(Long) Intro, stop me before I kill again.

From: Kit Halsted (kit@kithalsted.com)
Date: Tue May 02 2000 - 20:44:43 PDT


Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 23:44:43 -0400
From: Kit Halsted <kit@kithalsted.com>
To: cp@opus.hpl.hp.com
Message-Id: <aabcdefg1371$foo@default>
Subject: (Long) Intro, stop me before I kill again.

Hi all.

I'm new to this list, carnivorous plants, & plants in general. As
suggested in the welcome message, I'm introducing myself. I've also
got a few questions...

Not that great at talking about myself, but here goes: I'm a
30-year-old Mac geek working as a network administrator at an ad
agency in Manhattan. Ludicrous Manhattan rents & a need for space for
my cat & computers sent me to Brooklyn a couple of years ago, & bad
roommate situations put me into my current apartment. What the
h-e-double-hockeysticks does that have to do with carnivorous plants,
you ask? Well, along with its severe problems, this apartment has a
yard. First time I've had one since I was growing up in Virginia. The
first warm day in March, I went & poked around in the yard. Among the
concrete, bricks, chicken bones, & crack vials left over from the
previous tenants, I noticed a thorny vine. Apparently a rose. Seeing
as it was in a particularly ugly corner of the yard, I thought I'd do
a web search to see if I could find out how to take a cutting & start
another bush in a more prominent part of the yard. As often happens
with web searches, I turned up lots of unrelated links. One of them
said something about carnivorous plants. Next thing I knew, I had
placed an order with Cascade Carnivorous Plants for various
Sarracenea, a Drosera, & a couple of VFTs.

Enough about me, I'm sure. Now come the questions.

All of my plants are in my back yard. They are in 6x6" pots with 1"
tall saucers under them, on concrete. The saucers are kept full,
except for the VFTs. Temps lately are between 45 & 65 F, with
humidity around 30-50%. Plants receive indirect light all day, with
at least a couple of hours of direct sun.

Drosera rotundifolia:

Didn't look very happy after 3 days in the mail. Looked a lot less
happy after being banged around on the subway home & waiting another
day & a half for my pots & sphagnum to arrive. Now all the leaves are
thoroughly dead. My questions about this plant are as folows:

Is there a chance that the roots are still alive & the plant can be
brought back? If so, what should I do?

Any idea what I did wrong, aside from not potting it immediately? I
put it in a 6x6" pot in a roughly 75/25 mix of long-fiber sphagnum &
sand with a little bit of dirt* on top, & watered it with a mix of
"spring water" (When did delis stop selling distilled water? Doesn't
anybody iron their clothes any more?) & filtered tap water that sat
out overnight.

Also, I should probably mention that Andrew at Cascade gave me a fair
shot at these: I ordered one & got three.

Sarracenea alata:

This plant shipped with two ~12" pitchers & looked none the worse for
wear when potted. It ate a small fly the first day I had it outside.
It still looks pretty good, but the tips (? There's probably a better
term.) of the plant are turning tan & looking a little dried out.
I've just gotten a garden hose today, my plan is to leave it dripping
all the time, thereby wetting the concrete around the plants &
hopefully raising the RH in the immediate area. Sound like a good
plan?

S. flava:

I thought this one was gonna be King Carnivore, but now I'm not so
sure. It came out of the box with one ~14" pitcher & one ~11
leaf/stalk/young pitcher & didn't seem to mind waiting for a pot. It
was the first of my plants to feed. It had eaten 2 flies before any
of the other plants had gotten anything; I only knew that the alata
had gotten something because I heard the alata's fly buzzing while I
was looking into the flava's pitcher to see if fly #2 was still
struggling. Now it seems to have severe indigestion: the side of the
pitcher is turning brown where the first (big) fly is. Is this
normal? Is there anything I can or should do about it?

The other Sarraceneas seem to be sitting there, with some browning
leaves/pitchers & some new growth, so I have no specific questions
about them.

VFTs:

My VFTs are all in the same pot right now, due to a snafu with the
pots & the fact that they're all pretty small. They're planted in
about 60/40 sand & long-fiber sphagnum, with a little bit of dirt on
top to help hold them down. They've been sitting i the pot with an
inch of water in the saucer for the last few days, but I'm planning
to let the saucer dry out before I water them again.

Props again to Andrew for giving me a good chance: I got 3 Akai-Ryus
& 2 typicals on an order for 1 of each. The biggest, a typical, has a
rhizome about 2-3" long & 4 long (Spring?) leaves & something small &
light green just coming up from the center. Only 2 of the leaves have
traps, but it looks like one's coming in on 1 of the other leaves.
The other leaf was decapitated somehow, probably when it mysteriously
got out of the ground. This leads to my other question: how did it
get out of the ground? Okay, nobody can answer that, on to the other
other question: is staking a viable option with these plants? I was
thinking of putting some twigs in the soil next to a couple of the
VFTs to stabilize them. (It's a lot windier in the yard than I had
realized, I suspect that's why the big one came out of the ground.)

The other typical is not doing nearly so well. It's lost one leaf &
has 2 floppy leaves left with closed traps that seem to have been
triggered by its own roots on its way here & 1 new stalk coming up.
The very tips of both traps & the new stalk are black. Any tips?

The Akai-Ryus all seem to be doing pretty well, they've lost a couple
of traps/leaves that were triggered in transit, but they've got new
ones coming in. I figured it might help to feed them (live
invertebrates) since they'd just been transplanted; the leaf that let
the millipede get away is open for business again & the rest are
probably halfway through digesting their various prey.

Thanks for listening. I apologize for the long post; I just wanted to
get it all out at once. Don't worry, I only write something this long
about once a year.

-Kit

*The "dirt" I used is fertilizer-free potting soil described on the
bag as "an excellent starting point for potting mixes." Probably not
as nutrient-poor as sand, but as close as I could find in the
neighborhood. I added it when the sand settled in several of my pots
& left them a bit less full than I thought desirable.



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