Greetings guys, gals, and non-binary pals! Welcome back to Botany Snippets, with the
Amazing Plant Project.
My name is Kate and today we're asking:
Why should you not water your cactus?
So the cactus is a desert plant that's kind of an obvious
but within botany cacti and succulents are kind of a unique situation if you
have any other houseplants you might have to water them every day in certain
environments or 2-3 times a week however the cactus and to a lesser extent,
succulents but the cactus for the purposes of today's discussion has
evolved to live in a very arid climate meaning that when water is introduced in
the form of rain it is absorbed to capacity by the plant so if you've ever
seen a cactus that was kind of just a regular sort of slender cactus and
another picture after its rained when the flesh between the the ridges
especially for like barrel cactus it expands a lot and that's the plant
taking on water from the environment now
if you do that too much like if if a cactus gets too much water it doesn't
have a shutoff mechanism for that absorption because it's like it's not
like if a person was in a starvation situation the body stops
beginning or enough fat because it thinks that you need that fat you don't
work to survive and sometimes people do but if someone doesn't and that happens
to just be part of their genetics fat is stored in the body and it just keeps
being at it it's the same sort of principle for the cactus and waters just
absorbed and absorbed and absorbed and if enough is absorbed by the cactus it
can explode or less dramatically just kind of shrivel up and die fight it has
been known to occasionally cause cacti to explode if there's been a high enough
influx of water and the cell walls haven't been able to adapt to it so
there you go it's kind of my one way permeability to let water in but not let
water out because of the Aeron nature of the climate in which they're native so
there you go they hope that shed some light on the situation as it work so
that's it for today come back tomorrow and hear more about plants specifically
cacti this week I look forward to any comments and suggestions in the
description down below comments in the comments down below I don't know it's
been a week in the comments down below and last videos up here something
YouTube thinks you might like is over here my second channel is linked over
here and all the other social media links the link for my podcast is down in
the description box I quite like the podcast it's about the poisons and the
darker side of botany if you want and the last episode they just went up it's
about the Amazon rainforest and how the fires are burning pretty much any
questions at the moment so check it out look forward to hearing from you and
I'll see you tomorrow