The plants you buy will be shipped to you bare root. When you receive them, take them out of the packing and gently GENTLY place them on growing media. Create a hollow in the surface of the media and gently place the plant in it and cover any roots that are easily covered, with media. The roots of pinguicula are like small white hair and do little more than anchor the plant to the media and absorb some water. The roots being anchored in media is not very important to the survival of your new pinguicula. However, if you damage the fragile roots, you create openings for pathogens to enter the plant while it is still weakened from shipping.

Pinguicula gigantea plantlet

Avoid rubbing the roots in any way. If they cannot be planted in media easily, it is absolutely fine to simply place the plant on the media without worrying about the roots at all. As the plant acclimatizes and grows, it will send out new roots that anchor it to the media. A ping is not too fussed by this.

Sometimes growing leaves of a ping will lift the roots right out of the media or the plant can also send out arial roots that don’t touch the media at all or the plant can simply grow in the direction of the light putting out new roots that sort of let it… “travel”. You planting it in some place does not mean that it will remain there. Here is a Pinguicula gigantea plantlet that I’d kept in too low light that decided to leave its pot in search of better light. If I had not spotted this in time, I’d have ended up with a very etiolated plantlet like a tube that sent out roots as it grew toward the light. As the current lowest leaves died, the plant would “move”.

This isn’t to say that your plant is going to start crawling around, just to stress that the roots of a pinguicula are attached to leaves. With new leaves come new roots that find new anchors. Regardless of whether these roots are anchored, new ones that grow will anchor the plant to the media. If you can cover existing roots with moist media, excellent, the plant will be able to settle and grow quicker, but if you damage the roots and keep the broken parts wet, you can kill a pinguicula like that by making it vulnerable to pathogens.

In the image below, you will see that I have placed a lot of small plantlets of pinguicula gracilis and pinguicula rotundiflora on a bed of sphagnum. It is difficult to make out in the phtoto, but the sphagnum is not very deep. It is a half an inch layer placed in a tray. I have simply placed the plantlets on top without worrying about their roots at all. You can see some fine white hair like roots in the photo. In a few days, the plantlets adapt to the surface and attach to it. Some of the roots will continue to grow in the air and that is fine.

Pinguicula plantlets placed on sphagnum

If there are any leaves that get detached during shipping, you can place those on the media as well and if your growing conditions are good, they will form additional plants for you.

In terms of growing, think of giving the plant a space to hang out rather than PLANTING it firmly into place. If you grow succulents, you’ll find pinguicula easy.

Once your ping is in its pot, place it in a shady spot away from direct breezes. Avoid bright or direct light initially and only start increasing the light they get as they start growing again. It is very unlikely that you will be able to grow pinguicula in direct sunlight in India, unless you live in a really cool and misty place that has mostly cloud cover. However, most pinguicula will enjoy between an hour or two to several hours of direct light in the early morning or evening. Find out what your plant enjoys by very, very gradually moving it to brighter conditions – it is better to keep it in bright shade than too much direct sunlight – it will get cooked and die rapidly.

You can water it in, but if your media is damp, I have not really found it necessary. If you have damaged the roots, excessively wet media can make it easier for pathogens to enter the plant. This, I think is the biggest reason newly planted pings die. Keeping the plants too wet will encourage rot – particularly if the plants have arrived in shipping (less of a problem when transplanting).

Personally, I like to place any newly arrived plants on their growing media and simply mist lightly several times a day (if water is dripping from the leaves, pooling in the crown of the plant or the leaves are still wet five minutes later – that is drenching, not misting) till they start growing again, then reduce the frequency and start watering lightly. I never water my pinguicula too heavily. I give the pot a good soaking once in a while or just drizzle ome water on it if the surface appears dry.

The plants don’t really seem to care a lot as long as the humidity is high and you mist them well. Pinguicula can absorb moisture through their leaves easily as well as survive short dry periods well. If the humidity is low or you can’t find a spot sheltered from the breeze for them, you may want to put the plant and pot in a plastic bag to keep in the humidity and only increase it slowly once the roots seem to be established in the new media and start drawing water – the plant will resume growth of new leaves.

