Okay. I confess: I killed a cactus.
My only defense is I didn’t know what I was doing at the time – it was an innocent mistake. But because I killed a cactus, I was subjected to great teasing among my college roommates who witnessed the slow, accidental tragedy. Even now – over a decade later – the question still pops up from time to time among my college chums: “How the heck can you kill a cactus?!” Well, I’ll tell you, it’s really not that hard. And if you’ve done it yourself, don’t feel bad – you’re not alone. The untimely death of my little spiky friend (whom I named “Dan,” by the way), was due mainly to my lack of basic houseplant knowledge and cactus requirements. Where I personally screwed up was with my container of choice…and my potting mix…oh, and did I mention my watering technique? Here’s how tragedy ensued: I bought Cactus Dan when he was a lil’ 4-inch guy sticking out of an itty-bitty, ugly plastic pot in the florist section of a grocery store. He was cheap and cute, and I wanted to try my hand at growing a plant. (And seriously – how the heck can you kill a cactus?) Dan sat on my cluttered desk for a good month, ignored, pretty much because I could hardly see him with all the textbooks, notebooks and random other junk that tended to accumulate on my desk. So I eventually moved my plant to our living room, where he sat on top of the TV, near a window. It was at a commercial break during a bad made-for-TV movie that I bothered to notice that Dan had somehow grown larger (or his cheap little plastic pot was getting smaller). I needed to give my plant a better home so he could stretch his roots and live up to his full cactus potential!
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