u/HomeForABookLover

I want to build an export sector, outputting everything - because it’s relaxing - like building Lego.

So I want to use lots of overdrive domes.

How do people wire them together? Does anyone reduce plumbing by making silicon on site?

I know drones are probably a better idea. I’ve tried a few different logic schematics I’ve found, but I find they stop working once I build quite a few domes.

So if anyone has a reliable, robust schematic please share it!

Well, that’s it for summer in Scotland. It’s started raining, and is due to rain all week.

This is my largest, and one of only a few Ferocacti I’ve managed to grow. I think it’s hamatacanthus. It’s hard to tell in the photo but its body is nearly a foot/30cm wide excluding spines. Probably about 30 years old.

It flowered last year, and it’s got ever so close this year. I really struggle with the genus Ferocactus.

I can’t give them a hot enough summer, and my damp winters turn them into exotic mould. The last picture shows black mould on the areoles, so the rose spray and sulphur need to come out tomorrow.

At least I’m not alone - my branch of the British Cactus and Succulent Society share similar experiences with them, with Ferocactus setispinus (now Thelocactus) being the most forgiving.

Most Ferocactus are inhabitants of genuinely arid regions of Mexico. I believe hamatacanthus is distributed across North and Central Mexico, including the** **Chihuahuan Desert
.

Setispinus, however, comes from southern Texas and northeastern Mexico, particularly the coastal lowlands and thornscrub, from approximately sea level upwards. It grows amongst mesquite and other scrub vegetation rather than being exclusively a high-and-dry desert cactus.

I thought I’d test the boundaries of the sub rules with a little story.

It’s also a shameless opportunity to share a second flush of flowers I’ve got on this Echinopsis hybrid, courtesy of the “heatwave” we’re currently experiencing in Scotland. (It’s a heatwave everywhere else in the UK, and apparently a national emergency. Here it’s lovely.)

Before I got into cacti, I used to make quite a lot of homemade wine and spirits as a teenager. My dad had a simple rule: I could only drink what I made myself. It did wonders for curbing underage drinking, and 25 (ish…) years later it still helps me keep a healthy relationship with alcohol.

He made the same rule about illicit drugs. I didn’t take him up on that particular offer, but it did introduce me to horticulture, and some wonderful gardeners, and then arid horticulture.

About ten years ago I moved from the warm South East of England to wet central Scotland.

Just before moving, I replanted a 250-year-old orchard, including two black mulberry trees.

For those unfamiliar with mulberries, the white mulberry, Morus alba, is native to China and is the traditional food plant for silkworms. The black mulberry, Morus nigra, probably originated around modern-day Iran and Iraq.

There’s a semi apocryphal story that in the 17th century King James I imported 10,000 mulberry trees in an attempt to establish an English silk industry, only for it to fail because the trees weren’t the right species for silkworm production.

The fruit, however, is fantastic: blackberry-like in appearance, but much softer and ridiculously juicy.

My two trees are now fruiting really well.

I’ve just had a few weeks away on holiday, and I still can’t decide whether cacti are the perfect holiday plants because you can leave them largely to their own devices, or an absolute nightmare because there’s nobody at home to adjust the greenhouse.

My solution is to leave the greenhouse door wide open and hope that the Scottish rain decides to blow somewhere else. A heatwave 5 ish years ago still managed to cook a lot of my cacti, and some are only now nearly recovered.

On my last day of holiday I picked a couple of kilos of mulberries, and I’m currently making two gallons of mulberry wine.

The wine I made as a teenager was fermented above the hot water tank in my father’s doctors surgery. Initially to the amusement of the other doctors - until they had a taste.

I can’t do that now. So underneath the cactus benches in the greenhouse is the perfect place to keep the fermentation at a reasonably steady temperature.

So now my greenhouse contains cacti, euphorbia, succulents, the odd caudex and 2 gallons of slowly fermenting fruit wine.

Of course, the fermentation is also an excellent excuse to spend more time in the greenhouse admiring the plants.

