I can’t seem to get enough of the savage Darlingtonia californica cuteness! These babies were given to me as tiny seedlings from my friend, Mike Wang last year. They’re growin’ up quick and really putting some fangs out! (Photos from 17 Jul 2012. )
Posted in Blog
Tagged californica, Carnivorous Plant, Cobra Lilly, Cobra plant, darlingtonia
Last weekend, Dahlia and I had a little weekend excursion in Sonoma County. It was a much needed time to relax after all the moving that we recently had to do. We’re settling into our new place nicely – but man… moving always sucks! (Thanks again to everyone who helped out!)
So anyway – what would a mini-vacay be without carnivores?! For me, vacations are never complete without carnivorous plant goodness. Since we were in the ‘hood of California Carnivores we decided to stop by to immerse ourselves in the carnivory. If you haven’t been there, I highly recommend stopping by. It’s always a pleasure to visit this magnificent and magical place. Thank you, Cal Carn for what you do. Continue to embolden and equip us to be better growers!
Click here for the full screen slideshow!
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Posted in Blog
Tagged brocchinia, California Carnivores, Carnivorous Plant, Catopsis, Cephalotus, darlingtonia, Dionaea, drosera, Drosophyllum, Heliamphora, nepenthes, out and about, Peter D'Amato, Pinguicula, Roridula, Sarracenia, visit
Last weekend I finally had some time to mix things up. Now, I am a believer in keeping things simple — such as my media. I know that for whatever reason, media can be a hotly debated subject in some carni-circles. All I can say is — do whatever works for you. Seriously.
I have grown plants successfully in nothing but pure peat moss. And it’s good and great! My FAVORITE brand is Sunshine peat moss. Great stuff. I’ve used other brands of peat in the past and it was all effed up. Weeds, twigs, dead bugs, dried leaves, and other schtuff was just hanging out in the moss. Oh… and one time, there was one brand where mold was a problem! Seriously! I bought a bag and there was all this fuzzy stuff growing in the bag! Nasty. So right now, I favor Sunshine. But again, use whatever work works for you. Don’t be afraid to try things out. Just be sure it’s not that MiracleGrow brand or any other brand that has fertilizer in it. Well… you can try it out and tell me how your plants fare.
Like I said, I’ve grown plants successfully in pure peat. However, I needed to make the peat stretch, so added a few things.
This year, I am using sand in my mix.
Now, I don’t know if the below brand of sand is really any good, but my test plants have had no horrific results. I picked this up from (ugh, sad to say… the Depot…) I typically like to go to the quarry and use Oly Sand, (Oly for Olympia, Washington State, I guess…) and that has worked fine for me last year. We’ll see how the plants fare this year with this new stuff. If they all crash and burn and die… then… I’ll blog about it, cry for a while, and then warn you NEVER to use this brand!
Perlite. It adds a nice airyness to the mix. The general CP go-to-catchall mix is 1 part peat to 1 part perlite. Now, I do have to warn you NOT to breath any of this dust in. Don’t eat it either. I know some folk may be tempted. If you use this stuff, please wear a mask. Or moisten the contents of bag. Do not get it in your lungs, because it can cause weird things to happen to you. Seriously. I do wear a dust mask, and also — if you moisten the contents of the bag, it really minimizes the dust from flying all over the place.
So… on to the mix.
I dump the sand in my handy dandy wheelbarrow. I then wash the sand several times over removing some sediment and residue so that it’s cleaner.
Washing sand!
Next thing, below, I dump the moist perlite. This mix is roughly 1:1:2, sand, perlite, peat. A few more additives in there to stretch my media…
Then, I toss in the peat. Yes, I know it’s chunky and a block of hardened stuff in the photo below. The fun part is getting in there and mixing it all up. I get in there with my garden gloves and mash it all up. The sand will actually help break it down so much faster.
… and a few minutes later, a mix ready to fill those pots. I actually went through this wheelbarrow of media very quickly… ah, so much to do. So little time.
