The carnivorous plants are starting to grow again after their winter dormancy.
These ones are indoor windowsill ones grown from seed on sphagnum moss. #CarnivorousPlants#Drosera#Sarracenia#SavageGarden
Repotting day for the Venus Flytraps planted from seed in Fall 2022. They seem about halfway out of dormancy. The leaves are starting to stand up and there is new growth, but most of the traps are not fully active yet. They were pretty easy to work with this time. Most of them went into a larger pot, but I put some in smaller pots to give to friends this spring. The last pic is right when they were removed from the old pot.
Brought these outside for the first time this year to get some sun and fresh air. They started coming out of dormancy a few weeks ago (I reset the wintering bulb light timers every few weeks to follow sunrise/sunset). They'll be going in and out of the house until they fully acclimate to outside again.
The Australian Pitcherplant has the cutest little pitchers. It’s not closely related to Sarracenia (American Pitcherplants) or to Nepenthes (Tropical Pitcherplants), but instead to things like Oxalis (Wood Sorrel). These kind of insect-catching hollow leaves have evolved independently three times in the flowering plants.
I've never had any luck with carnivorous plants, but maybe I'll take another chance with this one. It is welcome to chow on my occasional fungus gnats. Anyways, I added it to my list of plants to acquire.
@artemesia Generally carnivorous plants are full sun plants, though some like Nepenthes and Pinguicula do fine in bright indirect light. They also apparently hate hard tap water, thankfully the tap water where I live works just fine. (Most also need acidic media with no fertilizers.) Some easy-to-grow carnivorous plants to get started with are Nepenthes x ventrata and Pinguicula “Weser”. (The Pinguicula will be great for catching fungus gnats, Nepenthes tends to catch ants more often.)
I’m wondering whether this butterwort (Pinguicula) is making a bud. Haven’t had any flowers on butterworts yet. Very excited.
Not sure which species. It had pink leaves but the new ones came in green. The newer new ones are showing some pink. Probably to do with letting it sit uncovered sometimes (direct light)?
I have a dormancy question. This is the first one for my one year old Venus Flytraps from seed. I seeded them way to close together (I know better now). I know the best time for separating them out is during the dormancy period, though when is best within that? Is it now when they are dormant for about a month or so with some green on them still or later closer to spring. If the latter do I just move the roots and rhizomes?
It feels like everyone who grows these has had a late start this season, but it's finally that tuberous #drosera time of year again.
A couple of views of my D. tubaestylis, the first of my tuberous to get going. Two different plants from the same pot. One smaller specimen, the other flowering size.
Nepenthes gracilis “squat” is such an underrated lowland pitcher plant that for some reason, I don’t see mentioned very often outside of the Southeast Asian cp hobbyist community. It’s tiny & compact (like, FAR more compact than either the normal forms of gracilis and ampullaria), it’s easy to grow, its leaves are tiny compared to its pitchers. #CarnivorousPlants#SavageGarden
That said, Nepenthes campanulata x ventricosa has become really affordable & widely available nowadays (at least here in Malaysia) and it has all the strengths of N. gracilis “squat”. (It does grow large eventually but with a bit of pruning, it can stay as a miniature forever) #SavageGarden#CarnivorousPlants
Flushing and checking the mini bog. Everything is pretty well anchored in at this point, but I still got pretty nervous when pouring off the water. TDS (total dissolved solids) was creeping up (lower is better) and pH should be acidic, but might have been bit more acidic before flushing than the Pinguiculas actually like (not entirely sure on that though). I swapped the lighting to a lower wattage also.
@SeekingDuck
That was what I suspected and it helps very much. Need it for a Fediverse Atlas (ActivityPub Collection of all the knowledge about Places) … Thanks. @chillicampari@plants
@chillicampari
If I understood correctly, Mexican pings aren’t too particular about acidity and some of them even grow on limestone cliffs? That said an acidic sphagnum mix has always worked ok for me. @plants
Keeping up the insectivorous content- another old photo, from 2020, close up of a couple of types of sundew plant we keep in our porch. The plants grow in sphagnum moss and rainwater. the moss grows very well, so the plants have to keep reaching up to stay in the light #SavageGarden#Sundews#drosera#CarnivorousPlants#InsectivorousPlants
This year I am trying a dormancy setup for the carnivorous plants in a cold storage room next to a wall that should get close to freezing in a few weeks (growing zone 7b) or whenever it stays cold throughout the day. It's a bit earlier than I would usually do, but I want to see how they adjust before fully committing to the setup. The lighting is made for hibernation (Parus overwintering LED) but it's the first year I've used them.
Another Sarracenia leaf photo, this one from 2020, taken of a plant growing in our bog garden. I do like the contrast of the veins against the paler leaf colour.
Still trying to increase the insectivorous plant content on Mastodon. #SavageGarden#CarnivorousPlants#InsectivorousPlants#Sarracenia
#Heliamphora leaf with the sun behind.
The cup at the top produces nectar to attract insects, which can fall into the pitcher and be digested- this plant does not fill it's own leaves with liquid, relying on the rain to fill them. Each leaf has a small slit to allow excess water to drain without losing their insect prey. #SavageGarden#InsectivorousPlants#CarnivorousPlants#plants#HousePlants
Looks like the sundew seeds that I sprinkled on a spare pot of sphagnum moss germinated.
Sorry for fuzzy photo, they are still very small and the moss was in the bottom of a glass - it all made sense at the time, I’m sure… #Insectivores#Sundew#SavageGarden#CarnivorousPlants
*Edited to put the alt Text on the photo instead of in the post- still can't do it on my phone where the photos are...
Checking in on the very small bog I planted mid-August. The first pic is what it looks like now, the last one is just after making it. There is a lot going on in there that I tried to show a bit with the center pics. Drosera (Sundew) seedlings have sprouted from flower stalks I tossed in there just to see what would happen and some of them are growing on the moss. For watering I just kind of flood it every few days, they seem to like that.
@plants usually you wouldn't want to flood Pinguicula/Butterworts (crown rot can happen with many of them when kept too wet) but these were always different than the others I have and usually looked dry and unhappy, so I wanted to see if they liked different conditions and so far they seem to.
@chillicampari@plants omg bog bins! I’ve got some indoor ones in varying condition. The outdoor ones are doing better but too hard to photo in the dark.