Another point to note here is that you can improve your chances of success dramatically by avoiding buying the plant so that it arrives at an adverse time in terms of climate. If it is summer and temperatures are above 30 degrees centigrade or approaching freezing, it is worth waiting for the weather to improve and getting a healthier plant that will recover and grow rapidly than a plant that may not survive the shipping or stress or take a long time to recover.

Almost half the people who buy plants from me or discuss carnivorous plants end up asking where to buy sphagnum moss or other supplies necessary for growing carnivorous plants in India. Since I repeat this information often, I thought I’d put up a list of where I buy things from.

Please note, any links to products are affiliate links, because why not. However, I am only recommending products I have actually used myself.

Potting mixes and materials for growing carnivorous plants

Carnivorous plants need nutrient poor medium to grow in. This means that using the standard mud or potting mixes will not work. The plants will die. Suitable materials include cocopeat, peat, sphagnum moss, perlite, vermiculite. Some of these can be used on their own or mixed with others to create suitable medium to grow your plants.

Cocopeat

Cocopeat is relatively easily available in India, given our long shoreline and abundance of use of coconuts. Many of the larger nurseries in cities will have cocopeat. Please be sure to buy bricks of cocopeat and NOT potting mixes based on cocopeat, because those will have added nutrients that will kill your plants. The problem with using cocopeat is that it needs to be rinsed with water several times to remove salts and other nutrients before it can be used. Also unlike use for common gardening plants, soaking in calcium nitrate fertilizer to replace the sodium salts will not work as a relatively quick fix, because carnivorous plants don’t want calcium salts either. So you have to do this properly. Soak in water, drain, soak in water, drain and so on. Once the water removed from the cocopeat gets lighter, you must use purer water – rainwater, RO or distilled till you have got most of the dissolved content out of the cocopeat.

On the plus side, cocopeat is inexpensive and available relatively easily. For those not living in places where local nurseries sell cocopeat, here are some online listings where you can buy it. I’ve made comments under each.

Sphagnum moss

This one is trickier to find, but probably the best medium to use. The ones sold by many nursery sites as sphagnum moss are often not sphagnum moss, but forest moss. This is also usually quite dirty and full of debris and personally, I wouldn’t advise using it unless you are growing some of the larger nepenthes that you don’t mind gambling with. For any other carnivorous plants, this sort of moss is useless.

The very best sphagnum you could use is the AAA NewZealand Sphagnum. It is expensive, but it expands dramatically and is very good value for money, particularly for the more expensive and rare plants. I am pretty much discontinuing the use of all other sphagnum for my plants. I’m addicted.

But there are other and cheaper options too. Here are the acceptable listings of sphagnum moss I found to be acceptable quality. Please read the comments under the products for my opinion on them.

Coco chips, bark, etc

Coconut chips, bark and charcoal are other very interesting materials to use for larger nepenthes and orchids. Not much to comment on other than RINSE EVERYTHING YOU USE. Here is where you can find them.

Containers for growing carnivorous plants

This is simply a listing of various containers I have found useful for my plants. I’m commenting with the kinds of plants they could be useful for, but this is not expected to be a detailed listing.

I also start plants that will get larger later in smaller containers and move to progressively larger ones as their root balls grow and they need the space.

Seedling trays

Seedling trays are invaluable when starting plants from seed. They take up much less space, use less potting media and allow for better observation and growing of the tiny plants. They should be available with larger nurseries.

Here are some or similar to what I’ve picked up a time or two if you don’t have a nursery selling them near by.

Small pots

These are suitable for most carnivorous plants. Most drosera, pinguicula or byblis can probably be grown in them permanently, but they also form useful intermediate pots for drosophyllum and nepenthes, as well as larger drosera like drosera regia.

Bigger pots

These are various pots suitable for bigger plants. Hanging planters can be used for larger nepenthes plants.

