Ultimate Sarracenia Care Guide

[Music] thank you [Music] hey guys welcome back today we're going to do a much anticipated Ultimate Care guide and that is for the American pitcher plants or saracenia and yeah that's how you say that American pitcher plants are one of the easiest of all carnivorous plants to grow and also one of the very most rewarding in my opinion I started growing them when I was about 12 years old and I still have my first second third all my old original childhood saracenia are still right here at the nursery thriving lots of them are like this big across so I want to do this video for you guys so that you can learn how to turn these amazing plants into lifelong friends just like I have I have real friends too right Daniella anyways um back to these amazing plants for one second so even though we're inside this big beautiful Greenhouse uh American pitcher plants are actually perfect outdoor plants in most of the United States we're here in Northern California which is a vastly different climate from where they're from Native American pitcher plants are native to the southeastern United States all the way up to Eastern Seaboard after Virginia's as far north as Flava grows and then Sarah senior preparea this is the southern purpurea but that species Grows All the Way North from Virginia and New Jersey all the way up into Canada almost right up against the Hudson Bay places like Newfoundland and so the point of that is even though we're in a greenhouse in Northern California these plants are extremely tough and they actually don't need this greenhouse and they're also very very adaptable because we grow tons and tons of these outside also and even though you know they get much colder in the Southeast than we do they have constant summer rain and we have no summer rains so humid down there and here it's not very humid at all we can still grow beautiful American pitcher plants outside and so that's really great for lots of you beginners who are starting to get into this and you've probably looked into pente's low eye and fall in love with that but you're like okay where am I going to put a greenhouse in this apartment and why are you trying to figure that out you can grow some American pitcher plants I think it's also really important to um start with your experience level with all plants but certainly in this one it's a bad idea to start off with the nepenthes Raja that needs really specialized conditions and is very unforgiving you know the availability was such that when I was a little boy I pretty much had to start with cape sundew and then when I was 12 I was able to get some American pitcher plants it was very hard to get these plants and so because of that I was kind of forced to level up with these different Generac and I really encourage you guys to do that and Sarah stinia is a great entryway carnivorous plant foreign So within that native range it gets really really cold and so American pitcher plants are temperate plants and that means they go dormant in the winter time now it's mid-september here and so you can see the leukophilus the white trumpet plants are really shining and looking amazing that's because right near the end of dormancy they time their best pitchers with the Harvest Moon which is the brightest full moon of the Year and that just went by here so that's why they're still hanging on to these great gorgeous beautiful pictures Danielle if you pan over here though you can see the Flava is this is seriously no Flava or the yellow trumpet plant is already starting to look a little bit Tatty and by Halloween they're gonna look really super tiny and that's totally normal um you can if it's bothering you you can cut those pictures away um nobody's doing that in the wild so don't feel obligated to do that but if you're a more Persnickety kind of a gardener it's totally okay if you have the time to go in and cut them away as they go Brown you can even cut them right here and just cut that brown top off if you have a lot of time I have so many that we don't do that here but anyway they do go dormant um and that's a totally normal thing we've done a couple really great videos on dormancy both on what to do when it gets super cold and what to do if you live in a place like Hawaii or Florida so I'd encourage you to check those out as well but I will talk about that a little bit here too so here in California we get a lot of questions you know what do I have to do about dormancy the good news is you don't have to do anything these plants have it under control they actually know what they're doing they're keeping track of the time of the year and they're going to do it when the day starts to shorten nap and it starts to get a little cold we're gonna put on our sweaters and they're gonna start sucking back down into that rhizome that they die back to um so they're going to do that automatically don't worry about it you don't have to chop them back or any other newbie idea you don't have to do that just let them do their thing um as far as cutting the back goes oh well what to do as far as winter goes um so if you're here if you're like in Northern California where the winters aren't going to get below 15 degrees and there's actually quite a few places in the U.S that are that way um you don't have to do anything just leave it outside in the sun always sitting in the rain water or distilled water that we grow all of our plants in that water can freeze over the cold nights and thaw back out during the day that's totally a-okay if you live somewhere where it's going to be colder than 15 degrees Fahrenheit and there are a lot of the places in the U.S like that I don't have a whole lot of experience with that personally but we do know this happens we've read about it in books and on the