Tag Archives: cleaning

Cleaning and Organizing

Posted on October 6, 2012 | 8 comments

   

Much ado about cleaning! Now that I have water tables built, I finally have the chance to spread the plants out. The pots used to be crammed into either those 10 x 12 inch trays, or cement mixing tubs. There is nothing wrong with that, those make flippin’ AWESOME containers to hold water. I have used those for years! Now that I’m here, I figure a larger “container” would help me cut back on the time spent watering. Now I can just flood the tables by letting the hose run whenever I want to water the plants, instead of watering tray after tray after tray.

I’ve been doing a lot of cleaning, weeding, and getting things organized. You can kinda see how some weeds have begun to slowly take over above. There’s also the sad looking long and lanky foliage – a result of the “dark ages” earlier this year. I’m clipping some of the dead pitchers off, well ‘cuz you know that good floral hygiene is great. The joy and rapture of cleaning and organizing never seems to end here. At least things are coming together…slowly. What is cool is that I’m finding so many crosses and plants that I totally forgot about. Yeah, every now and then I find pots that contained rotted out plants. Dude, it still sucks, but what can you do. I just close my eyes, shed a tear, and toss those out. As my friend Jerry Addington recently reminded me, I’ll have time to remake stuff as the years go by. Anyway, I’ll update my surprise findings on the blog every now and then. Stay tuned!

Sarracenia Seedling Cleaning and Organization
Getting plants grouped and organized! In the foreground are the younger seedlings. The group of plants behind that are various hybrids I’ve done with S. ‘Adrian Slack’ from prior years. They don’t look that great now, but I have high hopes for next season. Various other hybrids are in the back.

Sarracenia Seedling Cleaning and Organization
Another shot of the recent babies! Grow lil’ homies, grow! Can’t wait to see what you’ll look like in a couple of years! In the background, you see a fraction of the stuff I still have to go through, sort, and clean. WOOHOO!

Sarracenia Seedling Cleaning and OrganizationYeah, I know. It’s really messy looking, but some neat and interesting young plants here. All are on the road to recovery and doing well.

Sarracenia Seedling Cleaning and Organization
More seedlings! Finally having the ability to stretch and enjoy a little! Still more space to fill in, but that will be filled very soon as I continue going through the various jumbled trays of plants. 

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Cleaning

Posted on January 24, 2012 | 6 comments

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning… it feels like it never ends.  I admit, last year I kinda let a few plants just go outdoors and they’ve become over run with weeds and all other sorts of nasty-ness!  Now that I am in a greenhouse, proper Sarracenia hygiene is a must!  I am working my way through the ordeal, one pot at a time, one tray at a time.   Some pots looked like the below. (NASTY, I know…)

Here’s one of the plants I was growing in some obscure part of the old yard last year. It became over run with weeds. You can see how heavy those roots are coming out of the bottom of the pot.

So to clean this thing up, I simply took the clippers and went at it. I basically hacked all the pitchers away, and all pulled out as much of that grass as I could, and also stripped the rhizome pulling off dead pitchers.  I used the clippers to also get down into the soil to help pull the weeds out from the root level. Nasty stuff.   Again, I would of used my Katana blade (like this and plants beware like this), but I think that my sword is still somewhere packed up in a box from my recent move…

After pulling the weeds out, it looks much better. Ready for growth in the coming season.  I trimmed the pitchers off  and I also stripped the rhizomes down pretty clean.  I did leave some of the foliage stubs from the pitchers/phyllodia. This will help them in the spring with photosynthesis.  I think. I know some who clip it all off, but I figure, hey, it may help to leave some stubs on there.

Now this is only going to be the first stage of cleaning for me while these plants are dormant. What I’m going to next is actually repot the plants into fresh media.  One of the challenges I have for the next couple months is that the water is harder than my old place.  To help counteract the mineral build up, I’m repotting. (OK, shocker, but it’s reached up to roughly 270 PPM here.)  So, while I don’t have an RO unit system, I am not really watering heavy as these plants are dormant anyway, and when I do water, it’s more of a top watering routine keeping the plants damp.  I’ll write more about the water thing in a later post. That’s just one of the challenges I’m dealing with, but I’ll be OK for a little bit.

