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.