The lie of grocery store cacti (and why they’re even cooler than they seem)
You know those cacti near the checkout line of the grocery store or hardware store? The ones with a dark green, triangular stem, that look like they have a colourful round flower on the top? A lot of the time, they come branded as a “ruby ball cactus,” or sometimes “moon cactus,” and you can buy one for under $10. The interesting thing about them is that they’re actually not just one cactus - they’re two cacti grafted together.
My whole life is a lie.
The top cactus is generally a mutated form of Gymnocalycium mihanovichii (try to say that ten times fast). This mutated form has no chlorophyll, which is why it can come in yellow, orange, and red; but that also means that it can’t live on its own. It gets its nutrients from the bottom cactus, which is a small cutting from a dragon fruit plant (or a close cousin). In the wild, the dragon fruit cactus can be up to twenty feet tall, with very long, jointed branches.
Yeah, these things are HUGE.
I learned this when mine started to die in 2018. I looked up tips on saving it, and I found out that what I thought was one cactus with a flower was actually two cacti that had been grafted together. Because they’re two different plants, they grow at different rates and have different needs, which means that often, the grafted “ruby ball” or “moon” cactus doesn’t live that long.
The gardening website that I looked at in 2018 said that you could save the bottom plant by cutting off the top one. This seemed strange to me, but I figured it was worth a try, since my plant was looking very sad. I cleaned off my sharpest scissors with alcohol, cut off the red top, and realized I’d cut through a piece of wood that wasn’t part of the plant. If I needed proof that these weren’t a single plant, a wooden dowel had been holding the two pieces together, like the support in a layer cake.
Not long after I took its red top off, my cactus started to grow. It kept growing. And GROWING. Today, the longest branch is over two feet long and the plant is THRIVING. But If you look closely at my pictures, the bottom half of the dowel is still in the middle of the cactus stem, as a last reminder of what it once was.
August 1, 2018
(Bailey Cohen-Krichevsky)
April 12, 2019
(Bailey Cohen-Krichevsky)
May 9, 2022. LOOK AT THIS THING!
(Bailey Cohen-Krichevsky)