internet uh if it's gonna get colder than 15 degrees you know as I mentioned these plants do grow in much colder places like that you know in the Hudson Bay it's going to get 40 below sometimes even in Virginia it's going to get really really cold so they're surviving in the ground because in the Matrix of nature there's the insulation of the peat itself there's going to be grass and other Leaf litter on top of the rhizomes and then snow on top of that and so in that context of nature most of the plants Will Survive not all of them though that's something interesting to think about in nature plants do die and in our collection if we have eight of them and six of them make it that would still be a win in nature but for us that's a loss so you kind of want to baby yours maybe a little bit more than nature if it's going to get super cold than that and there is such a thing as side freeze where the freeze will move right through these thin plastic pots so it's gonna get really super cold probably bring them inside you don't want to bring them inside to a greenhouse or like put them under lights or baby them too much though because you might trick them into growing in the wrong time of the season and once you throw off that cycle it can be really hard to get them back on cycle without some kind of major setback so an ideal place would be like a garage that was next to a window where they could get a little bit of sun they won't be actively growing there'll be no new pictures coming up and that's what dormancy and plants means and so there won't be any chance for classic edulation of long stretched out leaves as they search for light so that won't be happening they don't need very much light light does prevent fungus and help prevent rot and so the more light if you could get some light on there that would be a good idea natural light no grow lights um then just leave them uh usually they'll start to grow like I said on their own just as the night temperatures start to warm up and you can put them back outside when the night temperatures are no longer dropping below freezing or 32 degrees Fahrenheit and again the dormant plants are capable of taking temperatures much colder than that but as these new little tips start to grow like this is a new picture growing right here they're very tender and so if I put that outside in a big hurry and it could take another freeze that night you will lose that pitcher and they do tend to start growing their flower buds first and so it's easy to freeze your flower buds off if you're not careful so if you don't have a garage and you don't have like a cool room or somewhere else to keep them in there is a fridge method and we do talk about that more in depth but basically you can bare root the entire plant wash all the soil away put it in a Ziploc bag with either a paper towel or a little bit of damp sphagnum damn sphagnum is better because it's anti-fungal and antibiotic the paper towel might be a little moldy by the time you open it up in the spring but sphagnum won't be uh like I said I go deeper in that but you can do that because 40 degrees is a lot warmer than 40 below outside it's a little counterintuitive but you can put them in the fridge so say you're in Hawaii or Miami and you really really want a grocery store that's going to be hard for you for you you might take a hard look at nepenthes or tropical pitcher plants those will be easier for you to grow outdoors if your day isn't shortening up very much if um it's not getting very cold at all in the winter time there might not be enough trigger to tell these plants to go dormant when I used to live in Indonesia where I managed Louisiana Tropicals which is a tropical pitcher plant nursery we had a whole table of really super sad saracenia we were right on the equator then right there so there was Zero change in photo period or day length and it never got colder than 76 degrees ever and when Sarah senior are exposed to this kind of tropical tropical conditions and there's no triggers to go dormant they just get sadder and sadder and sadder every single year thinner thinner sad little leaning little pictures until just one Falls over and they're done so it can be tricky now not impossible so the fridge method is another good method for you too it's not just for the freezing cold people it's also for the sweltering hot people where it doesn't really have no winter so you can um put those plants in the fridge you're gonna have to force them this one you will have to do something to make them go dormant so you are going to have to cut them back forcefully you're going to put it in a bag and put it in the fridge in the dark it will go dormant and then pop it back out in the spring it's still not as good as probably growing them where there is a real winter but you can't have some some success growing American pitcher plants in a very tropical environment like that Beyond dormancy honestly most of the Care generally is pretty much the same no matter where you are watering is rain water and distilled water only although I will say American pitcher plants are somewhat more tolerant of minerals in their water than other carnivorous plants Venus fly traps very sensitive American pitcher plants Super less sensitive we have tap water that runs about 150 parts per million here not here at the nursery but here around us in the residences and those people actually have no problem growing serious India with that water as long as they're allowed to be rained on pretty heavily in the winter time and flush out those minerals you're also probably going to wash the saucer once in a while there's such a thing as mineral buildup so every time I put a gallon of water in here and there was a hundred parts per million dissolved solids in there with water