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What NOT to do with your Sarracenia

I remember Peter D'Amato writing an article(s) about CP torture years ago in the Carnivorous Plant Newsletter, trying to determine how cold-hardy, heat-hardy, etc. CP can be. With that in mind, I thought I'd post the occasional horror story and/or warning by example from my own experience.

Today's inaugural episode:

Q: How do you know when you've left your Sarracenia too long in their pots?

A: When they look like this:

photo.jpg


This poor plant is from the Georgia population of S. leucophylla, courtesy of Atlanta Botanic Gardens via the Chattahoochee Nature Center. It has been sitting (suffering) in a 5" square pot since 2005.

As you can see, when the growing point (or points) reaches the edge of the pot, if it can't break through (and plants in this condition often do, particularly when the pots have started to degrade and become brittle in the sun), they grow sideways, and then eventually down. In the worst examples (yes, this is not the worst I've seen in my collection), the leaves grow entirely downward, looking more like roots than anything else.

In many cases these growing points will die off, and the plant will put up a crop of new growing points along the back of the rhizome. Or the plant will just give up and die completely.

The good news is that even plants in this condition can be salvaged through division and repotting (placing rhizome divisions in bizarre orientations in the new pot so that the mis-directed crowns are pointed at least roughly in the right direction).

There is even a happy ending for this plant. It is doing fine after some surgery yesterday: Several large divisions now happily situated in gallon round pots (my standard) and a multitude of small divisions in my extras bed.
 
Wow! thanks for the warning! ;)
I have been doing some un-intentional experimenting as well, along those same lines..
I have one Sarr pot (an S. Minor) that is now in its 4th season without repotting..4 years is too long!
its noticeably weaker and less robust than previous seasons..
(I was going to re-pot it this spring..I was planning to re-pot 100% of my collection, but a big bale of peat only covered 90% of it..
a few pots didnt get repotted because I ran out of peat, and this was one of them..Im still planning to get to it soon..)

So..in my experience:
repotting every year is fine, but probably unnecessary and overkill.
repotting every 2 years is fine, and probably the best way to go.
Plants *seem* fine at year 3 without repotting, but they are probably declining, even if you don't see it directly.
4 years is definitely too long..

So from now on, im going to repot everything once every 2 years..

Scot
 
I was planning to re-pot 100% of my collection, but a big bale of peat only covered 90% of it.

I've been planning to repot my entire collection this year as well. I'm on my third bale of peat, and my third 100 lb bag of coarse silica sand, and I'm not even close to being done. I have about 100 gallon pots finished, and something approaching half that of extras in smaller pots). Unfortunately, all of that work represents a far fewer number of plants divided and repotted, since each overgrown plant typically turns into two large divisions in separate gallon pots and however many smaller extras are left over. Now that I have the room in the yard and the greenhouse, I'm keeping two stock plants of each clone, and three or four (or more) stock plants of the rarest plants and my named cultivars.

I'm going to stop repotting soon (probably this weekend) to make sure that the plants have enough growing season left to recover and settle in before the end of the season (usually around Halloween or a few weeks after in the DC area).
 
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