Other interesting containers

Here are some other containers that have worked well at various times. Vertical gardening is really a cool way of maximizing the available space.

There are very few sellers of carnivorous plants in India, which is why I am attempting to grow my inventory and sell as many species as I can. I operate from my home and grow the plants in my balcony, so stocks are unlikely to be in vast quantities to rival regular nurseries. However, given the rarity of these plants in India, I still think it is a worthwhile effort to make them available to hobbyists.

This post attempts to address common questions asked by new carnivorous plant growers.

Why are the plants so small?

Many of the species of carnivorous plants are quite small. It is their relative rarity and difficulty in growing that is the reason for the cost and not their size. Most droseras for example will only be a in inch to a few inches big. Pygmy droseras are even smaller. Notable exceptions are drosera binata forms.

Other plants can grow to massive sizes, but take a long time getting there and it is more affordable to buy seedlings and grow them with patience. Nepenthes species, most notably are among these. A nepenthes seedling can take upwards of two years to start forming adult pitchers. Apart from a few relatively common species of Nepenthes that are propagated from cuttings, an adult plant can be the result of years of investment in skill, growing conditions and risks with die offs. Such a plant will run into the tens of thousands if from among the more rare and spectacular species or hybrids. Depending on the rarity of the species, a plant that is only a few inches big can cost thousands of rupees. So, in such cases, the plants are small due to reasons of affordability and practicality.

What should I buy – seeds or plants?

If you are a beginner, your best bet is to buy live plants. Carnivorous plant seeds can be really minute and difficult to germinate and grow without some experience, even with seeds that are viable. Also, viability of carnivorous plant seeds can drop rapidly after being harvested (my seeds are always fresh). It is easy to be discouraged when seeds don’t germinate.

Notable exceptions to this are species that don’t handle root disturbance well – particularly the long leaved ones of these – byblis species, drosophyllum, long leaved droseras like drosera indica species come to mind. If you can buy these in person, without requiring them to be shipped, they are definitely the better option. However, if shipping is involved, you may be better off buying seeds.

If you buy seeds on the internet, please be sure to buy from a reliable seller. Avoid listings on Ebay that are from China (though sometimes now they appear to be from other countries). You can recognize them easily from the use of words like “bonsai” “pcs per bag” “blue temptress” and so on. They will also be ridiculously cheap. These are always fake. No amount of reporting appears to work to get the sellers banned, but these seeds will always be bogus.

A way to identify a good seller is to check out their other sales. If they are selling all kinds of plants and seeds (think tomatoes, cucumbers and roses next to rare nepenthes species), know that they are likely resellers knowingly or unknowingly but likely selling bogus seeds. However, if the person has only a couple of listings and they are all carnivorous plants or other rare plants, chances are good that the seller is legit. Another way to know is from reading the listing and seeing the photos. If the photos don’t match a simple google search for what the species looks like, the listing is a fake. A seller selling authentic seeds is more likely to have photos that appear to be taken in “real” conditions, without photoshop effects and the listing can often have more information about the plant.

Another alternative is to buy from online nurseries specifically selling carnivorous plants. Seeds from here are often likely to be genuine. Be warned though that even among these, sites that sell 10 seeds and so on of nepenthes are often reselling seeds purchased in bulk from other sellers or collectors from the wild and there is no way to know the viability of these seeds. Reliable sellers will often publish harvesting dates for seeds. Or at least the year and season they were harvested in.

How to buy carnivorous plants online

Know that there are very few sellers in India and very few sellers abroad that will ship to India. Additionally, if you are a beginner, you’d be well advised to buy from established sellers in India. The downside to this is that the plants are often without accurate species identification or they are among really common varieites. This cannot be avoided. Most sellers in India have limited collections and we tend to sell only spares, obviously. But this is the best option if you are a beginner wanting a cool plant rather than a specific species.

The reason for this is that shipping within India takes less time and the plants suffer less shock. These varieties being relatively common, the plants you get will be larger and less expensive. More importantly, these plants are acclimatized to the relatively hot conditions in most of India.

