Jardinerong Sunog (the Burnt Gardener)

In this post I am going to illustrate one of the ways I pot recently purchased cacti. And for this purpose, I will be using this plant, bought just two days ago (Monday), as an example. You can see that, as with most nursery-grown plants, the substrate used is mainly organic- leaf litter, to be exact. 1. One of my biggest hang-ups with nursery grown succulents in the Philippines is that most of the sellers do not know the names of their produce. I assume the plant at hand is a Melocactus , and for our first step we need to find habitat photos of melocacti. If you do not know the species name of your plant, worry not. You just need a loose blueprint, so to speak. Below are two screenshots from the e-zine Cactus Explorer No. 18, published April of the previous year, with an account entitled A brief history and visits to the habitat of Melocactus matanzanus . Note the prevalence of gray, serpentine rocks (rocks heavily laden with heavy metals) and other crushed aggregates. I do not ...