Thanks, paracelsus! I have not ever seen evidence of mites - would the insects themselves be visible to the naked eye? So you recommend giving up and starting anew - can I do this now or should I treat for scale/mites first and then remove the new pads? How would I go about removing the pads (there are two newish large ones that seem unaffected) and re-potting them? I know you are supposed to let them callus over by leaving them un-potted in a well-circulated area for a bit, right? Thanks again!!!

A couple weeks ago, I had, of all things, pill bugs eating the new growth on some smaller Echinopsis. Lucky, I caught on before they did too much damage. They only took out the growth points on two small offsets. Sevin dust dispatched them with haste. If you see these guys around, they will definitely munch on new growth if they have a chance. Here is a link that might be useful: Pics of pill bugs

The native plums we have on our property are Prunus angustifolia, commonly called by several different names by the locals, though sand plum seems to be the name used most often. They mature to either red or yellow, and you can have trees with yellow ones right next to trees with red ones. It can be confusing because the red ones do have a stage at which they are yellow while still unripe before they eventually mature to red. The yellow ones go from green to yellow to a deeper yellow when ripe. The native plums do make an awesome jelly. I make it every year, unless the whole plum crop freezes. We also have some Mexican plum trees on the west end of our property, but that area is filled with copperheads in great profusion so I just leave those Mexican plums alone for the wildlife to eat. You may have other native fruit on your property. We have several kinds of wild grapes, but all are bitter and better used, if used at all, for wine or something like that as they are bitter and not sweet like cultivated table grapes. You might be able to add enough sugar to make a palatable jelly, but I've never tried it. I leave those for the wildlife. We have two kinds of native bramble berries. The ones that grow upright down by the old farm pond are native blackberries. Sometimes I gather them (pretreating yourself with something to repel the chiggers that thrive around them is important) and sometimes (especially in drought years) I leave them for the birds. The berry brambles that crawl and sprawl across the ground at the NW edge of the garden are dewberries, planted in the garden by birds, and left there by me. Since they are more in shade than sun at this point, I tend to randomly pick them and eat them while working in the garden. We have the native persimmons in several locations, and the fruit really isn't edible (highly astringent) until it has been frosted enough to turn black. Once blackened you can harvest them and use them in cooking. They make a good persimmon cake or pudding. Finally, although we lost most of our native cacti to the 2011 drought, some are slowly making a comeback. The prickly pear cacti produce lovely flowers followed by fruit (called tuna) that make a nice jelly too. And, of course, there's the native pecans. We have tons and tons of them scattered around in our woodland.One large native pecan tree sits at the western edge of the garden and shades the western half of the garden for a large portion of the day in the hottest summer months, which I consider a good thing. When you have acreage that hasn't been clear-cut and cleared of all the native plants, you can find a lot of native fruit plants scattered all over.

They are all over the place, had a long fenced line of opuntia ficus indica (the commercial prickly pear) with visions of lots of fruit and they have made a mess of my plants. have removed all but two of the largest and cleanest plants. I will have to handpick any caterpillars off of them and remove any pads that are infested. This is a new and sad development for these type of cactus. as the caterpillars burrow into the pad and eat from the inside it will likely require a systemic treatment and I do not want to eat any poison. Hopefully a natural predator will step up and find a new listing on their menu and reduce them. Maybe the type of white screen to cover plant that growers now use for citrus to keep any bug out would help...?