Australasian Carnivorous Plant Society Meeting on 9 November 2012

I managed to get up to Sydney yesterday to attend the Australasian Carnivorous Plant Society meeting, which was a talk by Robert Gibson on his trip to Los Angeles and the ICPS 2012 conference plus field trips. Here are a few photos of the display plants:

The pros and cons of fertilising Sarracenia–and what happens if you overfertilise them

You don’t have to fertilise to get lovely Sarracenia! This is a Sarracenia flava var. cuprea ex Gotcha! Plants. Fortunately, it survived the fertiliser carnage described later on this page.

Prologue - If you are an experienced CP grower and read only one article on my blog, it should be this one. I wrote it in response to questions people had asked me about fertiliser use in late 2012. By mid summer, I had lost significant numbers of plants to what I thought was a weird fungal rot. I later learned it was fertiliser burn.

Fertilising Sarracenia is a relatively new thing. It was not usually mentioned in the original texts on CPs (although I think Schwartz in his 1970s book did suggest it from memory), and even today opinions vary widely on how to fertilise and what the benefits are.