So, I had some stuff to do in the garden today...

On earth day, I celebrated by buying a plant. Actually, rescuing a plant from Home Depot... I should know better, but I stopped in Home Depot to buy something or other and I dropped by the garden dept, and there'e these little cactus... I got a Pereskia aculeata that was badly in need of attention... I think I used Earth Day as an excuse to buy it...

Now Pereskia aculeata is one of THOSE cactus... Primarily because it doesn't much look like a cactus. They're the only cactus genus that isn't considered succulent. There's an arguement that they're primitive cactus... in other words, this is what cactus looked like before they developed succulent stems and all their leaves evolved into spines... but I'm not going to worry about that. They're a tropical plant, native to Brazil, that produces white flowers and edible fruits on climbing vines... called Barbados gooseberry...

This one was etoliating, and I decided to get it into a better situation this morning at about 7 am.

So I picked a dead branch off my curly willow tree to give it something to climb on, and then grabbed a glazed flower pot to plant it in... and something jumped out of the pot at me...

Now, I should make myself clear... I'm not particularly squeemish about snakes, spiders, lizards and such... but that's based on the general assumption that they don't want to be around me far more than I don't want to be around them... but at 7 AM, fortified only by 2 cups of coffee, I can't be expected to react well when paniked critter decides to do a Kamakasi leap at my face! After he settled on one of the straw bales that I'm growing tomatoes in, I determined that not only is he harmless, I actually don't mind him being here... It's one of the common geckos that live in this part of the world.
They eat huge amounts of bugs and such, but they generally only do it at night so the only time you see them is when they crawl up the sides of the house to catch the insects attracted to house lights. You also see them when you pick up the flower pot they've decided to sleep in. Anyway, after he squirmed into another hole, I continued with my project... And here it is...

I'm not expecting much, but I may get some blooms from it next year, and maybe a berry or two...

The plant, when established well, is a bit on the rampaging side, using its small sharp spines to grab onto trees and branches and scrambling up to 10 meters. It's white blooms make it appear to be more a climbing rose than anything else, when it blooms, and while commercial growers use Hylocereus undatus to make those grafted cactus at Wal-mart, the stems of Pereskia are often used to graft tiny seedling cactus, to make the seedlings grow much quicker. It'll need more water than my other guys, and I do now have another plant that has to come in this winter, but we'll see how it goes...