Is it possible to hybridize medusoid Euphorbia with Euphorbia obesa?

Is it possible to hybridize medusoid Euphorbia with Euphorbia obesa?

What the title says. I believe obesa and the medusoid Euphorbias are closely related enough that it is in theory possible, however, I want to know if this has been attempted before and above all else if it has yielded any actual results

u/DrowBot64 — 3 days ago

Orbea variegata and speciosa finally bloomed at the same time as eachother

Also yes, the variegata is crested

u/DrowBot64 — 8 days ago
▲ 2 r/cactus

Two Gymnocalycium hybrids I own

No idea what the genetic makeup of these things might be, other than they might involve G. mihanovichii to some extent

u/DrowBot64 — 8 days ago

Moss growing in the same pot as succulents and cacti

About a month ago it got really rainy around here. I'm talking it rained here for a month straight, everyday, every week, but as of recently the rain stopped for a little bit, and now the days have become sunnier and drier again, however, this hasn't deterred moss from continuing to grow wherever it can, and it just so happened that some succulents in a more forgotten part of my garden were the perfect place for the moss to grow. The plants (Sedum adolphi, Echinocereus pentalophus, and Peniocereus serpentinus) are actually not only not dead despite the rain, the moss, and the bad soil, but it seems that they're working on actively growing new stems and tissue, which is proof to me that certain cactus and succulent genre are a lot more resilient and tolerant of odd contains that some people would be willing to give them credit for

u/DrowBot64 — 18 days ago
▲ 3 r/cactus

Moss growing in the same pot as succulents and cacti

About a month ago it got really rainy around here. I'm talking it rained here for a month straight, everyday, every week, but as of recently the rain stopped for a little bit, and now the days have become sunnier and drier again, however, this hasn't deterred moss from continuing to grow wherever it can, and it just so happened that some succulents in a more forgotten part of my garden were the perfect place for the moss to grow. The plants (Sedum adolphi, Echinocereus pentalophus, and Peniocereus serpentinus) are actually not only not dead despite the rain, the moss, and the bad soil, but it seems that they're working on actively growing new stems and tissue, which is proof to me that certain cactus and succulent genre are a lot more resilient and tolerant of odd contains that some people would be willing to give them credit for

u/DrowBot64 — 18 days ago
▲ 28 r/MonarchButterfly+1 crossposts

Questions about growing Asclepias curassavica as someone who lives in Mexico City

Hello, I recently harvested some seeds of the aforementioned Asclepias curassavica from a plant that was growing in a nearby park, but right before getting to the preparations needed to sow them I do my research and come to find out this species is a very controversial one. However, most of the controversy and discussion around this plant comes around peeps who live in the US and particularly in or around warmer states such as California, Florida, or Texas, but I don't live in the US, matter of fact, I live very far away from it, in Mexico City to be specific. And one of the conclusions about this species that I've gathered is that it ~might~ be native to here or bordering states, which makes me question, is it okay if I decide to grow some here then? I've seen that it's bad primarily for two reasons, those reasons being:

-It disrupts the migration cycle of monarch butterflies by making them stay wherever the plant is year round

-The plant serves as a vector for protozoan parasites which cause malformations in the butterflies that lead to their death

But I'd like to know if any of these points are of concern around where I live, since again, the discussion I've seen around this plant revolves around growing it in the US.

Hopefully someone more educated than me could tell me about any possible impacts growing this plant might have under this context, and one last thing, if this changes anything I live in a big city with not that many green areas, and I believe I have yet to see a monarch butterfly in the first place but I'd still like to be cautious about any of them that might be around here

u/DrowBot64 — 1 month ago
▲ 4 r/cactus

It's been raining every day for the last 3 weeks and somehow I've only had one casualty...

For some context, I live in central Mexico and it's been raining every day for many weeks by now, and yet all of my plants have been doing better than ever as of recently. But I'll admit, it's really sunny and hot for most of the year when it isn't raining, with us going without rainfall for months straight and with days that remain at over 30°C for many hours during the hottest parts of the year, meaning most of my cactus and succulents have been in bone dry soil for the last months, however, when it rains around here it POURS, which is evident right now as it has rained daily for the last 3 weeks as of writing this, and it's been raining so much that the soil of my plants hasn't been allowed to dry in the weeks when it's been raining, and yet, because I have them growing in full sun and in very gritty substrate, they're taking it juuuust fine.

​

Seriously though, with how much people around here like to parrot that you should only "water cactus when they're wrinkly", all of my plants (mostly succulents and cactus mind you) are doing incredible right now, and as the title mentioned, I've only had ONE single casualty I can attribute to overwatering, which was a saguaro seedling whose roots didn't even rot away and instead what happened was the stem burst open and got infected and then died. And as I mentioned beforehand, this is because I've been growing them in specific conditions for most of the year (said conditions being bone dry soil for months and being in very gritty substrate) which help emulate the environment where most of these things are found in somewhat closely, it also helps that since I live in central mexico I already live in a place where cactus have been growing for far longer than any of us have been around for. Hell I could probably bike to go see cactus growing out in the wild if I wanted to.

