Saturday, July 23, 2011

Problem :(

After trying to grow more plants inside I started to see that plants health started to go down.
I could see upcoming leaves were deformed and some of them were not having dew on it.
After looking into the matter  I realized I have bitten off more then I can chew, I wouldnt be able to handle
so many plants(8 to be specific) at a given time to grow all of them inside. My plants were growing but they were not healthy leaves were in bad conditions and they needed immediate change.

Everything WAS working fine

Everything seemed to be working fine with my plants(4 Sundews, 1 Venus Fly trap) as they were catching insects and growing really well. But my desire of keeping more and different type of carnivorous plants took me into wrong direction. I exchanged seeds of Drosera Binata with gemmae of unknown species of  Drosera Pygmy. Gemmae is a part of plants which can be used to grow another plant or in simple word it is like a seeds but it is quite faster then seed. some species of gemmae can start growing withing 24 hours of sowing.

I prepared 2 plastic cups 1 with soilrite as growing media and other with sphagnum moss as growing media.
After sowing I observed that gemmae in soilrite sprouted faster then in sphagnum moss, gemmae in soilrite took 5-6 days to show sign of sprouting where as one's in sphagnum moss took almost twice the time.

But I didnt realize that I dont have much space to expand my collection like this, I was growing my plants inside a closed space and under artificial lighting(100 watt cfl) and I didnt have space enough to accommodate  bigger lights. I kind of tried stuffing in all the plants under small coverage of light which lead to less amount light being received by all the plants.     

Green Green Green

It had been a month since I have potted my carnivorous plants in sphagnum moss I received from Shillong.
I have been keeping sphagnum moss wet for proper growth of my plants but after some time I started to observe that sphagnum moss has starting turning green, for a moment I thought that dried sphagnum moss must have turned alive after sitting in water for some time but that was not the case, It was Algae. I have read on internet that one should clean up the growing media really well if it is not manufactured commercially and it is collected from wild, but in excitement of founding sphagnum moss I didnt clean it really well, I washed it only 2-3 times instead of 10-12 times due to which growing media was still having some nutrients in it which lead to algae formation.

Initially  I thought algae formation would affect my plants in some way but after consulting with some experienced grower online I came to know that algae can affect growth of seedlings or very tiny carnivorous plants, so I had nothing to worry about it. 

Plants Growing Well

After potting all my plants into sphagnum moss I was little worried as within past 3 days I potted my plants twice(first in soilrite n then in sphagnum), but plants did well and slowly started signs of improvement.
After a week I could see plants have acclimated to the new growing media and I could see new leaves appearing from growing point. It was a nice feeling that I found out a source of sphagnum moss and it has started working out for me. I started observing my plants daily and as I was having lots time I use to read about different kind of carnivorous plants online.