New grower can’t tell my plants are doing; also, Aphids?
Aug 7, 2021 17:40:19 GMT -5
meizzwang likes this
Post by rayject on Aug 7, 2021 17:40:19 GMT -5
I’m not much of a gardener but always liked carnivorous plants and on a whim decided to pick up these little fellas I came across in a nursery, since it’s fly season in my area right now.
Edit: Sorry, first time posting here. You may just have to click on the thumbnails to pull up the full-sized images.
I could tell they didn’t look all that healthy but I wanted to see if I could save them anyways, since they were only $6 each.
It’s been about 2 weeks keeping them as indoor plants; I repotted them into sphagnum peat moss with a 2 inch layer of red lava rocks at the bottom for drainage. The moss was enhanced with Miracle-Gro unfortunately, but I filtered the soil as I poured it into the pots and removed every fertilizer ball and white nitrogen clump I could see. I mist them with distilled water every day, making sure the soil is wet to the touch. The taller two are getting indirect sunlight under windows that each get a few good hours of morning sun, but I gave the shorter plant to my father who has kept it in his basement office and refuses to open his window blinds at all and claiming the fluorescent lighting during his work hours will be enough. Today I’ve abducted it to stay with its sister plant under one of the open windows. There are enough gnats and flies getting in through the windows that I’d expect them to be eating well, but just in case I’ve occasionally hand-fed them a captured ant or a gnat.
Unfortunately I cannot gauge how any of the plants’ health is at all, what is natural or what I should be concerned about. Hunting pictures online for how they’re supposed to look doesn’t help because these look so different from the varieties everyone else seems to be growing. My guess is that they’re some sort of hybrids.
Here’s how they’re looking now, sorry if the images uploaded out of order:
I see some new growth, but I don’t know if it’s natural for some of those tips to already be brown at that stage. I also don’t know if I should be pruning off any of these brown lids, going even further and removing the whole stalks under the browned lids, or if that’s just a natural process for when the pitchers have already eaten enough bugs and want to close themselves off or something.
And finally, I made a concerning discovery while taking the pictures for this thread. There are tiny white bugs somewhere between 1/4 mm to 1/2 a mm long at the base of the plant in the brown pot. I scanned the two white pot plants and they seemed to be clear. They don’t appear to be mealybugs, whiteflies, or thrips. This is north Georgia in the summer so my best guess is white aphids, but I don’t know how well whatever kind of Sarracenia this is can tolerate the spritzing of soapy water to kill the little pests, especially before I understand the state of its current health.
Apologies for the long post; but I figure the more detail I provide, the more likely it is someone can help me figure out what kind of Sarracenia these are (the tags it came with and the company website didn’t say anything of substance, the nursery staff was as clueless as I was, and they don’t resemble most of what I find on Google) and hopefully steer me in the right direction to get them strong and healthy.
Edit: Sorry, first time posting here. You may just have to click on the thumbnails to pull up the full-sized images.
I could tell they didn’t look all that healthy but I wanted to see if I could save them anyways, since they were only $6 each.
It’s been about 2 weeks keeping them as indoor plants; I repotted them into sphagnum peat moss with a 2 inch layer of red lava rocks at the bottom for drainage. The moss was enhanced with Miracle-Gro unfortunately, but I filtered the soil as I poured it into the pots and removed every fertilizer ball and white nitrogen clump I could see. I mist them with distilled water every day, making sure the soil is wet to the touch. The taller two are getting indirect sunlight under windows that each get a few good hours of morning sun, but I gave the shorter plant to my father who has kept it in his basement office and refuses to open his window blinds at all and claiming the fluorescent lighting during his work hours will be enough. Today I’ve abducted it to stay with its sister plant under one of the open windows. There are enough gnats and flies getting in through the windows that I’d expect them to be eating well, but just in case I’ve occasionally hand-fed them a captured ant or a gnat.
Unfortunately I cannot gauge how any of the plants’ health is at all, what is natural or what I should be concerned about. Hunting pictures online for how they’re supposed to look doesn’t help because these look so different from the varieties everyone else seems to be growing. My guess is that they’re some sort of hybrids.
Here’s how they’re looking now, sorry if the images uploaded out of order:
I see some new growth, but I don’t know if it’s natural for some of those tips to already be brown at that stage. I also don’t know if I should be pruning off any of these brown lids, going even further and removing the whole stalks under the browned lids, or if that’s just a natural process for when the pitchers have already eaten enough bugs and want to close themselves off or something.
And finally, I made a concerning discovery while taking the pictures for this thread. There are tiny white bugs somewhere between 1/4 mm to 1/2 a mm long at the base of the plant in the brown pot. I scanned the two white pot plants and they seemed to be clear. They don’t appear to be mealybugs, whiteflies, or thrips. This is north Georgia in the summer so my best guess is white aphids, but I don’t know how well whatever kind of Sarracenia this is can tolerate the spritzing of soapy water to kill the little pests, especially before I understand the state of its current health.
Apologies for the long post; but I figure the more detail I provide, the more likely it is someone can help me figure out what kind of Sarracenia these are (the tags it came with and the company website didn’t say anything of substance, the nursery staff was as clueless as I was, and they don’t resemble most of what I find on Google) and hopefully steer me in the right direction to get them strong and healthy.