Traded Royal Poinciana seeds with Red Barrel Cactus seeds, with Rebecca. Thanks. I bought plumeria seeds online. I still have plenty cactus seeds to trade with adenium seeds. Thanks. meli

I have fresh blackberry lily seeds (the yellow blooms with red spots lily) and the plants I have grown from seeds have done really well in my Louisiana heat and humidity. Please take a look at my tradelist and see if there is anything else you might want. Hope we can trade. Would love some of your Easter Cactus seeds, especially the pink ones. If you want to trade plant leaves instead of seeds I do have a pink Christmas cactus here that I could send you some leaves of if you would like to send me leaves of one of your Easter cactus. Just a thought. Please email me if you are interested. Best to you, quiltingfox

Hi socks, I'm not sure how to tell if something is ripe, but I did an experiment this spring sprouting the seeds of a summer blooming "Easter cactus" that I have. I waited about nine months for the pod to dry out or somehow change in some way, and it really didn't seem to change much. It did easily split open and there were indeed tiny seeds in the pulp inside that looked okay and not rotted. I had a hard time finding anything here on GW and on the web about how to process the seeds, so I just squeezed the seeds and pulpy stuff out and tried to separate them as much as possible. I put the seeds onto a prepared "Jiffy" pellet and put it along with the tomato seeds I was starting in the covered plastic Jiffy box (if you know what those are). I keep my sprouting toms with bottom heat at about 70 degrees. Regular cacti seeds like 70 degrees as far as I know, so I thought that would be a good guess. This did work, and the Easter cacti seeds were the first ones to sprout in the whole box! I didn't really expect much, as I thought they wouldn't even be viable since I only have the one plant and I read here in another GW post that Christmas and Thanksgiving cacti need a second pollinator plant. Since I read that I have given my Christmas and Thanksgiving cacti a sexy good time getting their flower parts together (I don't know the proper names for the parts of flowers) and have now a lot of pods to try the same thing with. I will probably just do the same thing as before, as it worked before. If you have more than one seed pod then don't be shy and just try something with one, at least break it open and look at it. Experimenting is fun, especially when it works, but even if it doesn't work. If all the seeds in all the pods sprout and grow to big plants, then you will need a second home! Oh- I'm not sure about the meaning of the maroon color of the pods. I'm not sure, but I think that my jungle cacti plants get red when they are a little cold and in the sun. I have one plant with a maroon pod next to the window, and green ones away from the window. The seed pod on the Easter cactus was green when I took the seeds out of it, and they still sprouted. They are now about one quarter inch tall. Good luck!

The green/brown growth that you referred to is called the stigma, aka female reproductive part. Generally the ovary will turn brown when pollination took. From the first few pics, it appears there are seedpods forming but it is too early to tell as they can abort. You can celebrate when they grow about an inch or 2 in length. The pedicel will grow thicker to support the pods too. This post was edited by k2fl on Fri, Oct 3, 14 at 14:10