How to propagate a cactus

While I have been mostly focusing on the cooking part on my blog lately, it does not mean that I have forgotten my plants. As this was initially a blog about the start of my urban garden to be honest it was a bit of a dissappointment this year. My flowers outside have flourished but that was it, my chillies are still green believe it or not. It has been hard to get supplies this year for obvious reasons so a lot of things had just not been planted on time.

My indoor plants on the other hand have thrived, mostly because I have been home more and have been able to tend to them. One of them is my cactus that I have had a lot of ups and downs with. I’ve had this cactus for about 4 years now. It started off as very small and the place I lived in then had lots of light so it grew quite a bit. Then we moved to a new flat with very little light which caused the catus to grow in a very funny shape. Once we moved to this palce we are at now where there is an abundance of light and it started growing properly again but never recovered really.

Since the top was going to topple over eventually I thought I’d cut it off and try to propagate it, which honestly was very easy. Except for the fact that my fingers got pricked a million times. What happened afterwards though was crazy. I just kept getting more and more growth on the cut part which eventually resulted in this:

So I thought I’d cut off some more of these and show you how to easily propagate them. I use a regular box cutter as its sharp and you will get a nice clean cut. So all you need to do is cut the new growth at the base and place on a plate. Leave the plate in the window for a few days until the underpart is competely dried up. The cut part will leak once you cut it and if you put it on soil immediately it won’t work.

Now what you can do is either place the dried up cut part directly onto soil or you can let it sit on the plate in a window as it is and it will start to grow some roots after a few weeks. I’ve tried both and the soil method does speed up things but if you don’t have any at the moment the other method works great as well, it will just take a little longer. The photo above of the rooted cactus is from just leaving it on the plate. It took about 5 weeks for this cacti to root. Once you are ready to plant it just place the cut off cactus in a pot with soil and firmly but gently press it down a bit so the root get contact with soil and that’s it!