Dormancy in Carnivorous Pitcher Plants

Hi! My name is Wes on behalf of expertvillage.com and in this video segment I am going to talk to you about winter dormancy for your pitcher plants. If you want to know more about carnivorous plants, you can visit us at equilibriocarnivorousplants.com. So the period of winter dormancy is an important part of the life cycle of all the sarracenias that we have here. They all go through this dormant period in the winter months usually from about December to February. In the Spring and March they start to grow again. We can see these plants here their pitchers are starting to die and they are loosing the nice color that they had in the Spring time when they first leafed out. We can also see here with this hybrid its pitchers are starting to die. Eventually most of these pitchers will get brown and die off and go off into their dormant period. Now it is important when you are bringing your plants into dormancy if you are growing them outside to know what kind of sarracenias you have. This particular sarracenia purpurea or the sarracenia purpurea purpurea subspecies can grow perfectly fine outside in the winter all year round. This particular one is more of a Southern species so it is going to need more protection during the winter. What we like to do is bring our Southern sarracenias like the sarracenia flava and this sarracenia minor; we bring them inside during the winter but in an area that will get temperatures of about 40 degrees. We don’t want them to get snow on them or a freeze completely over because this could kill the rhizome inside underneath the soil. We like to keep these plants in their garage or in a basement; some area that is going to be very cold. If you are living in a very very hot climate like Southern Florida or Hawaii or something like that, you can keep these plants inside of your refrigerator for 3 months out of the year in the vegetable drawer where they are going to be nice and cold.