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!
