Does anyone have suggestions about care after buying a plant from a store? I bought this cactus on sale at ShopRite but I don’t know its care history. Should I repot to fresh soil? Or leave it? I don’t know when it was last watered or what soil it’s in to know how to move forward caring for it properly.
i always repot. terra cotta is the best for cactus - it promotes the drying that they need. use a well draining, gritty mix and water only when the soil is bone dry. bottom watering is a good method — you set the pot in a bowl of water & allow it to soak up as much as it wants, then remove the rest. get it into the brightest light you have at home — right in a south facing window is best, west in a pinch good luck!
4 Mi piace
Good advice
1 mi piace
I agree with eatyacarbs! I always dump plants out to check the dirt and roots. Saves a lot of problems down the road when you verify everything looks good to start with. You can change the soil if it’s not a well draining mix and switch to a terracotta pot. You can also verify what size pot it needs by seeing the actual root size. Here’s a quick story on another reason that checking the roots is useful. My mom had a succulent that someone gave her. She had it for several months in a pot that had no drainage, so I got her to move it to a pot with drainage. She had it a year and it wasn’t growing much, and it was getting knocked out of its spot every time she bumped into the table it was on. So I finally got her give it to me to dump out and look at it. Come to find out, the roots on the plant were trapped in the compacted soil, from the original nursery pot. So it was never able, over all that time, to spread it out and anchor itself into the soil. I used a skewer and carefully teased all the dirt off the roots so they could stretch out and then plant it back in her pot. It has grown so much more since then! It was able to just survive with the water it could get as is, but it never would have truly thrived.
2 Mi piaceThank you so much for the detailed info! It all makes sense. I will repot him :)
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