An interesting read: Growing cactus in mineral mix

Just an interesting documentation this guy wrote about soil mix.

He is very firm in his views and believes that cactus are meant to be grown in the most natural conditions even if it does mean that their growth is somewhat stunted.

Do people think cactus should be grown "hard" with infrequent waterings in mineral soil or be well watered and fertilized in an organic mix? Any different views on how they should be grown?

An interesting point is that this guy claims that limestone is a growth inhibitor for cactus: that's something for people to think about who use limestone in their mixes.

Here's the link:
http://www.cactiguide.com/pdf_docs/hexalog-engl.pdf
Hope the link is alright to post > I'm not endorsing the cactiguide website it just so happens to be where the pdf is.

Honestly, I think it is all a matter of personal preference. In general there's no laws on how you grow your cacti, so you can pretty much grow them however you want to. Personally, I am impatient with mine, so altho I have many of them growing on own roots, I have many grafted and growing in optimal growth conditions, so I can see how some of the cultivars are going to look, as well as being able to get a lot of plants flowering (and hopefully making lots of seeds) sooner then if they were in natural conditions. Some of the Lophophora in nature will take 10 - 30 years to reach flowering size. The same types reach flowering maturity in as little as 120 days for me, grafted and with special heat / light / fertilizer treatments. All in all I'd say there is no one right way to grow them, though there's many wrong ways (usually ending up with over watered or dried out dead cacti).

I think I want to grow my cactus "hard" but it isn't practical to grow them like this in Melbourne conditions because there is no consistancy in our weather, we get heatwaves with the blazing sun then cool spells with cloud cover. Guess I just have to make the most of what Melbourne weather provides.

You could set up a spot inside in the corner of a room, and put a mini spotlight on a timer for a few small cacti. Could even have it set up inside an aquarium if you have an empty one somewhere, so you could keep the temp regulated as well. Open or close the lid on it to keep the temp where you want it, etc.

Yeah. It don't think my parents like running around and picking things up for me so I think I can wait til I'm 18 and got my license before I start putting all my plans into action Plus electricity bills are already high enough for all the lighting and filters and heaters used for my fish tanks. And it looks like bills are going to be up with the carbon tax coming in.

My ariocarpus will be in their microhabitat for at least another year so maybe they could go out of one monitored environment into another!

Fair enough. And yeah the carbon tax is going to hit my wife and I pretty hard too, especially in the electric bill department.