Hi Castorp, I don't know FLA well except a bit of Ft. Lauderdale as my Dad lived there in his last decade. When I visited, I did notice which succulents did well & suggest you pay close attention to your neighbors' plantings & if friendly w/ them, ask them questions abt this & for their help. I noticed healthy & happy landscapings of Euphorbia miliis (Crown of Thorns), Aloes & Yucca plants. Unless money is no object, I'd avoid the hit & miss approach, could be expensive & frustrating if you lose lots of plants. I'd also go to local greenhouse &/or nurseries & ask the same thing.

"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 use the Black Gold Cactus Mix distributed by Sun Gro of Bellevue, WA. I mix in Turface. I have a bag of E.B. Stone as well, but the first 2 mentioned are what I use most, although all 3 products are in the mix pictured below. I potted up my free echinocacti with it. And this Aloe Vera (3 bucks at a garage sale)... got potted up too because there were a bunch of rocks in the old pot around the base of the plant, there were privet seedlings growing there, and the soil was not ideal. This be the end result, although I did clean up the dried out lower fronds later because I was also cooking dinner during the repotting project.

There are actually quite a few candidates depending on the conditions you wish to provide. There are a multitude of very small to true miniatures in the orchid family. You just have a bit of research ahead of you. *For cool to intermediate temperatures: Masdevalias, Draculas, Dendrobiums, and Restrepia are some examples. *For warm temps: some mini-Cattleyas, Dendrobiums, and Epidendrums/Encyclia would be some examples.