Earl: Good luck. My great shame as a CPer is that for all the plants I
grow, I simply am no good with VFTs! Sure, they grow year after year, but for
some reason they don't flourish. My buddy, Paul McMillan, is a wizard with
this plant. All his plants produce traps with midribs longer than 3 cm,
some bright red, others all green. Beautiful.
I visited Paul McMillan this weekend to install a watering system for him,
and he showed me what his collection is up to. This man is simply a maestro
when it comes to VFTs and _Drosophyllum_. This guy can do anything with
the latter, and they thrive. For example, he decided to grow a single plant
in a big pot---in violation of all the rules he usually grows dozens of
plants in community pots (conventional wisdom says the plants inhibit growth
of each other). So he took a 2" tall seedlings, pulled it out of the soil,
and planted in a bigger pot (conventional wisdom says these will die with
any sort of root disturbance). Did I mention he ***washed the soil from
the roots?!*** So now this plant is huge, a leaf spread diameter of 35 cm,
several crowns, leaves easily 7mm wide at the base, a stem 3cm in diameter.
When I got home I looked at my _Drosophyllum_ which I'm usually proud of,
and got disgusted!
>Barry, I'm really sorry you missed this one it would truly reaffirmed
>you desire not to visit this place, but hey who needs Disneyland?
>when you've got mother nature.
Well Gordon, as you know I'd like to thrill to an earthquake, but 6.6
is a little rich maybe even for my adrenalin-addicted body.
This may be kind of weird to wonder about, when people have died there
and so much property damage has occured, but.... Well, I bet a 6.6
earthquake has to be hell on CP that don't like root disturbance. I
expect a lot of LA _Heliamphora_ will be dying. Also, a lot of tuberous
_Drosera_ will suffer when the dropper shoots are severed...
Barry