Settling into their new home!

Happy 2013! We are finally settled into our new house, and the Sarracenia are finally settling in too. True to form, we picked one of the hottest summers ever to move, and the collection had to cope with several days of 40*C heat. Pitchers and live Sphagnum burned at the tips, but everything has adjusted quickly to the new conditions and are looking marvellous.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in advance from the Pitcher Plantation!

An 80-something cm (nearly 3 feet) tall pitcher of my favourite plant,
Sarracenia flava var. atropurpurea “FRT 1-1”. This pitcher was produced last season; the plants have not yet forgiven me for repotting and fertilising them this season, and are still sulking! This is the biggest Sarracenia I have ever grown.

We are moving! As of this Friday, we will be packing up the Sarracenia collection. Our new house looks like it will be very amenable to Sarracenia growing, so here’s hoping! As it will take 2-3 weeks for our new internet to be connected (!), there will be no updates to the blog until next year.

In the meantime, we would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a happy, successful and prosperous 2013. Take care over the silly season and stay safe too.

Outdoor growing – bring on the colour!

Here is the overflow collection, growing happily in the full sun. These plants were all split late last summer because the parent plants had grown too dense and had started to experience rhizome rot. I had them in the greenhouse to start with, but soon moved them outdoors because they stopped me entering through the door!

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.