Cactus Blog

A customer brought in this lovely stone bowl, and Keith helped her pick out some lovely sempervivums to fill it out.

Bambusa tuldoides grown as a street tree. Good thing its a clumping bamboo, or there could be shoots coming up across the street, in the neighbors yard, etc…

It’s an extra special custom knob from the Bucksnort Lodge. You too can take home a piece of the lodge for your own home. I recommend using these fine antique copper finish knobs on your dresser drawers. That would be best. But not for the bottom smaller drawers you use for socks and underwear; these knobs would overwhelm those two lower drawers.

BuckSnort Lodge B132 Designer Knobs

We feature Lipson Robotics at the nursery, and the newest ones have rayguns! We don’t have any with rayguns.

I bet they’ll be up on etsy soon.

Yucca valida from my open back door. No way you’re getting me out there. Except to walk the dogs, of course.

It’s raining, again, and we’re a cactus blog, so to the google!

And up comes this interesting thing. Apparently it’s a type of musical instrument, and they’re available for purchase from the Lizard King.

Rainsticks: These beautiful & high quality natural rain sticks are made in South America from dried cactus. They have a natural tan color with yarn trim. We carry several sizes of these wonderfully soothing instruments at fair prices. The longer the rain stick, the longer the duration of sound.

We’re waiting for the rain to start. And for the tsunami to hit. Makes for an interesting day.

These are tiny little euphorbia blooms, and I didn’t see the aphids until I was working on the photos, and there they are! Click the photo to see the larger, more aphid-y version.

Euphorbia characias blooms and aphids.

Be assured, those aphids are already gone, long before this photo makes it onto the blog.

We’ve got 2 employees out sick with the flu. Oy.

We got a new shipment in of solar glass from Allsop. Nice!

How can a glass topped garden stake be solar, you ask? Come back after dark and I’ll show you…

Its the Yucca gloriosa out my front window on an overcast day.

The sea squill is blooming. The sea squill is blooming!

Hah, just kidding.

Urginea maritima

I don’t have a lot to say today, having spent the morning with a plumber in the house trying to fix the hot water heater.

Here’s an old photo.

Astrophytum capricorne

Citibank sucks.

That’s enough, because if you get me started on their latest scam, I’ll plotz.

Euphorbia wulfenii blooms

The UK style of ID’ing a plant is to not ID it at all. Don’t believe me?

Here’s an article from the Guardian about identifying plants, and a picture of a Hoya flower. Try to find where they tell you the species name in the article anywhere, even among their list of hoyas. Good luck.

Bastards.

Pretty picture, though. I would guess it’s a cultivar of the fairly common H. carnosa. This is a picture of what they usually look like when we grow them. But they can also look like this. So that settles that.

The large Aloe feroxes produce a lot of blooms, and if you don’t clean them up off the leaves, they’ll damage the leaves permanently.

Good thing Keith is on top of it.

Tiny cryptanthus terrariums. These were a failed product we were trying to make for holiday ‘09. But they were too cheap, the glass too thin. The glass kept breaking, so I took the last one home. We did find a heavier duty glass sphere that we pot into, and more recently a spiny glass sphere. Yes!

I see Keith Knight has a cactus.

I wonder if he’ll keep it after the baby arrives.

We’re going to SF Gift Fair today. I hate gift fair, but when you carry some gift items, you need to carry new ones every year or the retail goes stale. So off to the moscone center we go.

It’s the last day of the fair, and reports are that it’s small this year.