leaves and the minerals stay and so every single time I'm watering with a little bit of minerals in the water it's slowly marching up when it gets to about 300 350 parts per million that's when even your American pitcher plants will probably start to die so um you can use some tap water on these but you have to make sure to wash the saucers you have to make sure that the rain is Flushing them out regularly because if that builds up they will die maybe you don't want to have them for life like I do I know I appreciate the fact that we're all in this for different reasons and some of us just want to appreciate them easily for a couple of years and it's not so important if they're alive in 30 years so you can totally do that with some tap water um within their range their native exclusively to Wetlands swamps bugs um all kinds of places like that where there's alligators and mosquitoes because of that they want their feet to be wet at all times and so we just set them in trays of that pure water at all times it's pretty hard to overdo um one of the things to think about is you don't want to have pots that are much taller I would say than 8 to 12 inches because it gets really hard for the water to absorb all that way up to the top and sometimes the top stays kind of too dry um and probably uh you know a nice depth on a average pot for an average series is about six inches or so they will do in shallower pots but they do kind of like to get their Roots down especially if you want much larger pitchers as far as pots go the same rules as all carnivorous plants uh apply don't use um terracotta pots because they'll Leach minerals into your peat moss and eventually cause problems don't use any metal pots stainless steel would probably be okay but anything short of that is going to be eaten up by the peat moss it's very acidic and so iron Copper any of that will immediately start to be eaten up like almost like sea water and then as it does that it's breaking down into rusts and minerals and again they'll harm your plants so um plastic that's great if you don't like the look of our ugly little plastic pots like lots of ladies don't like that a beautiful glazed ceramic pot is fine and don't kill yourself looking for the three pots out there that are glazed inside if it's glazed on the outside it's a hard fire and you don't have to worry about the minerals leeching out of the clay so don't worry about that so much also like fiberglass or any of those pots that you can find at Home Depot they're non-reactive or totally fine glass would also be fine um they're great for bog Gardens bog Gardens are mixed Planters of carnivorous plants and they're so spectacular they're so beautiful and they have so many different colors it can be really beautiful to mix these all together into what we call a bog Garden or a mixed planter you can add Venus fly traps you can add sundews like it's red leaves sundews and Fork leaf sundos and they're all totally happy to live together and because carnivorous plants are trapping their fertilizer from the insects they catch their roots are very not even hardly involved with nutrient uptake and so because of that you can have plants be very close together and very pot bound looking and still look really spectacular uh as far as light goes um most of these plants grow in uh areas where the trees are either being frequently burned or the ground is so wet the trees aren't able to grow so like down in the southeast United States When I visit these in the wild picture um grassy Fields with short pine trees 20 to 30 foot tall long needle Pines which are really super beautiful in their own right and in the wet soggy places between these pine trees where the pine trees can't grow there are American pitcher plants growing out in the full hot sun and that's Alabama full hot sun which is a lot hotter than California Sun usually I mean we have some hot you know Death Valley gets super hot but most here mostly here a hot day for us it's going to be like 100 degrees and it's really short and fleeting in the South the temperatures there are going to be like if you know if I'm visiting these plants in the wild it's often 100 105 degrees in September and 100 humidity and these guys are just glowing out in the horrible hot sun while we slowly melt and drink lots of water and then hop in the air-conditioned car and try not to die that's a brief window into looking at carnivorous plants in the wild but because of that they can really take the sun now the only you know if you're in an area like I said if you're in a very hot and dry area like maybe Death Valley if you're in Arizona and people do grow them in places like that you're not going to do them in full all day sun like we would here in Northern California give them a little break they'll do in half a day sun so it's going to be really hard to keep them sitting in water when it gets over 100 degrees for you you can put them into a really big Basin it can be in a big dish Basin that you put a couple of gallons of water in if that's what you're up against but it's still going to be hard so cut yourself a little break and give them a little less Sun I would move them into a spot around probably around April or May anytime where the temperatures are getting above 90 consistently I would move them to some afternoon shape it'd be great if they were like on the east side of the house where they were getting really hot Morning Sun to color them up nicely but then uh you know a little afternoon shade as the house goes over the head because where the sun goes over the house um the other thing is not enough light uh it's hard to grow saracenia in the woods it really is if you're in a really overgrown tree you know wooded area saracenia might not be the ones for you they really