Oooop!s Wrong soil

[Australopithecus]

I re-potted my vft's in peat about a month ago. The peat in a couple of the pots settled quite a bit so the top of the peat was well below the top of the pot. I decided to quickly tip out the contents of the pots ( vft's + peat ) and chuck an inch or two of peat in the bottom of the pot and then just as quickly return the vft + peat back into the pots.

I thought all had gone well until I realised that I had used multi-purpose garden compost instead of peat by mistake. Now the plants are in about 4 inches of peat with about a inch and a half layer of multi-purpose garden compost at the bottom of the pots.

Is this OK? Will the plants be happy in this state or do I need to re-pot again using peat?

Thanks

A

[zeeland]

my advise is: repot them becous I think thare is to much fertilizer in that soil.

[Brendan]

Repot as soon as you can - the plant wont tolerate it for long. You'll need to change all of the potting mixture because nutrients will have leached out of the compost into the sphagnum moss peat.

Good luck.

[mantrid]

You could conduct a useful experiment here. Leave one (inexpensive) and compare how it grows to another (division off same parent if possible) of similar size. My prediction is that it will grow faster than the others but with greener leaves, I dont think there would be enough nutrients to kill it. I could be wrong, I often am.

[BenScoobert]

I have a minor bit of corrugation on 1 pitcher and a flower with is deformed, rest of pitchers from this plant appear fine.

Edited May 16, 2011 by BenScoobert

[Alexis]

Are you in the right topic Ben?

[BenScoobert]

Are you in the right topic Ben?

No!! :-p

[mobile]

Little Shop of Horrors run an experiment on fertilizing VFT, see HERE. However, they used their standard peat/sand mix with slow release fertilizer. The problem with multi-pupose is that it could contain lime and the fertilizer is not going to be slow release. As mandrid suggested, you could run an experiment but it might be at the cost of losing your VFT.

[Peter Hewitt]

My Tissue culture Lab recently accidentally potted a batch of 5000 sarracenia and the same number VFT clumps in to fertilized peat in trays. Once we noticed the mistake,we immediately started wtering from above only. 20% of the plants died in a week, the rest grew at an alarming rate for a few weeks, untill the fertilizer leached out of the peat. The whole batch was very vigorous and bright green. They hardened well and no residual problems.

Just my 2 cents.

[dchasselblad74]

My Tissue culture Lab recently accidentally potted a batch of 5000 sarracenia and the same number VFT clumps in to fertilized peat in trays. Once we noticed the mistake,we immediately started wtering from above only. 20% of the plants died in a week, the rest grew at an alarming rate for a few weeks, untill the fertilizer leached out of the peat. The whole batch was very vigorous and bright green. They hardened well and no residual problems.

Just my 2 cents.

So...Sarracenias and VFTs benefit from weak fertilization, compared to ones with no fertilizer at all...

[Peter Hewitt]

So...Sarracenias and VFTs benefit from weak fertilization, compared to ones with no fertilizer at all...

From my rather limited experience yes, but weak and struggling plants usually do not. I frequently fertilize trays of Dionaea with a rather strong Nitrogen solution, but since the plants are fairly tightly packed together, not too much of the solution gets to the roots. But I would never have thought that they could handle as much. Also, I am a commercial supplier, so I have thousands of small plants to experiment on.

So just dont go experimenting on your new "B52"