aphids….

it has strep

Those little white spots might be aphids, but what about the big black and blue spot? It looks like my cactus got pummeled in a fight! The weird thing is that it happened literally overnight. One day it was fine, and the next day it was like that.

Gentlemen, we may be witnessing the emergence of an underground cactus fight club…

Hmmm …. did you water it? Looks like fungus to me …. if you look closely, it’s comming from inside in other spots too. May have happened from being too wet, or, it was infected before you got it

My initial thought was that I must have overwatered it, but I quickly realized that “a few drops every few weeks” was, if anything, underwatering it. That black stuff is a relatively new phenomenon, but those fuzzy white things have been there since a few weeks after I got it. My best guess is that they are some sort of insect that my cactus picked up while sitting in my cube.

Unfortunately, the Black Death spread significantly over the past 24 hours. I apologized to the cactus for being such a bad caretaker then unceremoniously dumped it in the trash can.

I’m now 0 for 2 on successful plant care, though I blame the first failure on a bad plant sitter.

if you don’t have a cat, get a spider plant. “In the home, plant diseases are very rarely a problem.” Just keep it lightly watered; not too wet.

i thought that you’d appreciate this:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050106-4509.html

The spider plant sounds pretty robust; I’ll have to check one out.

Go Jon Stewart!

Sounds like you could use “Cast Iron Plant”
http://www.denverplants.com/foliage/html/aspidistra.htm

Wow… that sounds perfect!

you could also get a pineapple plant. I’ve severly abused mine multiple times, and it never seems to die off…though the fruit it bears probably won’t be very sweet…