Cactus Mammillaria mix - forever pots and windowsills: cultivation, care and photos

Mammillaria is one of the most popular cacti. It is easy to care for, it multiplies easily, is rarely attacked by pests and, with proper care, blooms profusely. Mammillaria has a huge number of varieties - large and small, single or abundantly branching, with different shapes and sizes of needles, and fantastically diverse flowering.

This article talks about the features of the content of mammillaria and about home care.

Content Features

Mammillaria mix - these are different varieties of cactus of this species, growing in one pot. With co-cultivation, problems may arise due to the peculiarities of the plant structure or conditions of detention. Due to different requirements for illumination, humidity or temperature, some plants may stretch out, others may die, which is why cactus varieties with similar growing conditions must be selected for planting together.

Abundantly branching mammillaria will grow in width over time and will interfere with each other. Varieties with long spines can interfere with neighboring plants, as cacti will damage the plants growing next to them. therefore in the mix you need to plant varieties of little branching cacti with short needles, similar in size and shape of the trunk, for example, Mammillaria Carmen, Superior (perbella), Duve (duwei) get along well in one pot.

Photo

This photo demonstrates the prickly sweetness of the Mammillaria mix.

Home Care

Lighting

Plants need to be provided with a maximally lit place with direct sunlight. If there is no good ventilation in the room, then during the midday heat unheated cacti should be covered from the sun, in order to avoid overheating and burns of plants. Mammillaria easily tolerate heat, but in the summer, optimal for them are + 20-23 ° C in the daytime and + 14-16 ° C at night.

Watering

Watering in the summer is done twice a week. In cool and rainy times, watering is reduced, in hot and dry weather, the frequency of watering is increased. It is watered with filtered or settled for at least 24 hours tap water a couple of days after the top layer of the soil has dried up, which should be very loose, air- and water-permeable.

Priming

To make an earthen mixture, you need to mix coarse sand, sheet and turf soil in a ratio of 2: 1: 1, add fine brick chips to prevent stagnation of water. On a glass of soil - a teaspoon with the top. The crushed charcoal, which prevents root decay, is added to a glass - a teaspoon without top. Purchased ready-made soil for cacti must be mixed with coarse river sand, sold in an aquarium shop.

Important! When watering mammillaria, it is necessary to control the amount of water. With intensive drying of the soil in a pot, it is better to water a little, but more often. If the water for irrigation is very soft, then you need to add limestone, limestone or crushed eggshells to the soil.

Pruning

Under adverse conditions, some of the mammals in the mix can ugly stretch or twist. To correct this problem, pruning cacti is used. Spend this operation in the spring. When cropping you need:

1. Wash hands and disinfect the clerical knife blade.
2. In one cut, without making a movement "back and forth" to separate the necessary part of the plant.
3. Sprinkle the slice with powdered charcoal or fungicide.

Leave the cut plant in a dark place for a couple of days, if the cut part is used for planting, then dry it as well.

Top dressing

Plants need to be fed with special fertilizer with a minimum amount of nitrogen. Fertilize cacti from late April to mid Septemberonce or twice a month. In the absence of fertilizer for cacti, you can use complex fertilizer for indoor flowers without humic additives, diluting it 3 times more than the specified proportion.

Pot

To plant a mix of mammals, you need to choose a low and wide pot made of plastic, ceramic or dark glass, you can not use a metal pot. Be sure to have a drainage hole in the bottom. The volume of the pot should be slightly larger than the total volume of the root system of all mix plants.

Transfer

A mix of plants is transplanted in spring or early summer. To do this, you must:

1. At the bottom of the pot for planting, pour drainage (expanded clay, broken brick) to a quarter of the height of the pot.
2. Pour a small layer of soil into the drainage.
3. Extract plants from the pot in which they grew. To do this, you need a soft cloth (towel) or paper folded several times. You need to wrap the plants in a circle and carefully remove them from the pot. You can turn the pot over and tap on its bottom and walls, or push a lump of earth through the drainage hole.
4. The mix is ​​divided into separate plants, inspect the roots for pests or diseases, and, if everything is in order, put the cacti in a new pot.
5. Pour a little damp earth around each plant to the level of the root neck (this is the place where the trunk begins), periodically tapping the pot on the table to compact the soil. You do not need to ram the ground with your hands so as not to damage the thin roots. If the cacti are unstable, it is worth filling the surface with fine gravel.

After transplanting, the cacti should be kept in a dark place for three days, and only then put it on a permanent basis;

Wintering

By the winter period, the mix begins to be prepared in the fall, gradually stopping feeding, reducing watering and lowering the temperature. If it consists of pubescent cacti, then the temperature should not fall below +15 ° С, the rest winter at + 7-10 ° С. You do not need to water Mammillaria at this time. If the plants begin to stretch, then they don’t “sleep” and they will have to be illuminated with fluorescent lamps.

Reproduction by children and seeds

Mammillaria propagates by lateral shoots (children) or seeds. Children grow on the mother plant to a sufficiently large size and can acquire their own roots in the same place.

1. The grown shoots need to be separated from the adult plant.
2. Fix the mammillaria children without roots on a slightly damp soil in a pot with the help of pebbles or sticks-supports, without digging the stem into the soil.
3. Children with roots plant in the ground in the same way as adult cacti.

Breeding by children has a significant drawback - with the repeated replacement of adult plants with young shoots taken from them, the quality of the resulting plants decreases. Therefore, cacti are grown every few years from seeds.

Seeds can be collected from your cacti, purchased in stores or from amateur cactus growers. For sowing you need:

1. Pour in a bowl a layer of 1 cm high scalded drainage with boiling water, on it - a two-centimeter layer of disinfected sheet soil, and a layer of washed and calcined river sand, with a grain size of 1-3 mm.
2. Disinfect and sow cactus seeds. Small - on the surface of the sand without falling asleep; larger ones - in grooves with a depth of not more than 3 mm.
3. After sowing, spray the bowl with seeds from a small spray bottle and cover with glass or film.
4. Ventilate the crops twice a day, removing condensation from the film or glass.
5. For germination, most seeds require a temperature of about 30 degrees and lower heating, so the bowl is placed on an heating pad or heating battery.
6. As soon as the first shoots appear, the bowl must be rearranged in a brightly lit place, or light bulbs should be installed above it.
7. Over time, the glass or film from the bowl is removed, the seedlings, if necessary, re-illuminated, carefully watered, dive and grown in normal room conditions.

It is necessary to regularly check the soil temperature with a thermometer so as not to overheat the crops.

Diseases and pests

• Mammillaria can get rot from damage or overflow, get a burn from the sun, if it does not shade in a sultry afternoon.
• Bacteria and viruses that enter the cactus through untreated wounds can destroy the plant in a matter of days.
• Mammillaria also suffers from the attack of pests - mealybugs and red spider mites.

Similar plants

Mammillaria is a very variable species of cacti and, when choosing plants for planting a mix, it is easy to confuse it with similar ones:

• Corifant
• neoporteria;
• rebutia;
• turbinicarpus;
• echinocactus.

These plants differ from mammillaria in their physiology, care requirements and conditions. Therefore, in order to prevent mistakes when planting the mix, it is necessary to consult about the belonging of the selected plants to one species and their compatibility.

When creating a mix of mammillaria, you can choose plants with different appearance and colors of different types and colors. With proper care, they will create an interesting composition that will attract attention, which will serve as a real decoration of the house.