I would not be exaggerating when I say I have spent lakhs of rupees on plants that died. Most sellers abroad who ship to India are in really cold countries to the point they have to shop selling in winters because of extreme cold temperatures. The plants suffer stress from long shipping times as well as major temperature shock. It was years before I learned to research for plants that would survive our climate, good times of the year to order them in (where our temperatures are relatively low but it isn’t cold enough to prevent shipping in seller’s country). Sadly, the best times also coincide with Indian festivals, resulting in shipping delays.

And then to protect the plants and to keep them alive and thriving after arrival. I learned this the hard way, but in my opinion, beginners should not attempt this at all, unless you have money to throw away. It is much better to gain experience in growing them and keeping them alive with less expensive and more common plants that are available in India that won’t suffer too much climate shock.

The plant I purchased has lost leaves/pitchers or is otherwise wilting

Many plants suffer shipping shock. This is an excellent reason to try and buy plants in person rather than having them shipped. However, given that local nurseries don’t exactly stock carnivorous plants, sometimes shipping is inevitable. Most sellers will replace plants that arrive dead, at least once (though there are some who won’t – even when bad packing is the cause of plant death). For this, you should click photos of the plant immediately on unpacking and contact the seller. You are unlikely to get replacements for simple wilting or some damage to leaves/pitchers if the plant is otherwise healthy.

However, once you have received a live plant, you are on your own. If you kill it, it is dead and you won’t have a replacement.

Depending on whether you have received the plant bare rooted or in a pot, you may need to pot it up in a suitable potting mix. Your seller can advise you on this. (Any plants I sell on this site already have the information in the product listing). I would advise against repotting a plant you receive already potted, unless the potting mix looks really suspect. There is no need to add transplant shock to shipping shock. It will increase the risk to the survival of your plant. If you need to plant it to a bigger pot, take out the entire rootball from the smaller pot it arrived in, and plant it in the larger one without disturbing the roots. If the seller grew the plant in that potting mix to the point he has plants to sell, including this exact plant, the plant is unlikely to suffer any damage from being in the pot it arrived in.

Once your plant is in a suitable pot, I would recommend putting the whole thing in a plastic bag to retain humidity and keeping in a shady place (not dark!) that doesn’t get any direct sunlight. The only exception to this is if you already have a misting system or humidifier or it is a heavy monsoon and the plants are getting regular spray from the rain. In that case, the misting/humidity as well as the air circulation is even better. Keep them like this till you see the first signs of growth – usually in the unfurling or growing of the newest leaves at the top.

This can take a while, so if you are potting up multiple plants, it may be wise to give each a separate container and plastic bag, so you can acclimatize each as per its own speed. If you have several plants in one container/bag, go according to the speed of the slowest one. Remaining protected for longer won’t harm the ones that are adjusting well, but being exposed to harsher conditions will kill those that aren’t.

After this, you may slowly decrease the humidity by poking holes in the plastic bag, or opening it very slightly every few days, till the plant seems to get very little protection from the bag and remove the bag. The longer you can take for this process, the better the chances of survival for your plant.

It is normal to lose old leaves and pitchers on a plant after shipping. Expect this. It is not a crisis and nor is it a threat to your plant unless all the leaves seem to be dying. New leaves and pitchers formed in your growing conditions will remain for much longer.

How to protect from pests

Best protection from pests is growing healthy plants. However, pests are a fact of growing plants. Some plants are more susceptible than others. Neem oil should be the first line of defense. It is harmless to most carnivorous plants. You can also use a strong spray of water to dislodge pests physically. immersing the container in a tub of water can help get rid of some pests in the potting mix, though a complete repotting may be needed in heavy infestations.

Some fungus in potting mix can be harmless, particularly if the plants seem fine otherwise. Good air circulation and light prevents damping off and other problems. Avoiding excessively soggy mix and making sure that the pots drain well also helps keep plants healthy.

