The first Sarracenia flowers open for 2015!

The Sarracenia bogs burst into life while we were away on holidays! This season will see a bumper number of flowers.

14 October marks the date of the first fully open Sarracenia flower in the bog gardens. It was of course a Sarracenia flava, this year the David Martin var. flava clone called F1. It produces robust pitchers.

The first pitcher open looks set to be S. flava var. rubrocorpora, a robust clone from Phil Reytter. The traps look like they will be around 50 cm tall, give or take.

In another few weeks, the bog gardens should be ablaze with dozens of flowers all open at once. I will post more photos soon.

Bog garden finished–and it will be Drosera binata central!

Yay! I managed to get the last bog garden all planted up, way ahead of schedule! It contains a couple of Sarracenia leucophylla and mixed varieties of S. flava. Here’s how the Sarracenia growing area looks now everything is done:

Bog # 4 in position, ready to fill – if the weather permits

This weekend, a vigorous series of cold fronts are sweeping across south-eastern Australia, so I did what I could towards the new bog garden before they arrived.

This meant laying some more gravel to level up the garden’s base. When I placed out the other two, I deliberately left enough room to put a fourth garden in the middle of them – or so I thought. The last garden was about  20 mm out of position, so I need to build up the gravel under where the fourth garden will go to fit it in. Fortunately, only the lips of the three ponds were overlapping, so its no big deal. I managed to get the gravel in and the pond levelled just in time for the first showers ahead of the front arrived. Seeing as the weather is likely to stop me doing further work this weekend, I half-filled the pond and will leave it settle until next weekend, when I will make any final corrections and start filling it with peat.