do need a lot of sun if you grow them and not chew not enough light you won't get any of these beautiful red colors the pictures don't know how to stand up right Evolution means that the cells start to stretch stretch out and look for the light so if you've ever noticed on you know any of your house plants at home with leaves start to get really really weirdly big well in the pictures they start looking for light and so they just get straggly and they start falling over and running out of place so they're really not that attractive in low light so and it can be tricky to grow under artificial light because there's so such tall plants um it's kind of hard to know where to keep the lights because as they grow would be great if the lights were here but they're coming up several inches every single day and so it gets really tricky all you can really do is put the artificial light up here and they're going to kind of stretch up to it be burned on top people are probably pulling it off mostly with shorter plants this is saracenia purpurea the purple pitcher plant there's also the parrot pitcher plants there are sanitina those are lower and you could grow these guys in your lights probably the yescom lights that they sell on Amazon can be really terrific they'll color up underneath those but again the tall ones can be tricky the short ones are okay so soil we grow our American pitcher plants and our general mix that we've used for years and years and years here and that is four parts Pete to one part perlite now you could substitute washed Horticultural slant or play sand for the perlite if you want to it will make for heavier pots but is slightly more attractive possibly because the perlite will kind of float up to the top but our our mix of four parts feet to one part perlite is really super tried and true we use the uh mostly we use the Black Gold brand or Sunshine brand of peat moss if you can find that at Home Depot usually you can if you're not finding peat moss where you live again it can be kind of hard to grow these without peat moss a short-term solution could be cocoa peat you could substitute that with peat moss but because we're sitting it in the water excuse me it's going to break down really fast and so you might be able to do that with constant repotting but these days I mean people are wasting peat moss for a lot of other things and so just a couple pots of carnivorous plants if you can track it down that's what I would use so we'll move into uh fertilizing as I said earlier uh all carnivorous plants are trapping the prey that they catch for fertilizer that they cannot get from the soil so in those bogs and swamps there's almost no nutrition in the peat moss for them that's all been leached away from Millennia by all the water and so they've evolved this clever ability to catch insects that they don't even know are there and catch all their fertilizer and American pitcher plants are the big gluttons of the carnivorous plant world we get a lot of people who I think they're going to order a venus fly trap and it's going to get rid of all the flies in their neighborhood or a lot of people they're going to buy a couple cape sundos and that's going to be the end of all the mosquitoes that ever existed and I really encourage people to grow these plants because they're beautiful and not because they're going to end the world of bugs but that being said if you have a lot of bugs in your yard and you want to satisfactorily you know with satisfaction watch them disappear American picture plants or furium one of the sounds of my childhood it is the buzzing of little flies and bees from the insides of these pictures and they will completely fill up the nectar that they produce along the rain lid and this is a rain lid it never moves unless they go like this but other than that it only pops up and it's just made to keep the water from going inside this pitcher and toppling it over so it can't catch any more bugs but the nectar that they produce to lure them into the Trap is particularly concentrated on top of this so it adds like a little Landing platform and then the yellow jacket will run around you're eating all the nectar and then you know what the most nectar's down here guys and they'll come down into the throat where there's the most nectar but it's also very very slippery and they slide down inside and the nectar does make them drunk and so they've lost all their inhibitions and they're walking around this delicate Edge and they topple on it um so you don't need to fill these up with water either you don't do that they're going to do that on their own that being said the parrot pitcher plant does not have a rain lid and it can fill up with water that's totally fine and it's actually recommended if you want to keep eating it's a good idea um you don't need to feed these though if you're growing them outside where they should be they'd be covered in bugs and by this time of year already filled up that far with insects and by that point they're not going to catch any more bugs and people often ask well what do I do with that like am I going to fish that out is the plant gonna poop someday no just gonna lose all these pictures when it gets cold in about three weeks and then we'll cut those all off around January and they'll all come back again from the rhizome like a bearded iris over and over again every single year a little bit bigger and once they get to their Optimum height they slowly spread that way and so you will end up with you know over the years with big giant clumps like I have outside um so you don't have to worry about feeding them they're going to fill up with bugs like crazy and because you have to worry about that you probably also don't have to worry about fertilizing them here are your crazy