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Outgrown pot

Well, my Dutch Hybrid has yet again outgrown the pot. It's distorting the pot itself and the pitchers are mutating because it's too cramped. Would it do more harm to leave it, or to split it now when it's in the middle of growing season? (Summer here)

Also, what sort of pot would be more appropriate? I've always had it in a round pot which it fills up very very quickly. Would it prefer a long pot or is huge and round the way to go here?
I would just repot the whole thing into a larger pot but if I put it in a pot larger than it currently has i'm concerned the whole thing would just consume the house hahaha.

Help?
 
Is it a Sarracenia or ???
 
i picture would help
 
Is it a Sarracenia or ???

OH yes, sorry, it's a Sar, the infamous random hybrid typical to supermarkets and garden centres.

Let me grab a picture of it:

P1050578.jpg


Honestly, i'm shocked it's as happy as it is on a windowsill. I've had it about 6 years now, started out as a tiny little thing with maybe 3 pitchers on it. Now it's a monster!
But as you can see, several of the pitchers are distorting due to lack of space. We commonly get pitchers that are bent in the middle or otherwise twisted. And it still has the flowers on right now, I figured i'd leave them alone till they started to die or really get in the way.

What's the consensus here? I'd really rather not kill the poor thing. Somehow it's survived this long, it'd be a bummer to accidently murder it now.
 
Based on the large amount of flowers, you can bet that next year, just after taking the plant out of dormancy, you can divide it and have at least 8 separate plants. It looks very healthy, congratulations!
 
Based on the large amount of flowers, you can bet that next year, just after taking the plant out of dormancy, you can divide it and have at least 8 separate plants. It looks very healthy, congratulations!

Woah.. that's a lot of plants haha. Too bad we haven't the room or i'd have an army of these little suckers.
It never actually goes into full dormancy though, not sure if that's a trait of the hybrid itself or the plant being odd but no matter what I try it slows down but never totally goes to sleep. Then it goes nuts when it warms up and throws up massive amounts of growth and a lot of flowers. Every year we get another couple of flowers to add to the crop. It's an impressively robust plant given I have no talent for horticulture at all.

So will it be alright to stay in such cramped conditions till next Spring? Or should I find a larger pot in the interm? I'd need a new bowl heh, a larger pot may not actually fit on the sill.. hmmm. Long pot?
 
The easiest, quickest thing to do is to merely pull the root ball and medium out of the pot (or cut the pot if needed). Then pop it intact into a larger pot and fill in the gaps with new medium. Minimal root disturbance that way. Then next year you can divide it when it slows down. I suppose you can extend the windowsill with a board weighted down with something heavy like bricks temporarily for a larger bowl and pot.

Incredible color for windowsill growth. How many years have you been growing it?
 
Amazing plant!

Are you in the burbs or in the city? The UK is quite warm, and given your location in london, it is quite probable that some divisions could survive the winter outdoors if you don't have the room for all of them on your windowsill.
 
Incredible color for windowsill growth. How many years have you been growing it?

I've had it about 6 or 7 years. My husband randomly brought it home one day lol. He thought i'd appreciate it more than flowers and he was right hahaha. It's a very nice plant tbh, it colours up beautifully without too much light which is surprising.

I'm in the burbs
but our weather is absolutely insane lately. It's stupidly hot one day, icy cold the next, then we get gales. It's mad! Also our garden gets next to no light so I don't think they'd be very happy there. I could give it a go though, if I split it I could always experiment with some of the divisions.
Poor things heh.

If I repotted it into a long pot about the same width as the sill would it grow lengthwise to fill or would it prefer a round pot?

And thanks guys, i'm pretty proud of my plant but I can't really take any credit. I do next to nothing to it aside from fetch it rain water and trim dead bits every so often. It's just a very robust Sar, if it can survive my beginner bumblings it must be tough.
 
  • #10
I would say a long pot would work, it should grow sideways, and having a bank of sarra on you windowsill would look really nice.
 