It’s good to keep it clean – especially in my new greenhouse environment.  Here it’s more humid and the air circulation isn’t as great as the great awesome outdoors!  Keeping things clean will help combat gross mold/fungi cooties from attacking the plants.  Below is the same tub, but after I went through it trimming things back. I’ll leave it this way while I’m sorting and cleaning the rest of the tubs. Phase 2 will be the re-potting portion!

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And So It Begins… Again.

Posted on January 22, 2012 | 6 comments

2012 has been off to an exciting start.  With the majority of the transition behind me, I’ve had time to focus on the next big task: cleaning and re-organizing. Garden moves are not as easy as I would like them to be, and I anticipate a full season before I can really settle in and get things organized at the new place.

The greenhouse provides it’s own set of advantages as well as challenges that I hope to negotiate and document here.  Honestly, I really do prefer growing Sarracenia outdoors; however – I’m thankful that at least the garden has a space.

Here’s a few photos from the past few days…


Overgrown seedling tray.  Those seedlings are about a year old, and need to be trimmed, cleaned, then re-potted…


A tub of old pitchers.  The blade is coming to slice em down soon…


Lots of trimming and re-potting ahead…  and no, I really still can’t find stuff I want to find…

One of those nasty pots full of overgrown seedlings… This cross is a Sarracenia (leucophylla x oreophila) x catebaei – Sumatra, FL


Same pot as above – Sarracenia (leucophylla x oreophila) x catebaei – Sumatra, FL post cut.   After trimming all these pots, the next step is thinning/shifting the seedlings out to let them grow out for evaluation.


Filllin’ the can up with dead pitchers full of bug guts… delicious.

And if you’re wondering why I haven’t used the katana blade – well, because of the move, I’m having trouble locating it at the moment. But not to worry, it will be in effect once found!


Looking cleaner! I managed to get through only a couple of benches thus far. And that’s only trimming.  I still have quite a few more benches to finish with trimming — then it’s re-potting time! YEAH!


Another angle.  Notice I left some of the phyllodia (those are the flat non-carnivorous leaves that aid the plant in photosynthesis), as well as a couple of pitchers that were still pretty good looking.

Speaking of pitchers… check out a few of these nifty pitchers that are still holding pretty well late in the season!


Recent addition – a couple of *bizarre beasts*, but yet kind of fun and interesting… this is Sarracenia “Smurf”!  From what I was told, it  originated as a tissue culture mutant of S. purpurea ssp. venosa, and later found at Carniflora.  Special thanks to Kevin for these awkwardly insane and strangely weird beasts!  (Uh, yeah… I do have a thing for weird pitcher shapes too…)


Sarracenia purpurea “Smurf”


Sarracenia purpurea “Smurf” — I guess there’s something about those weird pointy hood hook things that I kinda like!


As I was cleaning and trimming – I found some more pots of my cross of S. ‘Golden Red Jubilee’ x purpurea ssp. purpurea.  These were growing in partially shaded conditions. Plants that I’ve distributed to others in the past year have shown some nice veins when they were able to be grown out in full blazing sun. Now that I have more space, I can’t wait to see what these things will do!


Sarracenia minor var. okefenokeensis x “Green Monster” – This is a collaboration cross between an idea that sprang up during a conversation between Jerry Addington and I.  The mother plant supplied by Mike Wang, and pollen from the S. “Green Monster” I had.  What you see is step 1 in an antho free project we have going on… good times!


Sarracenia minor var. okefenokeensis x “Green Monster”

Rebuilding
Sarracenia courtii x ‘Adrian Slack’ – a select clone from a cross I did a couple years ago – late season pitcher.

There’s still a lot of work left to do. It’s unending, but it’s “work” that I find fun.  As I remove the dead foliage, there are faint glimmers of hope that appear.  Sometimes I’ll see the beginnings of a new pitcher, or perhaps a slight bulge at the growpoint on certain plants indicating that flowers are just around the corner…

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