New Arrivals!

Holiday season shopping madness has set in. Sorry mom I couldn't get you that expensive gift 'cause I spent all my money on CPs. Eeek. Our first arrivals of the season came in this week and we went to work potting them up. Here are some quick tips and pics of how we plant our bare root nepenthes.

Our new arrivals this week are the N. ventricosa x hamata that we got from Predatory Plants. No repotting necessary here, but a lovely picture of the characteristically toothy hamata peristome.  

We got our N. eymae x ephippiata we got from a private seller.  Here is a pic of when the plant arrived. 

When we have bareroot plants, we soak the roots in a solution of Superthrive for a 30 minutes. We use the Superthrive to help decrease the stress on the plant from being bareroot.  We add 3 drops Superthrive to one gallon of water.

After soaking, we cut off the dead pitchers, and plant them in their new homes. We use a mixture of long fiber sphagnum, perlite, and orchid bark as planting medium.  We will be making a whole post about our different potting mediums. There is so much information out there and it seems like just about everyone has their own secret mixture they swear by. We also add in a few teaspoons of trichoderma to the potting mix. We got ours online.

Trichoderma is a beneficial fungi that can strengthen roots and support good growth in carnivorous plants. Here is the plant all potted up and ready to go.

We added a few drops of water to the opened pitchers. Generally when getting neps, many of the pictures brown and die. It can take us up to three months to get new pitcher formation. 

Here are some more pics of our delivery this week:

N. lowii x truncata from Par O Beck Orchids.  Have to say the plants were shipped very nicely! My Christmas gift to Steven since he has been dieing to have this for a long time.

Our very sassy N. vogeli also from Par O Beck Orchids.