  • #11
very nice ,put it in the long pot and divide it next early spring if you want , a 1 meter long flower window box would work great and keep doing want you are doing if it an't broke don't fix it
 
  • #12
Agreed on all of the opinions above. Tearing a sarr apart is dicey in mid-season, but I move plants up to larger pots all the time by keeping the rootball intact and moving it into a larger pot. As mentioned, fill in the gaps with additional soil or sphagnum, being sure not to use normal potting soil or peat moss that has fertilizer in it. A long pot will work fine. Nice job. Looks like something from the "bug series" of plants.
 
  • #13
I'm sure you'll get a lot of opinions. Here are mine :):

In my experience with S. purpurea and its hybrids (and yours appears to have purp in it, likely with minor (and perhaps back crossed with minor another generation (?)), the pitchers will become crowded as much due to the multiple growing points bumping into each other as the growing end of the rhizome pressing itself against its pot.

If it were mine, I'd divide it to avoid that internal crowding (I think a row of round pots would look as nice as one long rectangular pot on that windowsell ... imho).

As for when to divide and repot? I just came in from the backyard, where I've been repotting like mad. It's warm here (78 deg F with 36% humidity). We're not quite into a typical summer yet, but it's getting there.

Part of my late repotting is necessity. I have more than 100 Sarracenia that are in desperate need of repotting, and it's going to take me many, many weekends to accomplish this task.

Part of it is also experience. I have never (knocking on peatmoss) had problems dividing/repotting late into summer and even fall. I have potted up divisions from friends that I've received as late as November without issue.

Now I keep my plants at right around 40 degrees F low in a greenhouse for the winter, so that might have something to do with this success. I also dust exposed live rhizome (i.e. the white tissue you see when you cut or break a Sarracenia rhizome) with sulfur powder to help prevent fungal attacks. Maybe that helps as well (shrug).

Hope this helps!
 
  • #14
wow jlechtm i just checked out your grow list ,drool drool,im just starting out with sarrs and have like 6 different ones , all i can say is wow im very jealous wow, we need photos, my keyboard is all covered with drool wow
 
  • #15
If you've been growing it that long and it is still producing flowers each spring then it maybe be doing ok dormancy wise. People who grow Sarracenia in the tropics report after a few years without dormancy the plants will start putting out deformed pitchers and phyllodia. That could be what's going on here. It may also be from the media breaking down and releasing stored nutrients. Time will tell. Some people will tell you you can only grow Sarracenia outdoors or at least under full sun. In this case, as the saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

It's difficult to predict how the plants will grow. In general new growth points radiate out from on end of the rhizome as it were but seldom symmetrically if that makes any sense. If you examine the growth patterns of the crowns of the plants you'll hopefully understand what I'm failing to say.

Yes, you can pretty much repot and divide Sarracenia any time. How much their growth gets put back depends on many factors - what phase of growth/time of the year, age of the plant, species, how savage you are in handling the plant, health of the plant and so forth. I prefer at the end of winter, others during the dead of winter and others at any time.
 
  • #16
I'm reluctant to stress the poor thing more than necessary atm, so I might have to invest in a nice long pot in the interim. Give it a few months to fill that pot (oh, it'll fill a new pot. It took it about a week to fill this pot last time I repotted it, and the current pot is about 3X the size of the last one!)
From what I can see looking at it, there's at least three distinct "growth points" where the pitchers cluster, with blank gaps between (there's a bald patch right in the centre)

The pitchers come up fine but gravitate of course, toward the window where the light is. I rotate the plant when this becomes an issue to encourage growth on the other side. Unfortunately now with the crowding, what's happening is the pitchers as they develop are pinching against other pitchers or the edge of the pot, which then distorts them. You can see, when you examine them, the crushed section which is flattened. I do cut back the dead pitchers every so often to make space but it isn't enough.