saracenia guy and you know who you are you are fertilizing them also and that's totally fine I fertilize them also and if you're in a greenhouse situation like this and there's a million thousand carnivorous plants all around and nobody's ever catching any bugs it's a good idea to fertilize but if they're outside and they're catching lots of bugs and you're not a crazy person about it all day just let them do their thing and don't worry about it that being said the Maxi fertilizer has been uh we popularized that years ago to be used on carnivorous plants we sell it at our nursery and you can either do a quarter of a teaspoon per gallon or you can also measure it with a TBS meter at about 250 or maybe even 300 parts per million anyway anywhere in there is totally acceptable you can sprinkle them all folderily with a watering can like that you could also put it you can make it a little weaker and put it directly into the tray of water and let them stop that up or you can squirt gun that directly into the mouths you don't want to fill it up so much that falls over and Spills it because without eating anything that way but you can even make it a little stronger and squirt gun it directly into the pitchers themselves they will grow faster that way and if you're growing baby American pitcher plants from seed like that would be classically without any fertilizer about a three-year-old plant from seed um you can speed that up probably take a couple years off of that if you grow them under lights when they're small you can skip a winter or two on American pitcher plant babies and you can fertilize them when they're little if you're waiting for a little baby American pitcher plant like that to catch its first meal and grow it could be a really really long time so a little fertilizer on the baby ones is a good idea not to be overdone so you don't encourage the Moss too much now I want to talk about uh what happens when we encounter problems I did do a long video for the icts it was called uh it was all about pesticides and I called it you know it's all fun and games until somebody gets aphids and that's really true there is such a thing as beginner's luck you might get a couple of these plants things might be growing really super well and then all of a sudden you accidentally created a little niche you have these beautiful serious energy growing and now there's a little niche for aphids or maybe mealy bugs and there are problems the same even though these ironically all eat bugs these all suffer the same um pest problems that almost all plants can suffer from and I want to talk about some of those first off something that almost never happens that people worry about a lot and that is root rot like I said these are from swamps um unless you're like in a really humid spot like if you're in Alabama and you're like next to where they grow in the wild and it's really really hot down there sometimes you can run into some root rot on smaller plants and so it may be a good idea to back off on the watering just a little bit in the winter time that being said here we will take a little bare root of saracenia and you know a lot of times we're busy here there's thousands we'll put it in a buck of water and come back a week later two weeks later sometimes the Mooks a month later oh my God it's been three months and still sitting in that buck of water and they're actually totally just fine really really hard to rot these guys and likewise in the wild they'll often either floating in water or we water up on top of them for a month while the rain settles back out so I don't really worry about that too much probably worrying too much about that um the can get aphids aphids are tiny little insects green orange brown with a tiny tiny totally visible with the human eye but sometimes you don't see them I usually look for their little white old aphid skins and husks all around you're like ah there's probably aphids look closer and look for Twisted leaves I don't have a good example of that because I'm pretty quick to kill any aphid in here but these leaves will get all twisted and deformed and that's usually a great sign that something must be done um there's numerous pesticides that you can use if you have access to like orthene that's fine and that's systemic that'll last for like a month and make sure that it keeps killing the pests any of the bare products with amidacloprid as the active ingredient totally fine not so great for honeybees to be careful about how you use it but totally fine for the saracenia if you really want something organic you can even use like a um take down this totally available online and it's pyrethrin and canola oil pyrethrin comes from chrysanthemum so that's pretty non-toxic um so if you're treating any pest I would treat that two or three times about a week apart just to make sure you didn't miss any of those scraggly little survivors Beyond aphids smelly bug is really probably comedy I think most that mealybug has actually been treated and dead already but the dead giveaway is going to be this white fluffiness at the base of the rhizome it's almost always starts there and then they'll start to hitchhike up the pictures as they grow or have the flower stocks and you will see them up higher on the plants but it usually starts down in here and you can pull away these old picture scales that gives them a place to hide you can see I'm exposing them now by pulling that away and that makes them easier to treat I would also go take this first thing I would probably take some rubbing alcohol and a toothbrush because rubbing alcohol will kill them on contact and just scrub all that away and then once they're good and dead I would take this with a garden hose and just put a good spray on that and blast all that fluffy white