"I was planing on growing it in a pot ... with a green house in the winter ..." "Because for my cactus soil i get cheap soil from lowes or homedepot throw in a bunch of prelite and rocks and a bit of food ... should that be fine?" Yeah, you definitely need to do some reading. : p Perlite and rocks will improve a fine soggy soil simply by leaving less space in the pot for water to occupy, but it's only marginally better than deliberately underpotting the plant. Long story short, any potting medium that forces a plant to drink or drown is bad, and most succulents will end up drowning. Might I ask which sorts of cactus you have at the moment? Some of them take bad soil better than others. I would recommend reading through as many of the 'gritty mix' topics as possible (more than once, and at intervals. There's a lot to take in), and also the one about growing trees in containers. The latter is less immediately applicable because cacti don't need aggressive rootwork to survive in a container, but it does explain the importance of roots to a plant's overall health. If a plant has weak roots, it's less able to deal with environmental stresses and pests. If one of these stressors finally overwhelms the plant, the blame will fall there and not with the plant itself even if it was the only one for miles around that succumbed.

I am in the same boat. I live in st louis and the weather can get extreme in either direction. Winters can be very cold and summers very hot. I have done research on this topic before and I have heard of some Agave and echinopsis that can survive the fridged temps here. Of course to increase the survival rate a bed with a drainage basin is needed. Larger, more mature plants have a greater chance of surviving but I would still recommend covering them in a clear plastic to try to trap in some warmth and protect from rain and frost. Another thing to consider, may be a lot of work, making holes in a bed large enough to set them in durring the spring summer and fall.( you could slip a plastic bucket in to the hole like the pots you can get roses, shrubs in.) Just up to where the lip on a terracota pot would be. They will be able to stay out longer this way too because the pot and the roots inside will stay cooler durring the summer and warmer durring autumn. There is another thread posted not too long ago titled "cold hardy" or "cold hardy cactus" something along those lines. A poster put up the name of a book that has helped him raise cactus in Canada. Hope this has helped :) plant_junkie

well, i actually got about 5 weeks to test the system. but it's not going to be as low temp as in dec-jan, so plants will be absorbing more water. so i hope if i can gauge the water consumption for 4 weeks at 67F i should be able to go 6 weeks at 60-65F? what do you think about putting unglazed clay pots on wicking mat with ultra-slow drip into reservoir to replenish water - so that the clay pots themselves will absorb some water - not the medium? the drip will be very slow as i said - so i think that some moisture will evaporate, so that not that much will be left to be absorbed by the pots? i also think that i can put thick wicks into passive water reservoir (no drip) and the other end curled on top of large jade/sansevieria pots on the soil outside - just to barely moisten it. some will evaporate again - and some will give the top soil some moisture. sort of like dew... am curious, what do they do in commercial greenhouses for cacti/succulents? i got sev aloe and jades that i purchased recently - they look like they are wicked on mats! is that possible? i even found some reference to succulent wicking mats in greenhouses - but not much detail.

When it might flower depends on what species it is. And also on where you grow it. Cheiridopsis are very roughly winter growers but in many areas winter is too cold and dark for them to grow, so they either flower in autumn or spring or maybe not at all. I wouldn't expect flowers on your's until next "winter" at the earliest. They need almost no water in summer because they will be dormant, although they will probably still be plump and green. It is normal for the older leaves to die back in summer, generally leaving just one pair of leaves on each head. Eventually the plant will clump up so that you will get a mat of many heads.