One of the badges I needed to do for my brownies is the prickle patch. I went to visit Mrs. Love and she showed me her cactus collection. She has been collecting cactus for over 40 years.
If you look carefully at the top of each of these there is a lighter section and that bit has grown in one year. I think this is the cactus I like most because of the little pink flowers.
With the cactus on the left it started off with just 2 branches. While on holiday once someone came and stole the branches by cutting the branches off, really low. It ended up growing better though, and it now has 6 branches.
And even another type of cactus.
This cactus gets very big flowers. The big brown things are the flowers that have died. More to the right the small green balls are the new flowers. Mrs. Love says these are her favourite cactus because of the beautiful smell of the flowers.
Mrs. Love gave me a cutting of this cactus to grow.
The pink things on this cactus are the fruit, they are called prickly pears. When my mum was a girl she used to eat them.
I was able to take home some cactus to grow. I planted these on the 7th of December.
I enjoyed planting the cactus. I seem to be very sensitive to smells. I could smell the cactus and I did not like the smell.
A flower is growing on one of the cactus. This was taken on 20 January 2016
The flower opened. 24 January.
I love the shade of yellow on this flower.
One of the other things I had to do was make a hedgehog from a pine cone, twigs leaves and stones. This was one of the things I enjoyed most.
I also had to dig up a thistle it was really hard but I managed to do it in the end.
All of the things I have not done before, and they were all very fun.
