Well, That Worked Out Better Than Expected — A TBMC Story
There are moments in this hobby where you do everything right and still watch something go sideways — and then there are moments where something goes sideways, you scramble to fix it, and somehow end up better off than when you started. This is one of those stories.
Original TBMC before the incident — a small, yet beautiful crested bridgesii grafted onto myrtillocactus, before things got interesting.
Back in Spring 2026, I got my hands on a nice little TBMC through Reddit, which is honestly how a lot of my best plants have come to me. It was a beautiful, sprawling crested bridgesii grafted onto a myrtillocactus. Then came what I'll just call an unfortunate incident involving an alcohol treatment to deal with a pest situation, which resulted in some burn damage I wasn't expecting. I'll leave it at that, because I genuinely don't want to revisit that particular chapter any more than I have to.
What I was left with was a decision — let it limp along and hope for the best, or chop it and try to salvage what I could. Here's the thing though: that crest had grown so wide and was waterfalling over the sides of the rootstock that getting a clean root on it down the road was going to require chopping it up eventually anyway. So in a way, the incident just moved up the timeline on something that was already inevitable. I made my cuts in early June and ended up with four separate pieces to work with.
The largest section went back onto the myrtillocactus it had been living on. The other three went onto some Pachanoi yearlings I had ready to go. One of those three pieces was, to be honest, a real long shot — tiny, not much to it, not a lot of meat on the bone. I grafted it on with a kind of "well, let's see how lucky I get" attitude and didn't expect much. I also dusted some diatomaceous earth around the base of each, just to make sure whatever pest had caused the original headache didn't get a second invitation. I use DE pretty regularly around the base of my plants anyway, so if you see any white dusty residue in some of these photos, that's what you're looking at — not a problem, just a habit.
All four pieces shortly after healing in mid-June. The runt of the bunch (last photo) is easy to overlook at this point, which is exactly what I was doing.
By mid-June, all four were in the greenhouse and I was watching them like a hawk.
Now here's where it gets interesting. That little piece I had written off? The one I grafted with basically zero expectation? It is, as of right now, the most stunning of the four. I don't entirely know how to explain that except to say that sometimes cacti just decide to humble you. I've been doing this long enough that I'm not sure I can call it luck anymore — but then again, I'm also not sure I'm ready to call it skill either. Maybe somewhere in the middle.
The piece on the myrtillocactus — the biggest, strongest chunk from the original — is doing fine. Growing slow and steady. But the three on the Pachanoi yearlings have just taken off, and watching them blow past the "flagship" piece has been equal parts surprising and deeply satisfying.
Late August, and the comeback is real. Four photos, four pieces of what used to be one plant. The last photo is the one I nearly didn't bother grafting — make of that what you will.
Yes, that is three months of grafted growth between the two sets of photos above. So what started as one TBMC became four, and honestly? I'll take that trade every single time. You might notice some of the later photos have barcodes partially visible — those are from a Cacti Companion app, which I use to track all my plants. I wrote about how I built it here if you want to check it out.
If there's a lesson here, it's probably just that sometimes the thing that feels like a disaster is really just the universe forcing you to do something you should have done anyway. One became four. The weakest became the strongest. And the myrtillocactus is out here taking the slow and steady road while everyone else sprints past it. Honestly, I respect it.
