a larger pot of soil, placing it on the ground and surrounding it with some heavy-duty garden wire.

And dang if all three hearty pads didn’t rebound magnificently. As you can see below in the upper left, the first bud has turned into a prickly juvenile pad of its own, and the other two smaller pads are now hosting growing buds, too:

cacpadz.jpg

Amazing!