There are stronger pesticides and fungicides that can be used in worse infestations. However, I am not listing them here, as they can be species specific and what works brilliantly on your nepenthes may wipe out your entire drosera collection, so these should not be used without extensive research.

I will add to this post as I can think of other things to add. I am also happy to discuss carnivorous plants with any hobbyist, particularly from India (no purchases needed). You may contact on Twitter @Vidyut for general discussion or email vidyut@vidyut.info for anything specific.

I just got some tissue cultures of drosera in the mail and planted them out. Given how little information there is on the internet on safely acclimatizing droseras and given how many plants I have killed till I stopped killing them, thought it may help people if I wrote the steps I took. Sadly, being alone at home and not able to find the tripod for my phone, I was not able to video the process or take pictures while I was working.

The plants arrive in plastic vials containing small plants in sterile tissue culture growing on agar based media. The vials are air tight and your race to acclimatize the plants basically starts the minute you crack one open and pathogens can enter the vial and rapidly multiply on the sugars in the growing media. The minute you have done this, the plants can no longer survive in that medium without being at severe risk of fungal infections in particular and must immediately be moved out to growing conditions or new tissue culture.

To transition the plants safely to growing conditions, it is important to ensure that they get intermediate conditions that allow them to adapt in a gradual manner. Here are my tips/learnings from several experiences of acclimatizing tissue culture plants to my conditions.

Growing conditions of plants in tissue culture

• In tissue culture, the plants have a nutrient dense medium to grow on that allows them all the energy they need to grow rapidly.
• This nutirent dense medium is indiscriminate – fungus can grow on it with as much joy as a plant (and kill the plant) if you allow it to be contaminated. Therefore, the tissue culture is sterile. The plants have no need to build defenses against normal microbial threats prevalent in the world, because they don’t need to face them while in the tissue culture.
• The plants are growing in 100% humidity. As a result, the plants don’t need to develop any protection against losing moisture.
• The plants are usually growing in much less light than normal growing conditions and in any case, they will have arrived after spending several days in complete darkness if they have been shipped to you.
• The plants often have very few to no roots at all, because the growing media provides nutrition so effectively, the plant has no need to develop a root system while growing in the culture.

Precautions that need to be taken when acclimatizing delicate carnivorous plants from tissue culture

• Acclimatize plants to increased light
• Acclimatize plants to lower humidity
• Acclimatize plants to normal microbial ecosystem in growing area
• Encourage the plant to develop roots

Steps I take to ensure successful acclimatization of tissue cultured plants to growing medium before deflasking

• Unless the culture seems to be infected in any way or the plants are in any immediate risk of damage from being left in the tissue culture, I prefer to wait for a week to remove the plants from the sterile flasks. In this week, I leave the plants undisturbed in normal growing area temperature and low light – never direct light – not even bright light. Just giving them a chance to recover from the travel and darkness to some light. I may increase the light they get gradually if opportunity presents, but I don’t stress about it – one week is a relatively short time for any major adaptations. If the plants are doing fine in the flask and growing, I’d probably leave them there for another week or two.
• Try to deflask at a time when the temperatures are relatively “normal” and you aren’t getting any extreme highs and such (in our area, no question of low temperatures, but I suppose watch out for that too, if your area is prone to cold weather)
• Mix the growing medium and keep pots ready before deflasking the plants.
• Maintain a relatively pathogen free growing space. I don’t actually sterilize the growing media before planting the drosera onto it, but I do try to ensure that the growing medium is well rinsed and fresh and the pots are either new, or cleaned thoroughly to prevent fungal or insect infestations from whatever grew in it previously.
• Keep plenty of distilled or RO water handy for rinsing. You will regret if you run short in the middle of the process. Also keep tools you may beed clean and handy. For me, these would be tweezers and a spoon or two. I also like to have a few clean bowls handy if I want to use them.