stuff off it's like a matrix that they make that they hide inside and repels water and keeps them safe the ants will Farm both of those they'll also Farm hard scale and they can be a problem on these plants as well so if you see a lot of ant activity although sometimes they're just eating the ants it's great but sometimes the ants I have uh started their own farming situation down here and they're raising their past incense again the same pesticides that I mentioned earlier can be really effective on these if you want to go really hardcore on them although it is expensive there's one called Tau star that I really really like it's very very effective but very very expensive um but once you get it under control and you clean it all up and you hit it a few times you can usually get rid of them it's much more a problem in greenhouses or indoors than it is outside mealybug likes the protection from the rain and the cold and the wind so when you have them outside in the you know Chuck and Jive of the world they're way less likely to pop up but it can be a problem in greenhousings another problem only a real fungal problem that we see regularly on them that hurts them is powdery mildew it can be really obvious on red plants like this one you can see this white patchiness here so that's a fungus when you're seeing that sporulation of it it's already inside the plant and so you could wipe it away it's pretty easy to wipe off but it'll still be there um there are lots of fungicides that you can buy to treat this but honestly pure Elemental sulfur has been the best option for me I just do one big heaping tablespoon in a gallon of water inside a watering can I agitate that really well with the um with the spray head of a hose to really work it up because it is kind of hard to get to dissolve and then I just wet the entire plant with the watering can and all the neighboring plants every time a drop of normal water lands on that and splatters somewhere else it can spread so once you see that you also want to stop spraying it with water don't make sure you're not spraying the foliage over and over again the sulfur will leave little sulfur spots that's not powdery movie there that's a previous treatment it's been a little resistant to come off of here so those are the sulfur spots that's totally fine it's a little unsightly you can wash them off if you're really Persnickety but it's good to leave it on there because it's prohibiting the powdery building um it's more of a problem when they're actively growing in the spring and summer I like to treat them all prohibitively with the sulfur while they're dormant before all the new pictures come up that's a really great time to do a dormant spray on those another thing I wanted to talk about is City molds that occurs on the nectar of saracenium so this is an anthocyanin free saracenia anthocyanin is the red pigment in plants and so when they're anthocyanin-free they're basically albino and incapable of making any red pigment it's funny because that City mold is on all these plants I guarantee it it's on all these flavas that are so pretty and it's definitely on this but you can't see it because it's so dark red lots of people love anthocyanin-free plants there's people that totally fixate on that we're always making new ones here that are really cool but you should expect that there will sometimes be a kind of black City mold on them it's totally harmless it's just the sugars in their nectar lure molding if you put any sugar in a wet environment it's going to mold but it's not rooting the plant at all so you know nature is full of all kinds of imperfections that people like us may not like but it's our job and is in way to swallow that down and just accept it for what it is and that's absolutely the case with that City mold so don't worry about that another thing not to worry about is sometimes the nectar gets so concentrated on top of the lid it'll create like a little droplet and that little droplet will sometimes create a lensing effect that the strong sign will burn little brown spots on top of the lid that's called nectar burn also an unavoidable fact of healthy Sarah skin yeah so don't worry about that either um I think that's most the major problems that they get I would say as a carnivorous plant genus they're a relatively Problem free oh one more thing I should talk about is the phenomenon of late summer thrips especially in really thick saracenia stands if you have big plants like I do this big across deep inside there gives a really cozy spot for another little pest called thrix they're hard to see with a naked eye but if you get down in there and you look you'll see a little elongated green or a brown little little tiny little guy so so we so tiny but they can be seen more would I look is more what I see is thrips damage it's right around late summer on the flavas very often you'll look and it looks kind of um gray and silvery kind of the pictures will look dull and they'll be little brown flecks in that silveriness that's thrips damage they're actually rasping the uh pitcher tissue with their mouth parts and damaging it and then defecating on the leaves to create that weird silvery brownness there's a pesticide called Monterey Bay Garden spray that the active ingredient of spinosad that is also organic but really effective against bricks I always use that specifically for thrips because it stays on the leaf for about a month and as they continue to rasp on the leaves it'll keep killing any new ones that happen it's even a good idea to go out around I don't know May June and preemptively treat your plants with that spinner side just to make sure that nobody takes hold again if you're Persnickety and you can't stand it generally thrips can take a lot of damage especially