Another good friend of mine (Hi Mama Lo!) uses a concrete mixer to mix her media in. I should really invest in one…
To break up some of that monotony of dead foliage and seeds, here are a few current shots of some seed-LINGS that I am growing indoors under lights, behind glass. I grow my plants mostly outdoors or in an unheated greenhouse (to protect from wind and such), but I have started seed successfully indoors under lights. These seedlings will be shifted and grown out in the unheated greenhouse once it gets a tad bit warmer. And those flowers are from Mexican Pinguicula (another carnivorous awesome plant.)
Now don’t get me wrong, I do love this season, but it’s seems like there is never enough time for all I want to do with the plants. Winter is a great time for me to work on all them since they be all dormant! Once they’re up and growing/blooming, I don’t like to bug em. Trips em’ out.
Anyway, basically the photo below is in a 50 gallon terrarium/grow chamber with lights.
These babies are just over a year old and as you can see, have been growing in rather cramped conditions. Yuri in the earlier post commented:
“… I just sowed something like 50 different crosses, and needed space is really a problem…”
Yep. I have that problem too! LOL! No way I can grow all these seedlings, so what am I doing with them? Compost some (the very weakest ones), or distribute some as gifts, give aways, or sell some off to help offset my growing costs. These plants above are ready to be thinned out.
Being that I am new to this, I am finding my way and trying to get somewhat even more-so disciplined in the art. It’s hard though. You have a seedling that you’re about to toss, but yet, that nagging voice says “OH, but you don’t know if it will have some insane beautifulnormous pitchers in a couple years, after all you can’t really tell what it will be like at this point in time…”
This is true. But it’s also dangerous especially with limited space and resources. So I tell the voice to “Shove it.” Then, I just plod along, composting some and transplanting even this early (which, isn’t too early for me…) shifting them to roomier abodes.
In the background here are some Mexican Pinguiculas. They are great for in the terrarium gnat control! I haven’t had any gnats so the leaves are nice and clean. During the first week of set up on this terrarium, the leaves were chalk full of those lousy fungus gnats. Cycle broken. Yay.
And… standing head and shoulders above the rest of it’s fellow seedlings is this one UNKNOWN plant.
It’s a plant that my good friend Jerry Addington crossed. The exact parentage is uncertain. The plant is S. [(leucophylla x rubra) x minor giant] crossed with the pollen parents of either S. “Nadine” or S. “W.C.” Unfortunately I do not have a photo of either parent plant, but can tell you that S. “Nadine” and “W.C” both have the Sarracenia leucophylla (white top pitcher) influence which is very present above. It’s kinda hard to tell and will probably be impossible to really determine later as it gets older. Who knows, we’ll see. It happens. This was an “Oops cross”, as Jerry called it. (Hey, it’s all good Jerry, it’s showing a lot of promise to be an interesting and beautiful plant already…)
Sarracenia, I am told, can accept pollen from several different sperm donors, and the seeds will of course be all mixed representing characteristics of pod parent + sperm donor A, or pod parent + sperm donor B… or donor C… and so on and on. Digest that for a while and then a new world of madness opens up. Fun stuff, this breeding thing!
I still can’t believe that there are only a few more hours left in 2010.
Ok. A box. So it’s a Vans shoebox. Yes, I know.
For me, 2011 is kinda like this unopened box. A great culmination of stuff from this year building up to bigger and better things. At least, I hope I’ll get some bigger and better things. What is IN that box is something I look forward to. (And no, it ain’t shoes.)
What is in that box will grow. The results of the work I did this past year will become tangible. Some things may NOT be all that great (and will be tossed and composted), and some things will be simply spectacular. Some things will be nurtured, and some things despised. Who knows. All I gots to say is BRING IT ON.
And to all of you out there, I would like to wish you a Happy New Year! Have fun and please be safe. Wishing you all continued health and success in 2011!
Cheers!
-Rob
Salutations,
Man, it’s been pretty busy – I would imagine this is so for ALL of us in this holiday season. My cube day job especially has been pretty busy – resulting in my recent silence here on the blog. Honestly, I’d rather NOT have these mini hiatuses but would rather share Sarracenia goodness with everyone. All day. Every day. These past couple of weeks have most certainly has been quite the flurry of activity.
Anyway, I just wanted to say a very special thank you to fellow blogger James at Lost in the Landscape! (If you haven’t done so, check his blog!) He had sent me a few things that really added some awesomeness in my not-so awesome past couple of weeks… (Thanks James, you ROCK!)
