Dear fellow Nexian,

A year ago I bought a trichocereus pachanoi and let it grow. Now I would like to take cuttings to get more plants. As I have never done this, I would like to get your advice on this.

Attached you find a picture of how I would do the cuttings. In this, way, I would end up with two top cuttings, one middle one and the one mother plant. I would discard the slim, conical part in the middle. What do you guys think? Would this be a good way to do it?

On the one left part of the cactus you see little finger-like things coming out of the cactus. Is this something I would need to worry about? I attached a picture with a close up.

Thanks a lot for you help in advance!

The "finger-like things" are adventitious roots and thus nothing to worry about.

You could get quite a few cuttings from your plant - they only need to be 4-5cm in length, or 8cm for a tip cutting as my personal preference. Thinner stems can be a longer length. Where new growth has emerged from a cut section, as appears to be the case on both of the pictured stems, this may be severed at the point of emergence. A new pup will arise from another areole nearby.

So, for your main stem it looks like we've got about 28cm up to the first 'joint', which could easily make four or five cuttings, and then a further 37cm to the very tip to give you a tip cutting plus a further four or five mid cuttings, easily making eleven cuttings in total. The side stem looks like you could get about seven pieces out of it. The question is then whether you have enough room for another eighteen plants. (Of course you do!!! )

Above all, use a razor sharp, freshly cleaned knife. Sterilise with 70% isopropanol between cuttings. You can lick the sap off the knife first if you're interested in how bitter it might be

Also, there's no need to discard the thinner portions of stem. It's all good, and even failure is informative.

You may want to try grafting the tips back onto the mother plant as well, as it's well worth getting your head around grafting. For example, just for fun I grafted a 1cm slice onto a stock and it's given me two nice pups.


Have fun, and good luck!

Thanks a lot for your clarifications and your advice! Good to know that the roots are nothing to worry about

I think I'll cut at the joints and make two cuttings each above the joint and two cuttings from the main stem below the joint. I think the second stem is to thin. The mother plant should still be able to grow new pups, right?

I guess the smaller ones will need some time to grow but eventually I'll have a nice collection and rely less and less on dry material

As long as you leave behind an areole you can expect that areole to throw out a pup. Cutting a cacti promotes pupping. This is why some people will cut a foot of cacti and then simply remove one or two of the pups that form from the mother plant to get more cacti. However you choose to do it... you will learn something. Trichocereus are surprisingly resilient and as such you could cut your cacti into much smaller pieces if you wanted to. The smaller the pieces you root the slower the growth will be. This is why many will keep their cutting size to 12 inches or more in length unless they intend to graft. If they intend to graft... you could simply graft each and every areole of that cacti onto other cacti and have many hundreds of clones very readily if you wanted. Even a few days old seedling can be grafted to a large Trichocereus though to speed up its growth which begs the question... how valuable is your particular cacti's genetics or is it better suited to be a stock plant for grafting?

Wakinyan, thanks for the answer and sorry that I didn't reply for so long

Interesting idea with the crafting. What you would suggest is to take my cactus, take cuttings, and root them. Later, one would graft small cacti onto them which have proven to have good mescaline content. As the seedlings would be much smaller than the cactus I have right now I would simply graft many onto one stem, right? The way I understood grafting so far was that you need to line up the scions with each others, or am I mistaken?

How small, roughly (or exactly ) can one get away with? The grafts in the pics there look pretty tiny, but how old were they when they were grafted? What signs do you look for so that you know a seedling is ready to graft?

I'm sort of imagining chopping out an areole on a horizontal stock and popping in a seed to germinate - well, almost