when they work down onto the rhizome they can really start to dehydrate that rhizome and heard it they are capable of killing a plant but generally it's usually a problem late summer and they die in the winter too and when you cut them back in the spring or in the fall then usually it's just fine um just cleaning them up is you know you don't have to clean them up like I said um during throughout the year you don't have to cut every little brown pitcher off I don't know he does that in the wild but it is a good idea to cut them all completely back to their rhizome in January and I do that all at once once a year I do that with old flowers I do that with old pictures even if they look nice I'm probably just going to cut them all off and I just do it right there you can see about the height we did it at last year you can be much tighter if you have more time it is probably good to get really close to the rhizome if you want to get really nuts you can always pull the two-year ones away like that and just pull those off of there not that one though but those and that keeps them looking a little cleaner and keeps them from getting mealy bug you know you'll do this when you have one plant you'll do this when you have tin plants when you have a thousand million plants like me maybe we'll pay somebody to do this but we don't have time to clean every single Center just like that but you can so although saracenia suffered from all those common pest problems another thing that they generally don't suffer from I can't really think of ever seeing um saracenia attacked by spider mites it doesn't mean it's impossible because Nature's a big big Brave world out there but generally I would say that spider mites is probably not happening that being said you know just because you've heard of a spider mite doesn't mean that the Myriad huge world of soil mites predatory mites decomposing mites uh is completely understood by you or me or anybody actually we're still trying to figure out what all these mites do we do know that any little spoonful of soil has thousands and thousands of soilights in it we do know that if you look closely at the peristome of your saracenia you may see little weird mites crawling around there we think the hitch rides on the bees we don't really know their whole life cycle yet but they're not harmful if you see a big giant orange mud running all over it that's probably not spider mite either it's probably predatory looking for the same horrible spider mites to kill that you are spider mites are incredibly teeny tiny if you're seeing it it probably isn't and if you see webs yes Spiderman snake webs it has web right in the name but you better have it's like uh it's got to be the Los Angeles the spider mite City in order for to see webs if you're seeing webs it's major if you're usually a web is just a spider web maybe it's a little fungus not webbing or something of the soil but you're probably not seeing spider mites please stop sending us emails we're just if you send us a picture a clear picture we're always happy to identify pests for you all right we can hedge that one off and say that probably isn't second thing you might see we get a lot of emails saying that like there's a little worm that came out of the pot and it's swimming around in the water what is this worm I don't know maybe it's an eel worm or a horse a horse tail Worm but all those little worms are non-harmful um they're not going to do anything to you or the plan stop trying to kill every little thing and sterilize the world there's a lot of creatures in the world also springtails sometimes you'll see springtails on the on the fresh peat moss and they're jumping around they're tiny tiny little gray guys to jump across the fight leave those guys alone it's okay don't kill everything um but yeah those are pretty much the uh a few things that we get a lot of questions about that actually aren't problems and then I want to launch into conservation a little bit um because why you grow these plants is such a question you know why I grow these plants for one they're beautiful another thing we've really got them on the ropes as I said earlier they're native to Wetlands and swamps um we've been really terrible to Wetlands we've been terrible to the entire planet Earth honestly but we started with the wetlands when Europeans first got here to North America there was huge swaths of long needle Pines and wetlands in between and one of the first things that we did was start to build roads ditches um dams and bogs became lakes and reservoirs and if you drive if you if you make a road down the middle of a bog and put two ditches on either side of the road what happens is all the water from no matter how big that bog is all the water will suck into those ditches and then all the saracenia are forced to retreat all throughout the bog they'll just keep moving and only survivors would be the ones right up against the side of the road so if you're from the south and you're driving around you will see a lot of roadside sites but what you're missing is the acres and Acres of saracenia habitat that used to exist and then carnivorous plants uh well all the United States carnivorous plants are dependent on fire and depending on fire it's kind of a weird thing I think more and more of us are becoming aware of the importance of fire and conservation but the general public thinks this fire is a really destructive thing and something to be quickly put out so our house doesn't burn down well in doing that we've interrupted fire Cycles so many plants including saracenia are completely dependent on that fire fire cycle and in the southeastern United States where it's literally a combination of explosively flammable long needle Pines and lightning storms all summer long it