Mammilleria elegans

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WayneByerly
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Joined: Sun Apr 06, 2014 10:35 pm
Location: In the north end of the Sequachee Valley, 65 miles north of Chattanooga Tennessee USA. Zone 7a

Mammilleria elegans

Post by WayneByerly »

Last year I built a tiny, cheap, primitive greenhouse--someplace that I could put my cacti that I had indoors--some of whom were doing well and a very few who were not--and put almost all of my cacti in it. So that they would have the benefit of the warmth, the brighter sunlight and yet be protected from the frequent Tennessee rains. My Mammilleria elegans was one of them. In the middle of the summer it began to flower and stayed in flower for months! From about October 2016 to April 2017.

#1
October 2016. In flower ... concentric rings around the top of the cactus. Eventually covering 8 or 9 "rows".
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#2
Later (sometime this year) I discover that what had been the flowers were now fruit. Note that the picture below is from four years earlier ... i don't have more recent photos of it fruiting.
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#3
So I post on this forum a question. What should I do with the fruit? Basically I was informed to let it dry out. Almost every one of the fruiting bodies were very small. Here is one of them next to a razor blade for scale.
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#4
I found that by cutting off the very hard end where the flower had been, and squeezing them like a tube of toothpaste that was nearly empty, that I could get a couple of seeds from them. From as many as maybe a dozen or so to as few as ONE. The next pic is a shot of what I got from one of them on the end of my thumbnail. Notice that these seeds, unlike many, many cacti, are not black.
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#5
Not knowing whether or not Mammillaria elegans was self fertile or not, I put some potting soil in a smallish container, squeezed out a few of the seeds, and washed them off of my fingernail, with a spray of water, into the soil. After a couple of them began to sprout, I repeated the process with the rest of the fruiting bodies, one to three seeds at a time. You may see the new seedlings with the subsequent remaining seeds in the pic below.
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#6
M. elegans like most cacti are not quick growers. The #3 pic above is from 2013. The next picture below is from 2017. I didn't take any measurements of the cactus in 2013, but I can calculate its size by extrapolation. A dime is about 12mm across. When I measure the dime on my screen, I get 55mm. 12/55=.22 The ratio of a real dimes size and it's size on the screen.

When I measure the cactus on the screen, I get about 200mm. Multiplying the size of the cactus on the screen by the ratio calculated above, I get about 44mm.

The cactus in the picture below is about 100mm wide. So you can see that this cactus put on about 56mm of growth (approx 2.25 inches) in 4 years.
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The above picture and calculation in included (so you can see how fast they grow) in order to determine whether or not anyone will want any of these seedlings. They will be small, small, small when you get them. I'm not willing to wait years in order to find out whether any one wants any of these. No charge. I cannot even justify $1.00 to cover the cost of an envelope and $0.47 postage. In order to try to insure that something lives, I'll include about a half dozen seedlings to anyone who wants them. First come, first served, as long as the seedlings last. I have NO idea how many I'll wind up with. I've only got about a half dozen so far, but I only started with a few seeds. I must have put 30-60 seeds in the soil on my subsequent addition.
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