Alexis

I didn't know that. Supermarkets fall over themselves to recall a product that doesn't have milk properly labelled, but companies can sell peat with hidden fertiliser in it and don't care.

Where is it living?

Darlingtonia needing cold roots is massively overhyped in my experience. Mine just live with my sarracenia in the greenhouse and do fine. Same with purp ssp. purp. Either will be about 5 weeks behind their greenhouse brethren if they live outside.

I think you've got your stratification and sowing instructions confused. 5 weeks wrapped in wet paper towel in the fridge, then sow on moss peat and keep warm and sunny.

42C should be fine if they are sat in enough water.

Pitchers on a lot of species turn red in full sun. If the old pitchers are from autumn or when it was in a garden centre they will probably be green through lack of light. Hard to advise on any heat rash effect without seeing a photo though

Traps don't last forever. The plant keeps old non functioning traps solely for photosynthesis. Sometimes they open wide to catch more sun, but won't function.

What brand of peat?

Yes, you can pot up bare rhizome with no roots at all and it'll grow back. The supposed big thing about Japanese Knotweed is that it'll regrow from a tiny bit of rhizome, but so do a lot of plants, including sarracenia. How much light is your plant getting though? It looks a bit light starved

Just been to Aldi and they have 210 litre waterbutts for £19.99 if anyone's interested.

Yep!

I think it was one of the earliest man made hybrids and so was given a latin name just because someone happened to create it. Presumably it looks similar to catesbaei, possibly even like 'Vogel' with the psittacina genes. It should be pretty easy to create if anyone had a catesbaei purpurea backcross, but I don't think there's much appetite in creating it because I doubt it'll result in spectacular plants.

Don't use boiled water. Rainwater or distilled only.

It hasn't got any fresh 2018 traps by the looks of it. Wait a few weeks and it should be good to go.

Back in the day I had a few VFTs on a windowsill and they did well. I had to move them to a relative's greenhouse in winter for dormancy though

It's the risk of botrytis in the stagnant air of a greenhouse. You can keep them as wet as you like outside in winter in moving air.

The bell jar will cut out the amount of light because it'll have to travel through an extra pane of glass. You'll also increase the chance of problems because of the stagnant air. I'd keep them as they are.

They're fine being frozen solid, and they'll still be blocks of ice whether in or out of water (if the weather is cold enough). We only keep them damp in winter to avoid botrytis developing in the dark and damp still air. Outside you can keep them permanently in water. Anyway, this weekend doesn't look too bad. Just cool and wet, and a light frost Thursday night. There isn't a Beast 3 on the way.

No loose roots in the packaging? Presumably it has a grow point?

They'll be happier in the greenhouse because they won't be affected by the drying wind. A lot of us lost plenty of plants in 2010. It got down to -13 to -15C, so I suspect the more sensitive sarracenia have a lower limit of -12ish.

Don't bring them in to thaw. They'll turn to mush.

A lot of the US guys seem to prefer syringing it into pitchers, sarracenia seedlings in particular.

Their peat may well be perfectly fine today, but considering all my fly traps nearly died in it about 7 years ago, I won’t buy it ever again.

It worked for me the other day but it’s now gone behind a paywall for some reason. Strange. It basically said that peat free trials weren’t going as successfully as hoped and that Gove was looking at the possibility of taxing it rather than banning it in 2020 at the moment.

Interesting!