It doesn't go dormant but it does slow down, not sure if that's just the breed itself or that i'm not being cruel enough to it temperature wise. It used to live in a bathroom that was freezing in the winter and dark as anything, now it's in the bedroom due to moving house and access to light. It's warmer in this house because it's a 1960s build rather than an 1880s lol. So we're yet to really see how it handles winter. Our garden is pretty dark and London tends to be a lot milder than Yorkshire where we did live, so I may have to see what spending winter outside does to it. My only concern is finding a spot sheltered enough, given we keep losing fence panels to the wind, I get the impression this garden isn't very sheltered from gusts. Not sure it'd appreciate being constantly blown over. I don't think it would like it out there in summer. Our garden gets very little sunlight thanks to the shadow of the house itself. In the front garden I suspect some brat kid would steal it because brat kids steal anything that isn't nailed down outside the house. That and the neighbour's cat likes to dig up all out plants in the front garden and sleep on them. He sees new soil and he just has to poop in it. Stupid cat.

I have potting media ready to go (Pearlite, peat, sphagnum mix) but I always like to make sure i'm doing the best thing before interfering with the plant.

So would you say the best course would be to put it in a longer pot of similar width to encourage lengthwise growth, then come winter/spring time split it?
 
  • #17
Hi Purple

It is indeed a happy healthy plant, but I would try to give it a dormant period af three to four months if possible as all Sarrecenia need it, otherwise it will eventually die, but if your window sill is 10C or lower over winter it wiil be fine but houses are normally warmer than that. It looks like it has purpurea in it so it should tolerate low temperatures outdoors but as it has been spoilt for so long in the warm it may be a big shock to it if you just put it outside in November.

As has been said divide it in late winter early spring and try some outdoors if you have a garden, you may be pleasantly supprised.

Cheers
Steve
 
  • #18
If it has been growing this happily on that windowsill for 6 or 7 years, I should think that it has been going sufficiently dormant. I would repot it in the manner suggested by "Not a Number" and leave it alone. It will sort itself out. If you feel you must divide it leave that for fall or spring.
Just my opinion.
 
  • #19
So I repotted the old thing into the only pot I could find that had any sort of water "trough"
It's a "self watering" trough so it has a false bottom where the water sits underneath. I figure it'll be about the same as a pot with large holes sitting in a bowl as it was before.

But now my concern is regarding the rhizome. I've read they prefer to be a bit shallower, and while the edges where the 5 (maybe 6, hard to tell on one side with the cramping) growth points are look nice in the soil with the growth point just poking up, the centre of the rhizome which itself has no growth is a huge hulking mountain of the thing that rises up a good 3 inches above the soil level!
Is that ok? I haven't got any more potting media to bury it and even if I did, that would bury the actual growing points part way up the pitchers!
Is it normal for rhizomes to bulge up in the middle like this? it looks dead at the centre to be perfectly honest, having repotted it and given it space to settle outward, the bald patch where this mound is is quite noticeable to me.

The good news is, the new pot is a lot bigger and hopefully, if i've buried it ok it should be happy enough. It's as deep as it can get in the pot (without adding new media at least. the soil level is maybe an inch from the top of the pot. should I level it off to the very top or will it not matter much?), I didn't disturb the root ball and decided to just bury the old peat in the new (same mix anyway) and let it sort itself out. It's what I did last time and it seemed to be ok with it, i'm a bit happier doing the least amount of disruption right now.
I can now make out some lovely clear growth points which will divide up beautifully. Two are very dense and will produce some fairly large plants, the other three are smaller but are looking good.

So have I done this right? What do you guys think? Should I get more media and level the pot off, is it ok for the dead looking bit of the rhizome to be above the soil level? Is there anything more I can do to make it happier or is it best to just leave it alone now and let it spread out into its new surroundings?
 
  • #20
is it ok for the dead looking bit of the rhizome to be above the soil level?

Yes, it should be fine with the old rhizome above the soil surface as long as the growing points are at or very slightly below the surface. Many of my plants, particularly S. psittacina hybrids, grow this way. The only time I run into trouble is when the plants grow too high out of the pot, and the growing points are -- in essence -- suspended in air. Then the roots that grow are exposed as they try to find the ground, and those growing points often dry out or give up.
 
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