With cacti, sand and a bowl, you can conjure up a miniature desert landscape in no time at all. A great idea as a gift and as a decorative eye-catcher on the windowsill. This guide explains how to do it.
A cactus bowl is a beautiful decorative element
material list
The following list of materials should serve as inspiration for planting a bowl creatively and individually. Pretty decorative items give the prickly plant community the special flair of a desert. There are no limits to imaginative ideas here.
- Several small cacti
- White bowl with a diameter of 30 cm and more
- Seramis or expanded clay (19.73€) as drainage
- Succulent or cactus soil
- Lime-free quartz sand
- Decorative items: stones, model figures (e.g. sheep, camels, elephants, lions)
- Thorn Resistant Gloves
Please place the soil used in a cauldron without a lid in the oven at 150 degrees Celsius for about 20 minutes. In this way, any germs and pathogens are killed. Please clean the plant bowl and decorative items with hot water.
Step-by-step planting instructions
By equipping the bowl with 3 different substrate layers, you generate an ideal living environment and a lifelike desert landscape for the cacti. How to proceed correctly:
- Fill in Seramis or expanded clay about 2-3 cm high on the bottom of the bowl
- Spread the sterilized and cooled cactus soil over it
- The height of the soil layer corresponds to three quarters of the height of the root ball
- Put on thorn-resistant gloves
- Pot and plant the cacti
- Press the substrate lightly around the root ball with a spoon
- Optionally place stones as decoration between the cacti
Finally, scatter the quartz sand (€15.85). If you cut off a corner of the bag, the fine material can be distributed precisely. The cactus bowl is given the finishing touch with mini figures. You can stick them in the sand or fix them to the decorative stones with superglue. Finally, spray the cacti with a fine mist of lime-free water. The desert beauties are watered for the first time after a week, when they have recovered from the stress of planting.
tips
Bird sand is completely unsuitable as a substrate component for cacti. The lime it contains drives the pH into the alkaline range, which the succulents cannot tolerate. You should also ignore building sand if you want to plant cacti in sand. Please only use the lime-free quartz sand recommended in these instructions.