Wakeup Carnivorous Plants!

It's time for the carnivorous plants to wakeup from dormancy, come out of the basement, and get out into the real sun.  Most of them are already showing new growth, and the little Pingicula grandiflora is blooming!

The ping!  (The little black dots on the leaves in the background are tiny bugs the ping "caught" over the winter in the root cellar.)

Venus flytrap 'Megatraps' is growing a bunch of new traps!  (Note the fly exoskeleton in the lower left of the photo.)

One of the tall pitcher plants is putting up some flowers (those little ball-shaped thingies are buds).

Many of the pots were kind of full.  The plants grew in size quite a bit last summer, but we decided to wait until this spring to repot them.

This is what one of the pots looked like before we did some repotting.

This is Sarracenia 'Judith Hindle'.  It was in the middle of the above pot and had gotten too big to have so much in the same pot with it.  It still has last year's flower, and it's putting up some new ones.

Here's one of the freshly repotted pots.

We spent quite a bit of time repotting and rearranging the plants.  And by quite a bit of time, I mean about 6 hours.  It's a very delicate process, as one doesn't want to disturb the roots too much.  Totally worth it, though.  The plants have more room to grow and spread out, and each pot has a better selection and variety of plants in it.

Here's a pic of our (current) collection.  This photo is before we did the repotting, and I neglected to take a group shot after we finished.

The whole family!

We're still kind of carrying the pots in and out of the house as the overnight temperature dictates.  If it is predicted to get below about 40°F, we take them inside.  The last frost date in Michigan is at the end of May, so until then we just have to watch the weather forecast carefully.  Eventually, we'll be able to leave them outside all the time, and they can really start growing and doing their thing!

In case you were curious, here's what our winter grow room looks like:

Oh!  Here's what the indoor/tropical pitcher plants (Nepenthes) are doing:

Cool, right?

And some of the Venus flytrap seedlings look like this:

We keep the seeds on top of an awesome Count von Count placemat (from my childhood).

We have learned that our seeds might be goofy because we used some plant hormones in the solution that aren't usually used when starting seeds in tissue culture.  But they are still growing, so well see what happens.