​

If there's one thing I want you, the reader, to take away from this, is that plants are surprisingly adaptable to growing in conditions most would deem fatal, and that the environment in which these plants grow in the wild tends to be quite a bit different from what most people would expect, such as in here, where yes, it's dry for most of the year but there are months where it rains and rains and rains and these plants just take it, since they're used to growing like this in the wild. But of course, I am not necessarily telling everyone to go water their cactus daily, especially if you don't know what you're doing, I instead suggest reading up on what plants you're growing and the kinds of environments they live in so you can know what they can and can't take, and also, take into account variables other than water, such as the soil in which the plants are sitting in, how many hours of sunlight they're getting, how hot does it get during daytime, and even where you have them growing in and what material and color the pots might be.

u/DrowBot64 — 2 months ago

How it's going // How it started (2021)

Species is Faucaria tigrina for the curious

u/DrowBot64 — 2 months ago
▲ 62 r/orchids

Prosthechea karwinskii, flower smells like overripe lemon zest

u/DrowBot64 — 3 months ago
▲ 40 r/botany

Poinsettia seedlings update week one

So if you haven't seen my last post I found a mature poinsettia tree with seeds near me and thought I'd give it a shot to grow some, being that there is almost zero information related to poinsettia seedlings on English. And well, I'm happy to announce the seedlings turn 1 week old today! So far they're doing very good, they're growing really fast, even far faster than I expected, and they've got some huge seedling leaves as well as some true leaves that are seemingly going to grow pretty big as well. The seedling leaves at the time of me posting this are around 4 centimeters wide on all sides, and I can definitely say I didn't expect them to have seedling leaves this large, but I'll have to let y'all know if they grow any larger than they are now.

All and all the seedlings are doing great, hopefully I can keep them for another year and get them to flower to see what might change with them, that's all for now, bye!

u/DrowBot64 — 3 months ago

Poinsettia seedlings update week one

So if you haven't seen my last post I found a mature poinsettia tree with seeds near me and thought I'd give it a shot to grow some, being that there is almost zero information related to poinsettia seedlings on English. And well, I'm happy to announce the seedlings turn 1 week old today! So far they're doing very good, they're growing really fast, even far faster than I expected, and they've got some huge seedling leaves as well as some true leaves that are seemingly going to grow pretty big as well. The seedling leaves at the time of me posting this are around 4 centimeters wide on all sides, and I can definitely say I didn't expect them to have seedling leaves this large, but I'll have to let y'all know if they grow any larger than they are now.

All and all the seedlings are doing great, hopefully I can keep them for another year and get them to flower to see what might change with them, that's all for now, bye!

u/DrowBot64 — 3 months ago
▲ 205 r/Euphorbiaceae+1 crossposts

I have successfully grown poinsettia from SEEDS

Yes that's right, SEEDS. Some of you might not know this but poinsettias don't always grow as those small little houseplants everyone keeps during christmas, in their native habitat in central Mexico (which just so happens to be where I live) they instead grow as fairly big trees, measuring around 2 stories tall and they're generally 50% wider than they are tall. And it's because of this that I presume many people have planted them around my city since they do well and are easy to get, leading to there being a good amount of these mature form poinsettias around here. And seemingly, the presence of various poinsettia trees around here has led to at least one of them growing seed pods with viable seeds on them, which I harvested after noticing the tree the seeds were coming from and decided to grow them myself.

Now, the problem with this is that there is damn near no information about growing poinsettia from seeds, with some websites even stating misleading information such as saying you have to cold stratify the seeds for multiple months (which by the way, how does that even work? Poinsettia naturally live in semi-arid warm mountains where not once does it ever snow, poinsettias themselves are not frost hardy in the slightest dammit!) so I had to go off intuition and guess how they grow in their native climate (but to be honest I didn't have to do much guessing since I already live in it though). As such, all I did was stick the seeds about 2cm underneath a pot with very organic soil and tried to water only when the top half of the soil seemed completely dry, after that the seeds germinated fairly quickly, taking only 1 and a half weeks for the seedlings to pop out of the soil and 2 weeks for the seedling leaves/cotyledons to split open from the seed shell and begin to grow. Also, the cotyledons seem to be covered in what I believe to be the seeds endosperms after they rise from the ground, this approximately 2mm thick crust eventually thins away and becomes easily peelable and removable from the cotyledons (see pictures 8-9) which allows the cotyledons to fully expand and grow along with the seedling.

I am particularly eager to share the last part related to the cotyledons, because even though there's a few articles on the internet talking about how to germinate the seeds there are none and I really do mean NONE that go in depth about the appearance of the seedlings and cotyledons or show pictures of them, or atleast none that I could easily find. So pretty much, you're looking at the only picture of poinsettia seedlings on the internet =b.