And another shameless plug for the wine-red cactus flowers.

Does anyone else combine their arid-plant obsession with another hobby?

I’m down at a friend’s parent’s Tudor stately home for a few days.

Their gardener has grown lots of Pelargonium in their old walled garden terracotta pots (but is off work for the weekend).

Are these old varieties that are worth taking a cutting from? Or just modern “salmon colour” plants?

This seems like a “step up” from every other medium difficulty map Ive seen so far. This is but one small part of the base.

You get 7 mins before thd first wave, and I presume theyre not very strong.

But I’m not prepared for this

I haven’t done any programming in nearly a decade, and that was VB. I’m trying my first Mindustry code.

I have a Vault, fed with the output of scrap separators.

From this I have an unloader to an incinerator.

I’d like to remove all the copper and graphite and keep the lead and titanium, and loop in perpetuity.

My code so far has 2 bugs:

1. I have to set the unloader to a random material to make it start.
2. Once it’s unloaded it’s switching to no material and emptying everything.

What do I need to do?

To mark the longest/shortest day of the year, I thought a post sharing cacti flowers that remind you of the Sun might be fun.

Here’s my opening entry.

Pictures dont need to be from today.

I’ve been using a few steam schematics for years without thinking.

My intuition tells me that spores are more powerful in steam generators than coal, and converting spores to oil to coal uses more steps so more electricity.

So why do some schematics use this method?

This is my largest single cactus head by volume. It’s about 40cm tall by 25cm wide/ 16inches by 10 inches approximately.

The label died a long time ago, and I can’t even remember its genus. Does anyone recognise it?

There are a lot of successes on this thread, and a lot of rightfully proud people.

So I thought I’d share a failure for a bit of a change.

This Rebutia really needs potting up. Potentially dividing up into smaller colonies. It’s on the job list.

My P.appendiculatum (highly expensive carrot substitute) has set seed and they really are rather pretty. Like a dandelion that has dressed up for something special.

I’ve lost some due to my cats sunbathing and brushing past it, but I’ve got enough seed to try sowing.

I’m not overly optimistic as it’s an expensive plant to buy so that hints at it being difficult to raise.

I need a greenhouse about 4x the size of my own one, so over the summer I’m always on the hunt for extra space.

A new family have moved into the village and their son is good friends with my older daughter.

So I’ve swapped a half of their greenhouse for some advice and help getting on top of the garden.

The extra sunlight is really helping them.

My P.tetragonum has reached 2feet/60cm and toppling. I had been reluctant to prune it in case I killed it.

But I have realised it is replaceable so if it goes wrong it’s not the end of the world.

I cut it into 3 segments. That didn’t go as well as planned. The 2 cuttings have a lot of leaves for this species so hopefully that helps rooting. But my gut feeling is I pruned too hard.

Fingers crossed

This is obviously a commercial fake bonsai of some tree cuttings pushed into a cheap pot. It’s in the UK but could have been made anywhere

I haven’t seen this specific tree used before. Does anyone recognise them?

I’m hoping they are Dawn Redwood or Swamp Cypress, which I could “de-bonsai” and use as a cheap source of trees.

I was recently a bit naughty in sharing a Northern Hemisphere Geranium sanguineum in flower, for comparison with Southern Hemisphere Pelargoniums.

Both are colloquially known as Cranesbills. In the Northern Hemisphere Geranium pratense is probably the easiest to see why.

This is my Pelargonium aridum, just before the flowers open, and the resemblance to Cranes and Storks really shows.

Aridum is a low-growing to shortly caulescent xerophytic subshrub, with small, grey-green, finely pubescent leaves, often developing a somewhat thickened, semi-succulent stem base and fusiform tuberous red roots, shown here when I repotted into one of my Great Grandmother’s pots:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pelargonium/s/3nBtpUpGJp

Native to the arid western regions of South Africa, particularly within the winter-rainfall zone (e.g. Little Karoo, Namaqualand and adjacent semi-desert areas - apologies my South African geography is poor). It inhabits rocky slopes, gravel flats, and well-drained sandy or stony soils, often in exposed positions.

