Earlier this year when I was living in Mississippi I posted about my pitcher plants not thriving like they should have been, and eventually I figured out the cause... It was because the soil I used had waaaaaaay to much LFS in it (I think I used LFS, peat, and sand in a 1:1:1 ratio), and over the next few months after I repotted them, the LFS decayed into a bunch of slime and the soil became severely anoxic. When I lifted the plants and root ball from the pot and took a whiff, there was a strong rotten egg smell. Also, when I watered the plants, the water would sit on the surface for a long time before slowly draining. The roots of my plants weren't getting oxygen or fresh water, so consequently, most of the roots died and several of my plants got rhizome rot.
I think most of the plants are going to recover, there's just one small piece of the rhizome of one of my S. minor okefenokeensis that I got to too late and I think is probably not going to survive (the piece of rhizome is about the size of four stacked nickels with like one root and no growth points), but who knows... My young S. rubra got severe root/rhizome rot in the middle of the summer - pitchers wilting and everything - so I did an emergency repot and cut off all the dead material until I was left with two small growth tips and potted those up in a 1:1 peat/perlite mix. That plant came back with a vengeance and went into dormancy with about 20 healthy pitchers and a good root system forming.
So even though it's not good to repot plants two years in a row, I feel it's necessary for them to survive. Hoping to replicate the success of my S. rubra, I'm pulling them all up and replanting in a 1:1 peat/perlite mix. I hate, hate, hate perlite because it's ugly and always pops up to the surface of the soil, but the mix is light and airy and should promote good root growth. I'm trying to put moss over the soil to keep the perlite in place, but finding moss that can survive the desiccating summer sun in California is a monumental task. I've given up on sphagnum and I'm now turning to planting native mosses I find growing around the yard.
Here are the plants I've repotted so far... Several more to go. Note the poorly-shaped pitchers on most of them. The majority never made good pitchers all summer and when I removed them from the pots and washed off the old soil, I found that most of them had very few live roots at all. The old roots that were robust and healthy when I initially repotted them last winter were now dead and black. Lesson learned.
My 'Leah Wilkerson'... She was actually one of the most forgiving plants to my crappy repotting, having many live roots along the rhizome, but all of which only penetrated the first 3-4 cm of the soil, the part that wasn't terribly anoxic. She had a slow start to the year but finally produced some OK pitchers in late summer. I'm hoping I can get her to thrive this coming spring.
Here's some of the moss I've been using on the surface. Anyone know what kind it is? I have a bunch of it growing in the sunny areas of my yard so I hope it will thrive in my pots.
And lastly, a big success for me, my Heliamphora heteroxa x minor growing a new leaf. I grow this plant outside in full sun basically like my Sarracenia, as the climate in coastal Humboldt County is much like that of the tops of the tepuis in South America (cool and cloudy basically all the time). Right now I'm down south in the Bay Area where I'm not quite as close to the ocean, so I have to watch for the mild frosts we occasionally get during winter (Novato is right on the border of zones 9b and 10a). The pitcher that's cut is browning because it caught a big hover fly, not because the plant is dying. The dead sphagnum moss around it was alive when I planted it.
Hopefully I'm doing everything right this time around and my plants will thrive!
I think most of the plants are going to recover, there's just one small piece of the rhizome of one of my S. minor okefenokeensis that I got to too late and I think is probably not going to survive (the piece of rhizome is about the size of four stacked nickels with like one root and no growth points), but who knows... My young S. rubra got severe root/rhizome rot in the middle of the summer - pitchers wilting and everything - so I did an emergency repot and cut off all the dead material until I was left with two small growth tips and potted those up in a 1:1 peat/perlite mix. That plant came back with a vengeance and went into dormancy with about 20 healthy pitchers and a good root system forming.
So even though it's not good to repot plants two years in a row, I feel it's necessary for them to survive. Hoping to replicate the success of my S. rubra, I'm pulling them all up and replanting in a 1:1 peat/perlite mix. I hate, hate, hate perlite because it's ugly and always pops up to the surface of the soil, but the mix is light and airy and should promote good root growth. I'm trying to put moss over the soil to keep the perlite in place, but finding moss that can survive the desiccating summer sun in California is a monumental task. I've given up on sphagnum and I'm now turning to planting native mosses I find growing around the yard.
Here are the plants I've repotted so far... Several more to go. Note the poorly-shaped pitchers on most of them. The majority never made good pitchers all summer and when I removed them from the pots and washed off the old soil, I found that most of them had very few live roots at all. The old roots that were robust and healthy when I initially repotted them last winter were now dead and black. Lesson learned.
My 'Leah Wilkerson'... She was actually one of the most forgiving plants to my crappy repotting, having many live roots along the rhizome, but all of which only penetrated the first 3-4 cm of the soil, the part that wasn't terribly anoxic. She had a slow start to the year but finally produced some OK pitchers in late summer. I'm hoping I can get her to thrive this coming spring.
Here's some of the moss I've been using on the surface. Anyone know what kind it is? I have a bunch of it growing in the sunny areas of my yard so I hope it will thrive in my pots.
And lastly, a big success for me, my Heliamphora heteroxa x minor growing a new leaf. I grow this plant outside in full sun basically like my Sarracenia, as the climate in coastal Humboldt County is much like that of the tops of the tepuis in South America (cool and cloudy basically all the time). Right now I'm down south in the Bay Area where I'm not quite as close to the ocean, so I have to watch for the mild frosts we occasionally get during winter (Novato is right on the border of zones 9b and 10a). The pitcher that's cut is browning because it caught a big hover fly, not because the plant is dying. The dead sphagnum moss around it was alive when I planted it.
Hopefully I'm doing everything right this time around and my plants will thrive!