January Update

Greetings all! I hope you’ve had a great start to the new year so far. My wish is that you, your loved ones and your plants will find happiness and health all throughout this coming year. Things are quite busy on this end with winter clean up. All this in preparation for the growth that will soon follow. The Sarracenia in The Asylum are all brown and crispy and pot-by-pot, table-by-table… slowly they are getting their shave on. Winter fun, yes? I’m about to burn them all down… 🙂

Yet, with all the dead foliage that surrounds me, I’m still growing things. A few plants (both carnivorous and non-carnivorous) around the greenhouse are doing well. I have a few plants in my office cubicle that keep me company whilst I’m at the office. And YES – I’m still tinkering around with the Nepenthes. Remember this last year? Ugh. Sheeeyaaatttt….  I hope to do better this year. And so far, so good. That greenhouse-within-a-greenhouse (woooah, that’s so botanically Inception-y) is doing wonders for them. Man, those things are so fascinating and beautiful. They give me something to grow while the rest of my botanical world is not as green. I still have the tank going on that I referenced at the end of this post. I’ll update you with a few photos in my next entry, so stay tuned for that. In the mean time, here’s a handful of frames of what’s been going on in The Asylum.

This is my winter-ish-zen moment. Yeaaa, gettin’ this mo-fo cleaned up.  For the most part, this is my view – carting out dead pitchers, weeds, and old media wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load. Oh joy, oh rapture! It’s such a cleansing experience!

Thought this was pretty cool, a few of the S. alata “Maroon Throat” pitchers still looking quite nifty!

Another angle of those S. alata “Maronon Throat” pitchers.

S. alata “Red Mustache” with a couple of pitchers. Don’t mind that mess in the background.

The flytraps now all spiffy and ready for the growing season.

Ah, you know. a small pitcher of S. ‘Reptilian Rose’ x (flava var. rubricorpora x leucophylla) – Clone 8 just hangin’ out in that mess of dead pitchers…

S. leucophylla “Purple (kinky) Lips” and her burning-out phyllodia tips. The traps normally do not form that way, it just happened that this one opened weird for some reason and ended up looking… kinky.

This year promises to be a pretty good one! There’s a few things in the works, and some neat crosses that will be sown soon. And YES, I hope to have some plants/rhizomes available in the shop once I’m able to get a little more organized. (Right now, there’s still a few seeds available… check it out) I’ll post some photos from the Nepenthes house as well as photos from the grow tank in the next post. In the mean time, I’m off to the next table… Woohoo!

Off to the next table…