Grafting Cacti to Rapidly increase your Collection
There are lots of reasons for Grafting Cacti.
This article is about how to use grafting to quickly increase the quantity of a particular cactus or clone.
I’m going to use Trichocereus Bridgesii clone, “True Blue” as the subject/scion.
It’s one of my favourites! It has a nice blue epidermis and long yellow spines. Plus it grows fairly quickly here in Melbourne’s climate. It’s also not very common and is worthy of wider distribution.
Then just sit back an wait for the stump to form pups (more on the cutting later!).
When you slice the pup along the length, the idea is to preserve the tip on one of them. Often this is achieved without even trying! From experience, even if you are accurate enough to cut right through the centre of the tip, the tip still seems to want to grow out on one of them. The other half, will of course produce a pup.
From the photos above, you can see how the pup on the original plant has outgrown the grafted pups. So in this case, the grafts definitely weren’t done to increase growth. It was purely to increase the numbers.
Therefore, you can see how easy it is to turn 1 plant into 7 (including the original cutting) in just a few months.
Plus if you really want to, you can increase it again by simply regrafting the pups and tips in the same manner and increasing each by 2 more. It really does just depend on how many you want and how much rootstock you have!
As for the original tip cutting . . . .
14/04/2024 Yes, I know it looks pretty stressed! I really didn’t treat it very well. After it was cut from the mother plant I let the cut heal for a week or two. Then the cutting went straight into the ground and had very little sun protection. Luckily, spring and the beginning of summer were pretty mild last year, otherwise it would have needed some sun protection.
The good news is, it still continued to grow. I’m not sure if I have the ruler in the right position but there is probably about 10 to 15cm under the ground.
I’ll probably update this again at the end of 2024. I planted a few other cuttings of other clones in the same manner at the end of 2023. All are doing well and it’s probably worthy of another blog post.
Until then, if you have any favourites you’d like to propagate in numbers then try grafting some baby pups. It’s a great way to increase the numbers, really fast!