[Some seeds that will have some star potential! It may not look like much now, but I wanted to start documenting their growth. A couple years later I’ll probably refer back to this post just to show how these plants started.]
[Sarracenia division, unconfirmed ID at this point, but we’re pretty sure that it is a S. ‘Judith Hindle’]
[I’m really excited about this one- Seedlings of S. x melanorhoda, Triffid Park x purpurea ssp. veonsa v. burkii f. luteola. Yes! I will be using these for breeding in the anthocyanin free line. They have that recessive antho free gene in them now!]
[I potted them up a couple of nights ago right when I got home. It was about 10pm, and dark and cold out, but I still did it! Brrr!]
**Thanks again James!**
Expand. That’s what going on with the collection right now. I guess that’s what happens when you hybridize and grow things from seed. In order to prepare for further expansion, I need to shift some seedlings out and move things around.
I have a lot of pots that were once used for other plants that are just sitting there, so instead of buying more pots, I figure that it would be beneficial to use what I already have. I tweeted about the pots a while back and I really love how fellow blogger Bom Gomez (@plantchaser) from Plantchaser put it:
“@SarraceniaDude how many are we who find cleaning pots a portent of good things to come?”
(Bom, Salamat, pare! 🙂 )
Oh so true... some see crappy empty pots. I see space to grow some carnivorous art.
[Old pots, in need of a good scrub down]
So here I have all these old pots that have been used an abused. I wish I was was one of these gardeners that could keep things kinda clean, shiny, and sparkly, but unfortunately… eh… I’m not. The pots are still in great condition, but they do need a good scrub down to puuurrrrty them up a bit. What better tool to scrub the crap off them than the good ole’ crap scrubber…
[OH YEAH! LET’S DO THIS!]
The crap scrubber works great on scrubbing crap off the pots. You know, crap like that old dirt that kinda coagulates mysteriously inside those pots… As you can see, I used a brand new clean and shiny crap scrubber that is dedicated only to the crud that one finds adhering to the pots. It’s an awesome Clorox brand scrubber with the “Antimicrobial protection of the brush fibers”!!
I cleaned off as much crud off as I can for now, then take the pots and lined em up in the handy dandy utility tubs. These tubs also are used for the water trays that I keep the plants in.
[Getting em lined up!]
Next, I soak the pots a bit to soften up that older harder crap. I scrub down again, and I leave the pots sitting in a slight bleach solution for a day to sterilize them.
[Gettin’ a scrub down and a bleach bath]
So now I have all these awesome pots ready to be filled to the brim with potting media goodness. But wait! There’s large draining holes there and the media over time will seep out. So, in order to counter this, I am using up my unused rolls of weed block. Some people use coffee filters, pine needles, or any other course media to stop the flow of media from seeping out of the drainage holes. I say use whatever works for you.
[Left over weed block going to be used at the bottom of the pots to prevent planting media-leakage.]
As far as the media goes, everyone has their own special mix to use for their carnivorous plants. Again, use whatever works for you. I will use either 1 part peat moss to 1 part sand, or 1 part peat moss to 1 part perlite. I’ve also just used pure peat, or a combination of all 3.
If working with perlite, it’s a good idea to wear some type of dust mask. It’s not very good for you to be sniffin’ that stuff.
I like to use the sand because of the added weight, especially when growing in pots outdoors. Perlite is irritating when it rains and it all floats to the top, however you can use the peat/perlite mix at the bottom and add a nice top layer of pure sphagnum on top to prevent the perlite from floating out. Works for me.
[Ahhhh! Nothing like the fresh smell of freshly hand mixed planting media!]
Today I only got to about 18 or so pots, shifting some seedlings out, have another 50 or so more to go. I still have more pots to do after this set is done. I trimmed off the pitchers from the seedlings that were growing in those little square pots as they’re dormant anyway and separated them in clumps as you can see below. For me, cutting off the pitchers makes it easier to handle the plant, without those pitchers floppin’ all over the place. The pitchers will come up next growing season and the seedlings now have a little bit more room to grow.
[Room to grow.]
Posted in Blog
Tagged Carnivorous Plant, Garden, North American Pitcher Plant, Pitcher Plant, Pots, Sarracenia Hybrid
