Tylecodon reticulatus, Final Words on Rooting Caudiciforms (for those who might find this experience useful)

One day, you're an idiot and you spend too much on a dumbass plant. Two days later, it starts oozing.

When your plant does this, you don't panic, you don't think. You just go in there, dig it out and start hacking it to pieces. Don't even bother thinking it over. This is NOT one of those things that will resolve themselves.

For starters, I was clearly sold a diseased plant, right. That is a different conversation. For right now, you have a sick plant oozing something frothy. I'd guess bacterial infection but I really don't know and it doesn't really matter. 

If you have this problem or anything similar---a soft, slowly decomposing part of your caudiciform or what-not--amputation is the only solution that could save what remains healthy of your plant. 

So, get a sharp tool that is easy for you to control and sterilize it. In this case, a box cutter with a fresh blade was used. These blades tend to be lubricated with machine oil so you need to wipe that off and then apply some alcohol or bleach, allowing the blade to dry after each application. The plant in this crisis is poisonous so a pair of gloves was also necessary.

There is really no other instruction possible other than just get in there with a sharp knife and cut off the obviously decomposing parts until healthy tissue is exposed. By "healthy", in this case, it means no discolouration. In the photo below, cutting about a centimeter above that ooze was not enough. The interior of the plant trunk was still gooey. So, centimeter by centimeter, more pieces of the trunk had to come off.

Early autumn, 2016; days after arriving in the mail

After the hacking and slicing, I was left with three pieces that looked salvageable, except two of them looked too small and I was skeptical, already writing them off as a loss. Whatever you end up with, you will need to leave these severed pieces alone to dry. I got this particular plant in early autumn so this entire operation happened during it's growing season. (T. reticulatus are winter growers). Do not be tempted to plant it right away. 

After pruning the mysteriously pink parts.

T. reticulatus are very slow. One month after being sliced up (photo above), the skin on the open cut was still only barely forming. In the flurry of reading that followed this fiasco, several experienced growers recommended allowing the cuttings to dry out for several months before even attempting to root them.

I can not stress this enough: it really does take several months. In this case, a whole year. If you are one of those hopeless tinkerers that Ents would call the Fast People, your best option is to dip the open cuts in sulfur (to prevent mold/fungal growth) and then hang them out to slowly dry somewhere cool and out of sight. Then forget about them. 

The piece on the right did not even survive long enough to reach mid-summer.

The remaining two were potted up in early autumn--pure pumice in wide, shallow pots. I decided to use pumice because it does not stay waterlogged too long.

The use of wide and shallow pots is to ensure that there is enough surface area for water to evaporate even quicker. What you want to achieve, in other words, are humid conditions for the buried portion of the trunk while also keeping the rest of the plant bone dry.

Pro tip: remember that for this particular plant to get a clue that it is time for it to snap out of dormancy, it needs not just cool temperatures but also enough difference between night and day temperature.

Fortunately, it's easy to duplicate this indoors. I kept both cuttings inside on the floor, with an 18-inch T5HO above it and right against a door to the outside. That light fixture is enough to keep it warm (around 25C) during the day and cool at night when the timer goes off. Just to make sure, I placed a sensor right against the pot and discovered that over a two-week period, night temperatures were only going down to around 18C. So I decided to peel off about 5 inches of the door insulation to allow a bit of draft to come in and cool the plants down. After a few more weeks of tinkering (patching up the insulation to about a 2-inch gap turned out to be enough), the temp in this micro-location was 25C during the day and 12-15C at night).

During this first winter in the pot, they were watered every month from November to March the following year (2018). 

Also throughout this winter, both of the surviving pieces had to be repotted several times because I couldn't help but check their progress or the lack thereof. Maybe don't do that. I could not help it. Below, you can see one short, woody-looking root. Yes, it took that many months to grow that one measly shit. Gaah.

In any case, only the bigger piece managed to grow a couple of tendrils of root over that five-month period. The unpotting did help though---knowing where the root growth was starting helped aim the water spritz accurately so that in between the monthly soaking, I was able to directly spray the rooted area. 

By spring of 2018, both pieces survived the winter but 2018 would be their do-or-die. Without roots, neither looked like they had enough stored energy to survive the summer. The photos below show how wrinkled and dehydrated they have become, growing leaves entirely out of stored moisture. 

March, 2018 before going outside for spring.

When checked for root growth, this one had nothing.

Putting the surviving cutting outdoors in March did do wonders, however. In Zone 7, that time of year is probably heaven for T. reticulatus. The photo below shows the trunk finally (after two years) plumping up. 

I took no gamble with this particular project. Kept in a screened pergola all throughout the no-frost season, it was treated twice with imidacloprid which--remember this if you remember nothing else--will kill butterflies and bees if you do not isolate treated plants. But this particular plant would not have been able to survive infestation by pests, on top of losing its entire root system.  

Finally, here it is, four years later. This will be the last update to this post. 

October, 2020. Repotted in what will be its permanent pot. I ditched the pumice and replaced it with pure red scoria, just because it's prettier.