First entry

Welcome to my blog about cacti and other succulents. My wife has finally managed to convince me to start a blog about my passion, and hopefully I'll manage to update it regularly.

Though I certainly find many succulents fascinating and pretty, my main interest is cacti. Cacti are succulents too, of course, though for simplicity's sake most people just call cacti cacti, and the rest of the world's succulents are relegated to being called, well, succulents. At least, that's how you'll see it written on books and journals: e.g. "Cacti and other Succulents", "Cacti and Succulent Journal" or, indeed, in the title of this blog. It's only when one wishes to be a bit more specific that one might refer to groups of succulents as e.g. mesembs or euphorbias. Throughout this blog, then, whenever I mention succulents, I'll usually be referring to succulents other than cacti.

Living rocks, the name of this blog, is the common name for several genera of succulent plants, though two genera in particular often go by that name. Those two genera are Ariocarpus and Lithops. The former is a genus belonging to the cacti family (Cactaceae), while the latter is a succulent belonging to the mesemb family (Aizoaceae). The former is found in Mexico and Texas, while the latter is found in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. There is also another living creature that goes by this moniker, Pyura chilensis, but as it belongs to the kingdom Animalia it will not feature here. (I encourage everyone to google the creature, though! Who needs sci-fi when you can find creatures like this right here on Earth?).

Ariocarpus is my favorite genus of cacti, and Lithops is one of my favorite "other" succulent genera. Thus, the name of the blog seemed very fitting. So while this blog will mainly deal with cacti, I will definitely be writing about succulents too (and maybe one or two non-succulent plants as well).

In addition to writing about my cacti and succulents and about my own experiences growing them, I will also write about various topics from soil composition and watering, to additives and fertilisers, to literature on succulents and more. If there is any particular topic you'd like me to write about be sure to let me know.

This will be it for my first post. As I have just started out on this project, the blog is naturally a bit barren, but I hope to remedy this over the coming weeks.