I find it really strange that such a well known and iconic plant as the poinsettia, being found on every corner of the globe and all, has such a poorly documented registry on its seeds and seedlings, most likely because you can only harvest seeds from the old and tall arborescent forms of the plant which is a luxury not everyone seems to have. But I'm here to make that change, at least a little bit. I will keep everyone updated with how the seedlings grow over the months, hopefully my post reaches people who are just as interested in growing these things from seeds as I am

u/DrowBot64 — 3 months ago
▲ 205 r/poinsettias+1 crossposts

I have successfully grown poinsettia from SEEDS

Yes that's right, SEEDS. Some of you might not know this but poinsettias don't always grow as those small little houseplants everyone keeps during christmas, in their native habitat in central Mexico (which just so happens to be where I live) they instead grow as fairly big trees, measuring around 2 stories tall and they're generally 50% wider than they are tall. And it's because of this that I presume many people have planted them around my city since they do well and are easy to get, leading to there being a good amount of these mature form poinsettias around here. And seemingly, the presence of various poinsettia trees around here has led to at least one of them growing seed pods with viable seeds on them, which I harvested after noticing the tree the seeds were coming from and decided to grow them myself.

Now, the problem with this is that there is damn near no information about growing poinsettia from seeds, with some websites even stating misleading information such as saying you have to cold stratify the seeds for multiple months (which by the way, how does that even work? Poinsettia naturally live in semi-arid warm mountains where not once does it ever snow, poinsettias themselves are not frost hardy in the slightest dammit!) so I had to go off intuition and guess how they grow in their native climate (but to be honest I didn't have to do much guessing since I already live in it though). As such, all I did was stick the seeds about 2cm underneath a pot with very organic soil and tried to water only when the top half of the soil seemed completely dry, after that the seeds germinated fairly quickly, taking only 1 and a half weeks for the seedlings to pop out of the soil and 2 weeks for the seedling leaves/cotyledons to split open from the seed shell and begin to grow. Also, the cotyledons seem to be covered in what I believe to be the seeds endosperms after they rise from the ground, this approximately 2mm thick crust eventually thins away and becomes easily peelable and removable from the cotyledons (see pictures 8-9) which allows the cotyledons to fully expand and grow along with the seedling.

I am particularly eager to share the last part related to the cotyledons, because even though there's a few articles on the internet talking about how to germinate the seeds there are none and I really do mean NONE that go in depth about the appearance of the seedlings and cotyledons or show pictures of them, or atleast none that I could easily find. So pretty much, you're looking at the only pictures of poinsettia seedlings on the internet =b.

I find it really strange that such a well known and iconic plant as the poinsettia, being found on every corner of the globe and all, has such a poorly documented registry on its seeds and seedlings, most likely because you can only harvest seeds from the old and tall arborescent forms of the plant which is a luxury not everyone seems to have. But I'm here to make that change, at least a little bit. I will keep everyone updated with how the seedlings grow over the months, hopefully my post reaches people who are just as interested in growing these things from seeds as I am

u/DrowBot64 — 3 months ago

Two huge aeonium crests growing out of an even larger cluster in a nearby neighborhood

u/DrowBot64 — 3 months ago

I wonder if it'll be possible to hybridize them all...

Species (in order)

Euphorbia inermis

Euphorbia anopila

Euphorbia obesa hybrid (possibly with meloformis subsp. valida)

u/DrowBot64 — 4 months ago
▲ 117 r/peyote

Sold to me as Lophophora williamsii, got this 2 year old plant for just over 11 USD when converting to dollars

u/DrowBot64 — 4 months ago
▲ 15 r/botany

Leuchtenbergia is a very curious looking species of cactus with its very pronounced tubercles, but something I've noticed about this species is that it possesses two kinds of "stem". The first kind are the long tubercles with spines at the end, and the second is a smooth trunk that is exposed after the tubercles shrivel up/are removed, and I do not understand how the cactus was able to grow both kinds of stem tissue instead of merging them both into one like other cactus genre such as Mammillaria, which also have very pronounced tubercles that are, unlike in Leuchtenbergia, very much the stem itself and do not fall off/cannot be removed without exposing the inner tissue of the stem.

So does anyone know what is going on in here? How does this cactus have 2 kinds of stem tissue? In any other plant I'd just assume that the "tubercles" are in reality extensively modified leaf petioles and the smooth, bare stem that is exposed after they fall off is the true stem tissue but I know cacti don't work like that, and in cactus that do grow leaves such as Austrocylindropuntia the morphology of the leaves is completely different, so I am having a hard time believing that is the case in Leuchtenbergia, does anyone know more than me about the morphology of this thing?

u/DrowBot64 — 4 months ago