Opuntia seed germination

Hey everyone - my first post

I ordered some Opuntia macrocentra (purple prickly pear) seeds yesterday, and I was just wondering if anyone has any experience growing this species from seed or in general?

Iv heard that Opuntia sp. can be a bit difficult to germinate and Iv read a few methods that supposedly have fairly mixed results, so does anyone have a good technique that they have used on this or other opuntia sp?

I can comment that soaking in water, then on a heat pad during the day, garage temperatures at night has yielded 1 germination of about 60 seeds.

Hahaha wow, thats not too encouraging

Hopefully I have more luck than that... how long did you wait for yours to germinate? Iv heard of them taking as much as 9 years!

You might be interested in this thread : http://cactiguide.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20257

This guy did a similar thing but it worked out better. I think hes getting cooler nights though.

Theres another thread in the grown from seed section of the same forum that involved scarification, seemed to help a lot

Thanks for the link - that is a good read

I was thinking the baggie method may be the way to go. Im getting some GA-3 soon, so i think Ill give that a go for some too, see if that improves anything. Im only going to have 10 seeds to play with, but for $5 i can always get more (hopefully they turn out to actually be O. macrocentra - i love the purple colour they get in times of stress - but you cant always trust ebay).

I read the scarification thread too and that sounds like a good idea to try on some of them. Good thing is its coming into winter, and as you may know, townsville winters have hot dry days and cool dry nights, which makes it ideal for germinating and growing cacti (pitty its too wet any other time and i end up with 25% less cacti than i started with), so hopefully this will work in my favour.

I think the main thing though will be patience - as long as they dont rot (so wet-dry cycling will be needed), i should get at least a couple pop up eventually. I only really want 1 or 2 in the end but if i can get more then that would be awesome. Its hard to believe a genus thats usually considered a weed can be so difficult to germinate - but i think thats part of the reason they are weeds (even really old seeds will germinate after a while)

I hope you don't end up disappointed with your seedlings, because i have my doubts about how good a colour macrocentra will show in the tropics?
I have seen them grown in ridiculously hot & dry conditions under glass & they only get a violet tint, but out in the full force of granite belt frosts they glow vivid purple.

Either way they are a nice plant.
Good luck with them

Yea i was thinking up here they wouldnt get the full-on purple, but I think if I stop watering over winter and put them in an exposed area of the yard they should stress a bit (it can get fairly cool at night here and days are always scorching in winter), but I am considering going down south (SA) for a bit for uni (a year or maybe two) and i bet they'd glow down there - even somewhere like charters towers (west of here) might get cold enough

Seeing as its a cactus and i plan on keeping at least one as a potted specimen Id say Ill have many many years to experiment with it in different climates

poisonedshrooms wrote:

it can get fairly cool at night here

no it doesn't, it just feels that way after surviving a brownsville summer

I don't recall the towers being all that cold, i think you might need to take it up to the top of Herveys Range or Ravenshoe to get some colour into it; or SA to make it glow.

You may want to consider grafting a bit onto a wet tolerant root stock, i'm told they can be a little prone to rot during the wet when grown on their own roots.

hahaha yea I guess - im a bit of a frog, i wore a jacket the whole time I was in adelaide at the start of november. And summer here is just crazy

Good advice with the grafting - maybe i should make a cutting from a wild prickly pear (theres some around the base of castle hill and up harveys range) and graft it onto that - they seem fairly adapted to our stupid summer weather. I really dont like the weather here - too wet to grow many cacti in summer, then too cool and dry to grow a lot of ethno plants effectively over winter (my psychotrias and Iboga stall over winter).

Might go for a drive sometime soon and see if I can get some cuttings. The glochids make it a little difficult though - I remember when I was a bit younger (Im only 21 now) I was in army cadets and we went on an exercise up in High range and there were prickly pears growing around the place, and the person I was sharing a hutchie (tent) with got what would have been a few teaspoons worth of the glochids on her stuff and when she put it on she got them all over her - i think she needed to go to hospital to get them all pulled out


EDIT: i just checked out lester mayer's plant list for 2011, and he has O. Gosselliana v. santarita available - might give him a call and see if i can get a plant (that way even if all my seeds fail ill still have a purple cactus )

The wild opuntia's will probably make a top shelf stock for your environment, just remember to give them a good dose of systemic insecticide before use.

A few teaspoons worth of the glochids. That was never going to end well.

Wrap some packaging tape back to front around a soft foam block so the sticky side is out, roll it across your opuntia stocks & it will collect all the glochids so you will be able to work safely.
If its spiny as well just use nail clippers on the spines first

Thanks for the suggestions. If I use a systemic insecticide will that transfer to the scion too? I plan on (eventually - probably like half a decade from now) eating the fruit if it ever gets any, so I wouldnt want to be eating something thats full of pesticides (not sure how long the systemic ones stay in the plant for)