would have burned almost every single year almost every single bog would have burned and now it doesn't so we got rid of the fire cycle we got in the way of the water cycle now carnivorous plants are trying to survive and trying to adapt with even what we're throwing at them and so they're in the South they have a thing called Power cuts and that is the cleared land underneath the big metal power lines and they have to do that for maintenance so they were clearing all that out and that became another Refuge of carnivorous plants because even though we're not burning the brush away we had people that were going out there and physically clearing the brush and that gives enough light and enough clearance for all these guys to continue to thrive the fire is beating back the trees beating back the shrubs beating back the grass and allowing these guys to continue to flourish there where they grow um so we got in the way of that and we got in the way of the water but we started physically clearing them and mowing those roadsides and keeping those clear and so the carnivorous plants have been lingering there now something that I saw coming even starting to change uh 10 years ago when I started visiting the plants almost 20 years ago now um was Roundup it's way cheaper to round up roadsides and power Cuts than it is to pay people to physically clear it and so power cuts are being aerially uh broadcast Roundup and where they just spray round up on either side of the road now as opposed to mowing it now that simple decision that's saving you know the money to people is actually destroying these last remaining populations and sadly most these plants are um not respected where they grow there's very little information about them they're considered um Troublesome if they're on your property because if you find this endangered species on your property they're going to limit what you can do to your land and so people actively still destroy them um people are actively still destroying habitat every single day to build Walmarts and overpasses and parking lots and um they're really in rough shape you know saracenia oreophila which is the most endangered probably of all the species from northern Alabama I think it's down to nine small sites that's it Sarah senior grouper Jones Eye also extremely extremely endangered and saracenia um rubra Subspace albumensis all three of those are practically extinct but the rest of them are in really rough shape too another thing that I talk about a lot to people is climate change you know these are all in low-lying fresh water areas and when the sea level rises that salt water is going to inundate these areas and I expect in my lifetime to see lots and lots of freshwater saracenia habitat become saltwater Marsh which is of course uninhabitable to them um so it's really important uh it's really important to donate when you can there's the North American saracenia conservancy and you can donate directly to them on our webpage when you're placing your orders and there's no good excuse not to do that they do a lot of great work real foot on the feet on the ground work of relocating plants to safer areas without disturbing genetics really thoughtful conservation work and of course you can grow these plants and that will be twofold lots of people are hard on this you know they say that people aren't capable of long-term cultivation to make enough conservation impact I gently usually disagree with that we've made numerous things here that um you know seed sort of culturally that wouldn't be done otherwise and whether that will continue a thousand years from now I think it's smart for us to do everything we can yes conserve the land but yes grow these plants outside of it in case that it all becomes salt marsh and there's absolutely none of them left so you can do your small part by donating and also growing these beautiful plants and showing your neighbors that's why I've devoted my entire life to teaching people and growing these beautiful plants so that they'd be way less likely to get on board with destroying beautiful places if you live in the southeast United States you can also vote Blackwater Blackwater National Forest is a super beautiful area full of all these plants and they're dying to frack in there don't let them frack in Blackwater State Forest please don't but yeah they're in really rough shape and I expect most I expect to see extinctions In Our Lifetime even things like the Venus flytrap for that same package um anyways uh if you've never tried growing serious India I hope that now you're inspired to give it a shot they really are fantastic plants they really will catch all of your yellow jackets and if you take good care of them like me they really will be with you for your entire life I'm not joking about that I still have the ones when I was 12 and there's I don't see any reason why when I pass away they won't still all exist here and probably be even taken care of after that um so there's no reason to think of these as like a weird novelty that you're just gonna take home and kill if you do it right like I just told you it could actually absolutely be with you forever anyways uh thanks so much for learning about these amazing plants with me and stay tuned for more Ultra care guides look at the time stamps down below if this got long-winded for you you can skip ahead to any of the parts that I'm talking about and like and follow and ask plenty of questions down in those comments because we're always happy to answer them thank you so much

Channel: California_Carnivores

Views: 30,392

Keywords: California Carnivores, Carnivorous plant, Plant, Sarracenia, American pitcher plant, Garden

Id: CzFUUeCifpU

Length: 46min 46sec (2806 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2022