Gardening and Cacti

 Grafted vegetables are not much common, at least this practice does not belong to traditional farming practices here in my country. In fact I believe that most peoples do not know that anything like this is even possible. This blog is depicting cucumbers, but the actual reason how I got into this are watermelons. Growing watermelons here in eastern Slovakia, on latitude 48° is not that difficult but neither is trivial and we can only envy people who live closer to equator, no matter from which side. I'm not sure if we can count on three months of good growing season here. And this is point where the story starts. Yes, there are seedlings and we are using them, but grafted watermelons are higher level. I watched quite a lot of YouTube videos, and concluded that there are multiple ways how to graft watermelons: Removing one cotyledon and connecting watermelon's stalk there - this is described in this blog Doing a hole between cotyledons and inserting side-cut watermelon's s...

I have been growing cactuses for many many years, but never had a regular big greenhouse. What is pity because living in quite high latitude (48 grades) the effective and usable growth period for cacti is quite short. No more than 4 months in outdoor conditions. Peoples who have greenhouses, ideally with heating, can extend this time by two good months at least. So I opted for this compromise: A polycarbonate 1x1 m sized mini greenhouse for about 90 EURO. Photo taken in the morning when still in shadow, and still closed :) Greenhouse of this size can easily cook your plants if closed in direct sunlight for 10 hours and I am not there to "babysit" it so some king of automatic opening is a must. And not too expensive of course. So here come thermal based automatic window openers. To make the long story short: there are two types of openers - as available on Amazon. Wrong one First I got this one - and it cannot be fitted in small greenhouse anyhow, so I was left without automat...