WARNING: This may be long, drawn out, boring and newbie-ish!
Six weeks or so ago I bought a common VFT from HDepot, which has led me deeper and deeper into the world of VFTs. After my initial little VFT, I bought more from Petflytrap.com, along with some soil. These have all been doing great, but they aren't very good looking - they are in ordinary pots with peat / perlite medium. So, in an effort to make it nicer looking, I have been trying to find LFS or LSM to make a mini-bog - I have seen some cool pictures on the forums where people had live sphagnum moss. I finally bought a couple of bags of what I thought was LFS from Petco. I took it home and began to wash it when the first hint that it might not be LFS became apparent - it had pine needles mixed in with it. Also, it looks very very similar to the stuff you see quite often around the tops of plant you might buy. It is kind of flatish - not round, as sphagnum moss seems to be from what I can tell in the pictures. So I took this stuff and mixed it with peat and then put a couple-inch layer at the top of my pot. I put one plant in to see how it looks, which you see in one of the pictures. The second hint that it is not sphagnum is that the top layer dried out pretty quickly, although it has kept the underlayer moist. When I was trying to hydrate it and wash it, it had a lot of debris, most of looked like what you would find in a forest, certainly not a bog - pine needles and seeds, etc.
So here are my questions:
Do you think this is sheet moss, or something else, but not sphagnum?
Do you think I can successfully grow plants in this mixture, or should I just start over?
If I get some live sphagnum moss - at this point I'm ready to order it online - how concerned should I really be about catching sporotrichosis? If I wear gloves, it should be pretty safe once the moss is all planted in the pot, right?
Do you have a reliable source for live sphagnum moss that you can PM me with?
Thanks for your suggestions.
Scott
Six weeks or so ago I bought a common VFT from HDepot, which has led me deeper and deeper into the world of VFTs. After my initial little VFT, I bought more from Petflytrap.com, along with some soil. These have all been doing great, but they aren't very good looking - they are in ordinary pots with peat / perlite medium. So, in an effort to make it nicer looking, I have been trying to find LFS or LSM to make a mini-bog - I have seen some cool pictures on the forums where people had live sphagnum moss. I finally bought a couple of bags of what I thought was LFS from Petco. I took it home and began to wash it when the first hint that it might not be LFS became apparent - it had pine needles mixed in with it. Also, it looks very very similar to the stuff you see quite often around the tops of plant you might buy. It is kind of flatish - not round, as sphagnum moss seems to be from what I can tell in the pictures. So I took this stuff and mixed it with peat and then put a couple-inch layer at the top of my pot. I put one plant in to see how it looks, which you see in one of the pictures. The second hint that it is not sphagnum is that the top layer dried out pretty quickly, although it has kept the underlayer moist. When I was trying to hydrate it and wash it, it had a lot of debris, most of looked like what you would find in a forest, certainly not a bog - pine needles and seeds, etc.
So here are my questions:
Do you think this is sheet moss, or something else, but not sphagnum?
Do you think I can successfully grow plants in this mixture, or should I just start over?
If I get some live sphagnum moss - at this point I'm ready to order it online - how concerned should I really be about catching sporotrichosis? If I wear gloves, it should be pretty safe once the moss is all planted in the pot, right?
Do you have a reliable source for live sphagnum moss that you can PM me with?
Thanks for your suggestions.
Scott
