Hello from Italy!

Welcome,

Amazing plants ! I really like the two ^^ Fukuryu brothers, just outstanding.

Thanks!
We crossed them this summer and obtained some seeds.
The white one, called haku-jo, that mean white stripe on the rib, makes particular thick fruits similar to those of caput-medusae.

welcome carlo e daniele, wereever i go early or late you arrives ! i'm happy to be not the only italian on this forum!
your plants like i ever see you are beautiful! and i like a lot your fukuruyu, especialy the ones that flower on the sub ribs!
hope to meet you in the real word! italy are little!

Hello Emanuele and thanks! we see you have too a good collection of astros!
Writing on foreign forums is a good way to improve the languages...
And this forum is very interesting and particular since here in italy is now winter whereas in australia is beginning summer. So we can show during next months the change of colours of myrio koh-yo and see here the plants on flower!

Welcome Carlo & Daniele - hope you enjoy this forum.

Your plants are really awesome. You are lucky you can have such beautiful plants in your collection.

yes i agree wit you, one of the reason of my presence here are the language! english is ever useful! and yes inverse seasons are a nice ting to play with!
my collection are poor in front of your! and probably i have reali less arios than you but the budget that i can give to my collection are les tan your! i am alone your aare two!!!! hehehehehehehehe

@ Vicki: thanks for the welcome! We see here there are some astro lovers too

@ cortona: english is a good language to speak with foreign people!
About the budget: we try not to spend not too much, but if we want to buy an expensive plant we can buy 50 and 50 % and this is good!

Carlo & Daniele, Hello and welcome to the forum.
You have some very interesting plants, and they are very nicely grown... I like them a lot.
We never see any of the hybrid Astrophytums here in Tasmania... so I don't have any of them so I really enjoy looking at your photographs. I very much like your hakuun withall those lovely flowers.

Cheers, CP

Hello and thanks!
Hakuun is a quite strange plant, it flowered a lot past summer but is was not very fertile. But it is really nice when it flowers so much. Next summer we will cut (and regradft) all the offset in order to make the main head bigger.

Hello and welcome!
This is great, we need more overseas growers here. You Italians sure have some amazing plants, particualrly Astrophytums and crests and monstrose plants.
how old are the own roots digitostigmas?

re: hakuun, i always thought they were sterile but apparently not. however mine refuses to cooperate regardless of what it is crossed with.
i do know Lotusland is sterile though, i don' t think theres any denying that, so i'm not going to bother to attempt to cross mine with other astros. I'm more than happy to be proven wrong though

Hi Carlo & Daniele, welcome to the ausie forum.
It's good to see other people around the world that share the same enthusiasim.
I hate to seem like a noob but I have never seen the fukuryu variety.

Can I ask, trait carried via seed in the dna or is it monstrose?

@ lewis: digitostigma are from febraury 2007, the photo was taken in september 2008, in flower for the first time.

@ KanJe: fukuryu are new plants also in italy. There are many forms, some are clustering and do not flower too much but the other are fertile and produce perfect seeds. We think the trait is carried via seed, since mostly of these plants flowers like common myrios; but we have to wait some years to see the % of charaterized plants.

Carlo & Daniele wrote:

@ KanJe: fukuryu are new plants also in italy. There are many forms, some are clustering and do not flower too much but the other are fertile and produce perfect seeds. We think the trait is carried via seed, since mostly of these plants flowers like common myrios; but we have to wait some years to see the % of charaterized plants.

This excites me...
We need to get them in australia I think...

We need to get all these plants in Australia, such a shame:(

Welcome Carlo and Daniele! Your collection makes me drool, i wish we had these plants available here in Australia. I guess theres and upside though, if we could freely import these plants and CV's, it would make them less appealing i guess because there is so much to choose from, where as now we take what ever plant we can get, it's sort of like a treasure hunt.

Carlo & Daniele wrote:

@ lewis: digitostigma are from febraury 2007, the photo was taken in september 2008, in flower for the first time.

hopefully mine will flower eventually.
here it is when i got it a few months ago:

and now:

growth rate doesn't seem to be that slow, nice fat fourth tubercle in the middle coming through.
may i ask for advice, as im a newbie to growing these, how do you grow them well on their own roots? i don't really know what i'm doing, im just giving it standard cactus treatment. do you soak it all summer like a leuchtenbergia? or let it dry completely between waterings? lots of fertiliser? are they sensitive and/or difficult? they seem to like shade, correct?

We kept these two seedling almost dry during past winter and they developed very good taproot. They growed well during past summer and flowered for the first time in september. They are in 5,5 x 5,5 x 8 cm pots. We use the same treatment as other cactus and they are quite strong plants. As they have a good root they can stay dry for a quite long period (as ariocarpus we think); maybe some tubercles will dry up but after it will produce new ones. During summer we give them water and when the soil is dry we give it onother time. No chemical fertiliser, only natural one.
About shade: they grow greener not in full sun (we use a "shading tissue" on the greenhouse, do not know what is it correct name), but they need light like other "white" astrophytums.

^Thanks heaps for the advice. Much appreciated, great info.

Carlo & Daniele wrote:

We kept these two seedling almost dry during past winter and they developed very good taproot. They growed well during past summer and flowered for the first time in september. They are in 5,5 x 5,5 x 8 cm pots. We use the same treatment as other cactus and they are quite strong plants. As they have a good root they can stay dry for a quite long period (as ariocarpus we think); maybe some tubercles will dry up but after it will produce new ones. During summer we give them water and when the soil is dry we give it onother time. No chemical fertiliser, only natural one.
About shade: they grow greener not in full sun (we use a "shading tissue" on the greenhouse, do not know what is it correct name), but they need light like other "white" astrophytums.

Thanks for the tips guys, it's very much appreciated.
I still haven't got this plant, I gues it wont take long for them to be more common.

yep, as more propagating gets under way the plant will gradually make the transition to having a permanent place in the hobby. although i think at least in the short-term future it will remain as a choice collectors plant, probably not as common as a domestic ornatum or myriostigma. Unless some commercial nursery in Korea starts mass-producing them by grafting like they do with the albino Gymno mihanovichii's and so the digis start appearing at Bunnings and K-mart.