Christmas Cactus Update #4

The time has arrived. After months and months of waiting and watching, it is finally time to prune the Christmas Cactus! It stopped blooming in mid April and I had to wait another month before pruning it. Here it is before the big process:

If you've been following the progress of this Christmas Cactus, you may remember that I've been wanting to prune this thing since February, and in an attempt to curb my impatience, I wrapped green twist ties on the branches that needed to go. Like this:

Then all I needed to do was to reach in and start cutting.

Now there are three important things to know when pruning Christmas cacti: 1) wait one month after it stops blooming (which we've discussed already), 2) never remove more than one-third the size of the plant at one time, and 3) always leave a whole segment - do not cut the segment you want to keep. If you look at the photo just above, you'll see that I'm making the cut at the top of the segment with the twist tie.

So, how does it look now? Here is the before:

And after:

We can once again work at the sink without being shoved by the cactus. Now the Christmas Cactus will simply be green until November or so when it starts blooming again.