Hi Joseph - it's good to see you back in "the fold." These posts are really fascinating. When you say "dry" you literally mean no water added for 16 months? That is amazing. Is there elevated humidity where you grow your Pinguicula?
I'm glad your wife is doing better.
xvart.
We are in Tucson, Arizona, very much the desert Southwestern USA. Much of the year the humidity is very low (R.H. in the teens or lower), either Winter or Summer. We have central air conditioning, which, when it is used, turns our normally dry desert air, into air that is so dry, it is hard to measure any moisture at all. When we used the A/C to cool our house, I had to water my plant trays every day, adding twenty gallons or more just to keep some water in the trays.
About four years ago I changed how we cool our house -- I installed a 6,000 CFM evaporative cooler, which discharges into the window of the plant-room. I had to mount a piece of plywood in front of the cooler airflow in order to deflect it from blowing the plants out of the room. We run this cooler, instead of the A/C -- saves a fortune on electricity that the A/C uses versus the evaporative cooler.
We do not run the cooler constantly, but it is used to varying degrees, throughout the year. In Summer, when it is the hottest and driest, we run it almost continuously, and I keep its pads wet, always, year-'round. At other times of the year, I have two box fans positioned to blow out of windows on the opposite end of the house from the plant-room and they have three speed settings that we adjust for our own comfort.
This does tend to assist in humidifying the plant-room - and undoubtedly has assisted my plants in tolerating the "drought" conditions they have been subjected to.
The first Winter with the evaporative cooler, the plants near the window, where the cooler air entered the room, were often near freezing on cold mornings. That Winter was the first time any of my
Pinguicula laueana bloomed, and almost all that were large enough, did so. So I discovered the secret for blooming them in my conditions was to keep them very cool and humid in Winter.
and as you can see in the three close-up pics that follow, weeds die, moss dies, media can shrink up, spiders can web everything together, and though they continue to grow, they don't expand into Summer leaf form and they don't bloom. I like them wet, they look so much nicer when they expand into Summer leaf form and produce pretty little flowers (see bottom three photos).
