My Texas Saguaro: Two Years Later

(This was supposed to be posted here two days ago but somehow I managed to post it on my writing blog instead. Oops! Apparently I'm not too good at juggling two blogs.)

I went back to Texas for another visit a few weeks ago and got a chance to check up on the saguaro in my parent's backyard. My how it's grown!

Here's how tall it was in 2009:

Quite a few inches short of the fence line

In 2010:

At the fence line

In 2011:

Above the fence line

Looks to me like it's grown at least a foot, maybe even a foot and a half. I guess the weather in Texas is agreeing with it!

Raised Vegetable Garden

This year I've decided to attempt a vegetable garden for the first time. We have a gopher problem so an in-ground garden was out of the question - I'm not going to spend months babying my veggies only to have a gopher get to them first!

I built this 95% by myself (my husband had to help with some of the heavy lifting) so I'm pretty proud of it. The frame is redwood. You can't see it, but before filling it with dirt we stapled hardware cloth (like chicken wire but with smaller holes) to the bottom so the gophers couldn't get in.

The instructions I used were from Sunset.com. They were perfect because the size, 4 feet by 8 feet, meant it fit very nicely in the space I had. The only problem I had with the instructions were that they told me to buy 1 inch galvanized tube straps to attach the 1 inch PVC to the sides of the bed. However, I discovered that when I tried to use the 1 inch tube straps they were not big enough to go around the PVC and reach the sides of the bed, so I had to go back and use 1-1/4 inch tube straps instead.

I'm spouting seeds inside and then transferring them outside. So far I've planted squash, green beans, and strawberries (those were bought already grown). I'll probably post some updates as things (hopefully) grow.

Make Your Own Lawn Markers

If you need a way to mark your lawn or garden that's cheap and won't interfere with a mower, try something like this:

It's a plastic cap from a milk (or water) container and a large 8 cent nail from the hardware store. I used an icepick to poke a hole in the center of the milk cap and pushed the nail through (if your nail is sharp enough you probably wouldn't need to use an icepick).

Then you can just push it into the ground to use as a marker.

We were looking for some way to mark where in our lawn we wanted to set our sprinklers so we don't have to figure out where to place them every time we set them out. Flags would be in the way when we mow but plain stakes or nails would be hard to spot when they're pushed all the way down. So my mom came up with the idea to use the milk caps and a nail - since they're brightly colored they show up in the lawn but they're flat so they won't get in the way.

My Texas Saguaro

So I am 98% sure that this cactus is a saguaro (pronounced sah-wah-roh). If you don't know what a saguaro is, it's one of those giant cacti that have the big arms. I had no idea that they were called saguaros before I moved out here to Arizona. The saguaro is pretty much the mascot of Arizona and the southwest - there's even one on the Arizona quarter.

The interesting thing about my saguaro is that it is not in Arizona. It's at my parent's house in south Texas. Back when I was still in grade school I got one of those little greenhouse cactus seed kits while on vacation at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. I'm not sure exactly when that trip was but I am guessing it was between 10 and 15 years ago.

This cactus was the only one to survive from the kit. It finally outgrew the little pot we had it in so we re-planted it in the back yard. I never really given much thought as to what type of cactus it was - I thought it was some type of barrel cactus until I noticed that it getting taller but not wider as a barrel cactus should. It's shape made me think of a saguaro, so I started researching them online.

After a few days of searching, I was almost convinced that it wasn't a saguaro because many sources said that a ten year old cacti would only be 1.5 to 6 inches tall. As you can see from the photo above, mine is between 2.5 to 3 feet tall! But after doing some more research I found that those heights were for wild cacti in the desert. Since Texas is slightly wetter than Arizona (and since my parents probably watered it occasionally) my saguaro probably grew faster than it would have in the wild.

I compared my cactus to pictures of saguaros and to saguaros I've visited in real life here in Arizona - I couldn't find anything that made me think that my cactus wasn't a saguaro. The main identifying trait that I found mentioned online was that in each group of spines, there is one spine that is much larger than all the others and points downwards. You can see this on my cactus here:

So all these things together have led me to the decision that my cactus is a saguaro! After living here in Arizona where saguaros are a big deal (a full grown one can cost thousands of dollars), it's fun to know that I grew one without really trying! And that's even more special since it's in south Texas, which is not really it's native habitat (there are no wild saguaros in Texas or even in New Mexico). It's kind of cool to think that my parents are probably the only people in my hometown with a saguaro in their yard!

(By the way, if anyone who has some cacti knowledge thinks that this might not be a saguaro, please let me know why not and what you think it might actually be. I'm no expert so it's very possible that I'm wrong!)

Update 9/29/11: I've posted an update with photos of how the saguaro has grown over the past two years.