As a result of u/tazza107 sharing photos of his Graptopetalum bellum plants in flower, last spring I visited the UK’s National Collection of Echeveria, Graptopetalum, Pachyphytum (and inter genetic hybrids) to obtain a true species plant.

The plant I got is a pale grey-blue green, with the photos appearing more mid green than in life. The mother plant originally came from another collector in the British Cactus and Succulent Society.

Ive since purchased various other plants, and cultivars, and they are all much darker (see recent posts on r/cactusandsucculents). As seen in the photos.

It has stayed lighter than all the others, despite the same growing conditions.

This spring it has flowered, and they do look like bellum.

The International Crassulaceae Network does describe it as “mostly dark or grayish-green”:

https://www.crassulaceae.ch/de/artikel?akID=202&aaID=2&aiID=B&aID=1851

Has anyone else had experience of light grey/blue-green specimens?

My young P.triffidum is my next species to come into flower. I’ve photographed it next to P.kewensis as well as some normal zonales for comparison.

So…Triffidum refers to “it growing like a triffid”. What have I let myself in to…?

What I have found out is Pelargonium triffidum is a rather sculptural pelargonium with a semi-succulent, branching habit. It typically forms a loose, upright to spreading shrub, with fleshy stems that become somewhat woody with age. The foliage is finely divided to deeply lobed, giving a light, airy texture that contrasts with its more substantial stems.

Leaves are usually grey-green to mid-green, sometimes with a slightly glaucous sheen, and may be softly aromatic when brushed.

What I can confirm is it produces delicate umbels of small, five-petalled flowers, creamy and marked subtly with deep purple tones near the centre.

Pelargonium triffidum is native to South Africa, where it occurs mainly in the southern and south-western Cape region.

It’s typically found in rocky, well-drained habitats—often on slopes, outcrops, and seasonally dry scrubland where soils are poor and drainage is fast. Like many Cape pelargoniums, it is adapted to a climate with winter rainfall and hot, dry summers, storing moisture in its semi-succulent stems to get through dry periods.

In the wild it tends to grow in scattered, localised populations rather than forming dense stands, often tucked among low shrubs or in crevices where competition from larger plants is limited.

I managed to get agreement to borrow a friends greenhouse in return for replacing a sheet of safety glass.

This is my brand new sheet of 150cm x 60cm safety glass.

It hadn’t even touched the ground when it shattered in my hands.

Do people use safety glass in their greenhouse?

If this carries on their tomatoes will have a silica taste.

I shall try to not make a habit of this, but once in a while I think it’s nice to compare Northern Hemisphere Geraniums with Southern Hemisphere Pelargoniums. Especially when there is a botanical story.

At the weekend I visited a friend’s medieval physic/herb garden.

One plant in flower was a UK native - Geranium sanguineum, or Bloody Cranesbill.

It’s hard to see in the photo but the flowers have red veins giving its Latin name sanguineum (“blood-red”).

But its common name comes from its medical use of treating the “bloody flux” - what we’d now recognise as severe dysentery.

Under the old Doctrine of Signatures, plants resembling a disease or symptom were thought to treat it.
So a “bloody” plant for “bloody” diarrhoea made intuitive sense at the time.

There is some science too:

Bloody cranesbill contains significant amounts of tannins—compounds that:

- Tighten and contract tissues
- Reduce secretions
- Help constrict small blood vessels

In a condition like dysentery, where the bowel is inflamed, bleeding, and producing frequent loose stools, this would:

- Reduce diarrhoea
- Help limit bleeding
- Soothe irritated intestinal lining

It also has weak antimicrobial activity.

But remember this is medieval science - experimentation where doing nothing would be fatal so you might as well try.

Plants are a wonderful source of medicine because nature and evolution have found ways to synthesise chemicals.

But modern medicine is an extension of medieval medicine - researching better and better treatments. Modern herbology and homeopathy arent. Best stick to medically prescribed treatments for things as serious as the bloody flux.