My deflasking process for tissue culture droseras

• As soon as the flask is open, the race against time starts on various fronts. My main objective is to reduce shock (can’t be prevented, altogether, of course), prevent dehydration and prevent contamination.
• I keep two bowls of water handy. I open the flask and drop the plants into one bowl of water. If the plants are growing well in the medium, this may take slight encouragement to dislodge/scoop them from the agar using the handle of a spoon.
• Rinse the plants as best as possible without getting brutal about it. The goal is to get any of the agar medium that may be on the plants off. This is one stage I am never really certain of, given that the agar is transparent in water, so it is hard to make out if you have got it all off. Swirling the plants in the water a bit helps.
• I pick individual plants and check them for remaining agar medium as best as I can before putting them in the second bowl of clean water. I have found that adding a touch of fungicide to this water gives me better results, but I have had plants grow successfully without the fungicide too. Trichoderma viride works too, though I have heard that some droseras don’t like it. I haven’t had problems so far. I suppose you could play safe and use sulphur or Mancozeb or something.
• This is also the time I separate plants that may have got tangled with each other. I do as little of this as possible, and only for plants that are tangled with roots facing in the opposite directions, so that if I planted them as they were, one root would be in the media and the other in the air – those must be gently pulled apart. For plants tangled with roots facing in the same direction, I don’t bother to separate them, unless they fall apart on their own while swirling in the water or handling. This is because i want to keep the mechanical damage to the plants to a minimum – the goal at this stage is not to have as many individual plants as possible, but to get as much of the living plant matter to survive the transition. I can always separate those that survive later if need be when they are well acclimatized and growing robustly.
• I never ever break apart plants growing as a clump. This happens quite often with tissue culture plants, where several plants grow out of a “blob” of plant matter base (callus, it is called properly, I think), often with few or no roots between the whole blob. If the plants are connected at the base, I don’t break them apart, I treat them all as one plant.
• This whole thing takes longer to type than do. Put them in the water, swish them around, separate what separates readily, move to clean water.
• The plants can rest here for a bit in the water, if there is anything you need to prepare for the next steps. The water will prevent them dehydrating.

Planting newly deflasked tissue culture droseras

• Growing medium for the unflasked tissue culture droseras should be whatever you use for normally growing your droseras.
• Before you touch the plants floating in the water, make sure you have something to cover the pots with as soon as the plants are planted. Putting them into a plastic bag, as I have done works. Putting a transparent cup on top of the pot works too. Whatever you choose to give the plants 100% humidity after planting should be ready to deploy as soon as the plants are planted into the medium – I can’t stress this enough.
• This is not the time to toughen them up. They are used to 100% humidity. Give them 100% humidity – I have found this to have direct impact on survival rates – though strangely I haven’t read too much stress on this on the internet. Probably because a lot of the instructions are for tougher plants – orchids, bananas and so on. Drosera are way more fragile, I think. Minimizing potential for dehydration in the deflasking and planting process is important.
• Keep them in water till the point of being planted. Cover them immediately after planting. Yes, this means covering each pot up as it is ready instead of waiting to cover all after all the planting is done. At least I have done it like this on the times I have had better success.
• Sometimes, when planting the blobs, it is hard to make out what to plant and what to keep out, because the plants may not be formed well enough to make sense of as “this is root, plant this in media”. For plants like this, I make a shallow depression and put the whole base into it and sort of nestle the growing media some way up around the plant. So it gives the base media to root into, and also sort of cups the plant lovingly in case it wants to root from other places.
• When done, put the plants in a place where they get moderate light – not too bright and definitely not direct. Make sure they have water – whether in the plastic bag you put pots into – as I have done in this case below – or whether standing in trays. This can’t be stressed enough. If the pots dry out, your plants are history.
• Click a photo of how your plants look at this stage. You will see why later.
• Now for the acclimatization.

Acclimatization of tissue culture plants in growing media

If you did everything right, at this point, you will have plants planted into moist growing media, full humidity and low to moderate light. If you look back to the week of letting them sit and recover from travel, you will notice that their conditions now have changed growing medium and a lack of sterile conditions, but other conditions remain what they are used to – low light and 100% humidity. So in essence, we are breaking down all the things they will have to adapt into small, doable chunks.

