I Like Cacti

Jasper has decided he likes cacti.  On Randy Kaplan's new children's album,  "The Kids Are All Id", he has a song called "I Like Cacti", which he explains in his liner notes is one of three songs on the album inspired by Ezra Jack Keats picture books, in this case "Clementina's Cactus", a wordless book with gorgeous pictures.  Jasper loves the song and decided to devour everything he can find about cacti.  He's been making huge gardens of Lego cacti, and making books about the adventures of his favorite imaginary cats in the desert playing with cacti. We've checked out every book we could find in the library catalog on cacti (and every Ezra Jack Keats book too), watched movies on cacti and deserts, and even found another cactus song, "Don't Sit On A Cactus", by Joel Frankel, another favorite musician of ours.  We learned that only the New World has cacti, and why they are so amazing.  We went to a show of the Oregon Cactus and Succulent Society, bought a few cactuses and some African succulents, and talked to the vendors. Jasper was excited to ask them to tell him about their favorite cactus.  Since cacti tend to grow slowly, we picked out some that were starting to bud, so that we could watch them bloom.  We went to a Mexican grocery for cactus pads and prickly pear fruits, made sorbet from the fruits and saved some seeds to see if they will sprout.  Then I found http://www.cactusstore.com/ which sells a really crazy number of cactus seeds.  I ordered a nice selection and we planted them together.  The seeds I ordered were around $2 for a packet of 25 seeds.  We ordered 6 different kinds, including a mixed packet so they would surprise us.   The largest seeds were almost the size of a poppy seed, and all had to be planted with tweezers.  After about a week we finally have sprouts!   The left ones are ball cactuses which will eventually have "yellow to purple" flowers (which I suppose could mean different things, so I guess we're in for a surprise) and the right ones are giant saguaros, which Jasper couldn't live without.  We are really enjoying watching them grow!