Sundew and pitcher plant help please

[miss_corerupted]

Hi all,
Not sure if i have the right section but here we go. I have 1 of each plant and they are in little pots. I have some nice ceramic chamber pots i want to plant them in. Can they go in together or are their needs to different??I know i need peat?. I have a small conifer woodland which is very booggy and the soil is black. Is that peat or should i buy some??

Any answers gratefully recived

Thank you

[miss_corerupted]

anyone help please??

[Zenithtb]

I am sorry, I don't know the answer. I just didn't want you to sit in your post all alone, feeling sad. Hope a more useful person comes along soon! Good luck!

Mark

[Capsid]

I was waiting for sundew to answer, since as his name implies grows sundews and other insectivorous plants.

I don't see why they can't be in the same pot. I would recommend you buy some sphagnum moss peat as this will be sterilised and free of any pests and diseases.

[snohare]

Hi, love the name !
The soil you have in your woodland is probably acidic if it is coniferous and boggy, which I would guess is why you thought it would do in place of peat. However the surface layer of it is likely to still have enough nutrients to screw things up, it will have all sorts of trace elements in it that peat doesn't have. (I have grown these myself, used them as aphid control on my windowsills, so I am trying to remember the trial and error process here.)
The woodland that I got my sundew from ( I know, but it was doomed anyway), the main requirements for the sundews there are very, very wet, with very sandy, stony soil. Basically as impoverished as you can get; only the tiniest bit of humus, and that with all the nitrogen leached out. If you can find a sandy bank in your conifer woodland, and look at the exposed layers, you will probably see that there is the black soil then dark red soil underneath, then lighter red/pink soil. I used the latter, mixed with just gravel out of the nearby burn, and a tiny bit of almost liquified peat, and that did fine in a very shallow dish that I kept almost afloat with water all the time. I did wonder if ericaceous compost might not work, but I am quite certain that the main thing to remember about plants like these is that they need extremely low-nitrogen soils, and I don't know what ec has in it.
Cannot remember a thing about the pitcher plant except it came already in a pot, sat there and caught nothing except a fatal cold !
Hope that helps.

[Galileo]

Their needs are similar. But they probably come from different areas. Use fresh peat not the old stuff from your garden. Peat looses it acidity as it breaks down. Your plants want the acidity. I use 3:1 peat : Silver Sand. The silver Sand helps with drainage and is lime free. The roots do not like to be in water as they need air. I once killed a carnivorous plant by filling the tray with too much water. I got tired of re-filling the water in hot weather and got a big bowl and filled it to the top every few days. The plants roots rotted!!!

You could plant them together if you wanted but I would plant separately if it was me as if you get white fly or greenfly you can quarantine.

Check the shape of the container to make sure you can easily re-pot. You need to change the peat every two years or so as the peat breaks down and looses its acidity and your plants will die. I lost a very fine venus fly trap because I didn't know this. It just slowly died and I didn't know what was going on. I could have saved it if I had known.

Don't let them dry out and use rain water as most tap water has lime in it and they don't like lime. The odd bit of tap water in an emergency won't hurt and is better than letting them dry out which is terminal. I use reverse-Osmosis water from the house supply filter for drinking and it is great for the plants too. Regular water filters are not good enough and let the lime as well as other nasties through.

Good Luck!!

[miss_corerupted]

Thank you all for the replie and for the offer of peat. I suspected that their needs might be to differnt for them to get on. So it's not peat peat i won't but another type?? I shall google supplirs now.

[miss_corerupted]

Been googling away and found some useful info. U can get peat free alterntives now so i'm going to buy that instead!

[snohare]

Well done, thanks for letting us know, I never would have expected you could get acidic peatfree compost ! Live and learn...

[miss_corerupted]

The Carnivorous Plant Society - How To Go Peat-Free

This is the article I found if anyone is intersted.

I'm going to try Cocopeat I think