Keep them like this. They should be able to grow like this indefinitely if need be. There is no hurry. Hurry before the plants are ready will kill them. This is a good time to remember that the most destructive pest in a garden can be an eager novice gardener. Leave them alone to do their thing. Don’t even look at them if it will tempt you to touch. For a week at least, no matter what the plants do, short of getting an infection and dying, ignore it. Some may wilt. Leaves may die on occasion. Resist the temptation to interfere and do something to save – it will only add to the shock. There isn’t much you can do at this point apart from ensuring they have humidity and some light but not overwhelming. Remove any plants that die, of course. But if you did things right so far, and began with a healthy culture and removed most of the agar, there shouldn’t be any dead.

After two weeks, you can begin thinking about acclimatizing them to the other things they need to adapt to. This is the riskiest part of the process.

• I like to follow an individualized process instead of putting all the plants through the same acclimatization regardless of their condition.
• I examine all the pots and compare with the photo I took when I planted them out. What I am looking for is signs that the plant is well adapted so far, before adding to their stress.
• Signs I look out for include new growth and dew formation on leaves. The new growth is self explanatory. It means the plant is adapted from the stress and back to its main business of growing. In well adapted plants, this growth can seem dramatic. From the ragged clumps of green that get planted, you have miniature plants glistening with dew. This also usually indicates root development. These guys are ready. The rest get more time to wait and get there.
• There is no hurry. If some plants in a pot seem to have adapted, while the others are still struggling, it is a good idea to wait till they are all doing better, because of course what steps you take will happen with all the plants in one pot, unless you potted each plant up separately – which I rarely do for lack of space.
• With plants that are well acclimatized, this is a good time to take off or open whatever you have been doing for humidity and take a moment to admire your plants. Maybe a few photos. Then close it back up and let it be. Do this a couple of times over the next few days. What you are doing is letting the humidity drop for a bit before returning it to 100%
• You can do the same with light. Move them to brighter light – particularly when they are open – bright light encourages dew formation, and helps the plant not lose dew outside the humidity cover. Avoid direct sunlight too soon, but once the plants are open several times a day without suffering, it should be fine to expose them to early morning or late evening direct light.
• After a few days of opening them briefly, you can open them up for a while carefully and away from direct drying breezes like a fan. You can leave them open for say half an hour or so before returning the humidity. You can mist them a bit on occasion if needed to delay covering them up. Don’t overdo it. Misting is not watering.
• Once you have your plants in the open for over half an hour several times a day, you can try feeding them with very small insects to boost speed of growth. Be very careful while doing this. High humidity encourages mold
• Then I change tactics and leave a small opening in the bag or if using a glass/dome, I lift it up a bit from one side. And leave it like that after leaving the plant open for a while. The humidity will be high, but not 100% – there will be some ventilation. Other ways to reduce humidity can be poking holes in the cover or leaving the cover open from the top while still protecting from breezes from the sides.
• If at any point the plants look like they are wilting or they lose their dew, increase humidity a bit.
• Basically, you then increase this exposure to low humidity slowly till they are finally in open pots and growing normally.

This is a time consuming phase. I have done it over a month and still lost plants to shock. This time I’m planning to take two months.

I have found that I start feeling ambitious as the plants do better and tend to skip precautions and make drastic changes thinking the plants can take the shock. Invariably I am wrong and end up losing plants. A plant doing better means they are adapting well to the conditions I have already given them – not the conditions I will be giving them. This means that small steps are working. Not that large steps will work. This is important to remember, because if you are like me, you want the plants to be growing normally already and want to interpret all observations to mean that they can handle more and more. I cannot overstate the importance of understanding that this is a stressful adaptation for a plant and a plant doing well is definitely a call for celebration, but not a call for increasing stress on it.

Just like a school child scoring well in exams doesn’t mean they should be made to study 24/7.

This time, I am hoping to not lose any plants at all. I am planning to give the plants an extra few days when I see them thriving before adding a new stress.