Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 13:35:36 -0800 From: Wim Leys <leyswi@lin.vlaanderen.be> To: cp@opus.hpl.hp.com Message-Id: <aabcdefg1027$foo@default> Subject: Re: Sarracenias
Hi Mark,
> Last week I returned my Sarracenia's from their overwintering place to my
> room. They already start forming new pitchers, but last year's pitchers are
> still present and green. Should I remove the old pitchers to promote the
> growth of the new pitchers? Or should I just wait till they are dead? All
> advices are welcome.
Leave the old pitchers on your plants for as long as possible. Only
those
parts that become brown or attacked by fungi, should be removed.
I used to be very superstitious about cleaning up CP's after I read A.
Slack's first book. If only the top of a pitcher became brown, I would
remove the whole pitcher. That's the only way to prevent the plant from
being infected through the brown spot, I thought. The plants formed very
long rhizomes and only a few sideshoots.
One year I didn't have the time to clean them up so fiercely and I used
a knife to cut away all the infected or brown spots, and left the rest
of the pitchers on the plants. A few months later my plants produced
more sideshoots than they had ever done before.
I figured out what I had done wrong by removing the whole pitcher as
soon as it produced a brown spot.
A rhizome is a stem, and on stems grow leaves and buds. These buds are
formed next to the base of the leaves and will later become sideshoots.
When the leaves (pitchers) are removed too quickly, they are still
attached very strongly to the stem. To remove them, you must bend and
pull and bend and pull... During this process, the small buds get
damaged. If the leaves are left on the plant and only the brown spots
are cut away,
a) the buds have time to grow and become stronger,
b) the plant has time to recuperate nutrients from the old leaves and
c) the leaves will detach more easily from the stem (compare removing
leaves from a tree during summer and autumn) and thereby will not damage
the, now stronger, buds
So, if you remove only the brown parts from a pitcher (and most of the
time I even leave them where they are, as long as they don't rot), the
plant will be stronger (recuperation of nutrients) and produce more
sideshoots.
Hope this helps
Wim
-- Wim Leys, Belgium mailto:leyswi@lin.vlaanderen.be
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