Tag Archives: Garden

The Carnivorous Plantation

Howdy everyone!  Hope you’re enjoying your weekend!  Now, how about a little weekend getaway, shall we?

All photos in this video were all taken by Bob Hanrahan at his Carnivorous Plantation in Alabama.  Now pull up a seat (the video is about 22 minutes long), grab some popcorn, and enjoy the movie! 😉


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Mr. Hanrahan — a very sincere and special thanks to you for sharing this; it is an honor and a delight to have “virtually visited” The Carnivorous Plantation by way of these photos. For now, I must vicariously live through them until I visit in person one day soon. Thank you Bob!

Digestion

So, after the meal gets drawn in to the pitcher by the sights, smells, and savory serum spawned from the fierce foliage , it ends up looking kinda like this. Check out all those bugs swimming in a rich latte of enzymes that the plant uses to break em’ down for some nutritious absorption. Nice!

digestion

[In the tube…]

Yumm-o!

A couple of days ago whilst I was meandering about the garden, I spotted some lunch makin’ its way to the plant. Needless to say, after a few moments of sippin’ that luscious plant liqueur – there was a slip n’ slide, a few faint buzzes and… well… lunch was then served. Yumm-o!

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dinner [Sarracenia “John Rizzi” x ‘Judith Hindle’ w/ lunch.]

Looking Back: The Early Years

Howdy y’all! I was just going through some old archived garden photos and found a few of my early Sarracenia ones!  Photos below from 2004 – 2006, when I used to live in San Francisco. I moved from one unit with a small patio,  to another larger unit with a slightly larger patio while living at this complex for a few years.  Anyway, given my limited space, I still was able to grow a lot of cool things there. Just wanted to share a few of these photos with you! 😉

The Early YearsMay 27, 2006.  This should give you an idea of what my patios were like when I lived at the 2 different condos in SF.  Lots of plant diversity could be found here. Notice the Sarracenia in the back, by the cacti.

The Early YearsMay 28, 2004. One of my first Sarracenia photographs. I was fortunate enough to have this Sarracenia catesbaei grow in this quasi terrarium for a couple years. Hey, I didn’t know any better! I did grow this plant outdoors though, so that did help a lot. I let the pitchers grow out of the top.

The Early YearsApril 11, 2005. More quasi open terrarium action. Sarracenia ‘Scarlet Belle’ in foreground.
Sarracenia catesbaei in the back. There’s even that little Drosera capesis flower stalk there too… yay.

The Early YearsAugust 24, 2005. Various Sarracenia around the garden.

The Early YearsMay 21, 2006. Again note the floral diversity and the Sarracenia pitchers growing behind the cacti/succulents and Ginko biloba. Yes, that aquarium is filled with water plants. Yes, so is that really cool moss lined barrel that I made in the back ground. (I made 2 of them the other is out of the shot.)

The Early YearsMay 21, 2006. Another view of the Sarracenia in the patio garden.

Harvest

seedpods[Sarracenia Seed Pods, collected 8.15.10]
Clockwise from top: S. flava “widemouth” x ‘Adrian Slack’, S. ‘Alucard’ x leucophylla anthocyanin free,
S. “Goliath” x ‘Adrian Slack’, S. oreophila – veined x ‘Adrian Slack, S. ‘Alucard’ x ‘Leah Wikerson’

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It’s that time of year again – today I was out in the grow area harvesting some pods. I left some of the labels on them so you can see how I keep track of the crosses as I do them. I learned the hard way to cover the tag in tape as snails will eat the cardboard and you loose the ID all together.  That was one mistake I learned the hard way last year. I did all these crosses only to have the identity taken by snails.   DOH!

Anyway, I know the pods may not look like much now but I am hopeful for some of these crosses.  Over here it’s been on the cool side of things so many plants and pods seem a little behind.   More pods are forthcoming which means more seeds soon! I am really looking forward to some of the ones I did this year … now just gotta figure out where I can put them all… 😉

Sproutage!

Howdy y’all!  I was out checking some seeds that I started this year and to my delight, saw one sprouting!  I did this cross early on this year, harvested seed roughly a month ago, put through about 2 weeks cold stratification in the fridge and… viola!

Reptilian Rose x Adrian Slack

By the way…I did this same cross last year and only had a few seeds from that pod.  A few of those germinated but none survived. (Don’t ask…) I was so torn… anyway, hope to have better success this year.

A Young Moorei

Howdy y’all! So as I was thinning out some of the S. leucophylla x flava seedlings pots a few days ago, I stumbled across this one interestin’ lil’ fella.  This was from a batch of seeds that a buddy of mine sent in 2008.  Most definately, this is one of the kids that I’ll be watching in this group. This is the first juvenile pitcher showing these characteristics. The new pitchers that are coming up will be opening in a few days are exhibiting the same qualities – predominately white upper pitchers with nice green veins. Dude, you never really know what you’ll get with those lil’ seeds – and that’s part of what makes this breeding thing so fun! 🙂  Hope everyone has a good weekend!

Sarracenia leucophylla x flava

Sarracenia leucophylla x flava