Help with a gifted cactus!

[MaryMullen]

My mother gifted this cactus to me recently. She bought it at a nursery in Salt Lake City, Utah. The nursery people told her it was a "barrel cactus", but that's all. The cactus is about 4 inches high and 5 inches wide, not taking into account the length of the buds on it.

It just finished flowering, and apparently its flowers were yellow, if that helps!





(ignore the green leaf, it's from a weed that made its way into the pot)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[DaveW]

Its a Notocactus Mary, now lumped into Parodia. I will leave others to identify the species since there are quite a few similar looking ones. Usually "Barrel Cactus" gets reserved for the larger N. American cacti like Ferocactus or Echinocactus, but many seem to call anything globular "Barrel Cacti" and Notocactus are not even N. American, coming from S. America.

I note the dead flowers around the middle being left on, I find with those type of Notocacti is it is hard to remove the old dead flowers since they don't pull off easily like most cacti. I usually have to snip them off with a small pair of nail scissors if I want them removed, watching I don't damage the spines. But as its a lot of trouble so my Notocacti still have many dead flowers on them..

[dinfelu]

P1150181 (Copiar).JPG (105.26 KiB) Viewed 1881 times

if you find similar, mine is notocactus erubescens

greetings

[greenknight]

Agreed, also known as Parodia erubescens or Notocactus schlosseri.

I've got a couple of young ones:

20210702_131715.jpg (67.8 KiB) Viewed 1878 times

[MaryMullen]

Thank you all for the help! It definitely looks like a Notocactus/Parodia. Hopefully next season I get to see its pretty flowers. Thank you guys for the pictures and identification.

[greenknight]

Also, those fuzzy blobs at the base of the dead flowers are the fruits - since they're fat, they're probably full of seeds. When fully ripe those will split open (dehisc) and begin dropping seeds. You can collect them and plant them (they're pretty easy to grow), or they'll fall in the pot and sprout there - which is the really easy way to get more plants.

[MaryMullen]

Oh that's super great to know! I was wondering what they were, if they were old dead flowers or not, and if I should remove them. I'll let them grow a bit so I can get some seeds!

[greenknight]

The flowers that don't set seed are skinnier, and they tend to stick around forever - that's what those things on the side of the cactus are. You can remove them if you want, or not. As for the ones with seeds - it would be easier to collect the seeds if you took them off before they split, but it's hard to tell if they're ripe before that, so I never do.

I had a large, old one that died after many years, which is why I only have small ones. The one on the right is a pup from the old one (the only one it ever produced), the one on the left is the best of the seedlings that volunteered in the pot around it. I also have little seedlings from this generation. They don't get much fatter than yours is now, just grow taller, so I have space to keep several - but if I'd kept all the seedlings that popped up, I'd be overrun with them.