20 June 2008
How to kill a perfectly good Consolea
Posted by Stuart under: Cacti .
I have many plants of Consolea falcata in various sizes. The largest of them has been one of the unwitting participants in my experiment with my larger opuntioids that I’ve mentioned previously: giving them far more water than normal.
Most of them - particularly Opuntias quimilo, and leucotricha and Cylindropuntia spinosior seem to love it. However, I noticed that all was not well when I found one of the large consoleas branches had dropped off into the bowl of my big Mammillaria zeilmanniana.
I kept it for rooting, but it soon became obvious that something was wrong; the branch went very yellow very quickly. I cut it open to find brown tissue around the vascular bundles. Not good.
I tried removing a larger branch that seemed unaffected but in a matter of days the same thing happened: yellowing, and when cut open, brown tissue. When I noticed the holes appearing in the trunk it was pretty obvious that whatever bacterial infection was besieging it had spread through the whole plant. I cut through stems at various points and the damage was very bad.
So: in my conditions at least, if might be fair to assume that consoleas don’t like enormous amounts of water, although it may of course have been suffering already. It’s impossible to be certain.