What is going on everyone? Happy, happy Tuesday. Hope you are enjoying the start to the new year and today we're going to talk about the Christmas cactus, which actually has a couple different names.

It's also known as the Thanksgiving Cactus or Easter Cactus.

And the reason why all these plants are named this way

is because that is when their blooms start coming out

around the time of that particular holiday.

Now before we get into the episode let's talk about Garden Maker, who are the sponsors of the Epic

Gardening Podcast. I actually just got off the phone last Friday with them, and we are developing

our own Epic soil starter mix.

So what I wanted to do was create a soil starter fertilizer,

organic natural components, where you could just take topsoil and compost and then add this mix in and turn that, shall we say, basic soil mix into something that's really going to produce over the course of its season and then improve that soil even further over the course of the next few growing

seasons. And so there'll be more information about that in the future, but for now if you're interested

in GardenMaker who makes organic natural custom fertilizers, go to GardenMaker.com. Now let's get

into the Christmas cactus. So this is a very easily propagated plant

surprisingly and the way that you do it is you cut a short y-shaped segment from the stem tips.

And so you have to make sure though is that you're going to take that cutting from healthy foliage

because if you take it from damaged or diseased foliage, there's even more stress

on that plant than there would be just taking the cutting in the first place.

So what you'll do once you take your segment is put about

25% of it in sandy soil. You can actually even use just sand if you want at the start.

Moisson it evenly and then put it in a well-lit area and it'll just take a few weeks.

So you'll start seeing signs of growth within a few weeks and you can do a light tug on that

soil, or sorry a light tug on the cutting to see if it on that

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