Sticky plant questions answered!

A while back I made mention of our little carnivorous garden living on our kitchen window sill. One in particular, the Drosera scorpioides, has been struggling ever since we got it. It has been attacked by aphids several times, it's been slow to grow and it has lost its little sticky growths to catch bugs that it had back in March. So last night we decided to visit the monthly Victorian Carnivorous Plant Society meeting to see if they could tell us what we were doing wrong.

Drosera scorpioides - not enough light

From what we learned last night, it seems that all of our plants simply need more sun, especially the D. scorpiodes and also all of our plants need surprisingly less water than we realised, especially during winter. In fact, overwatering is probably the reason why our Cobra lily (Darlingtonia californica) died practically overnight just a few weeks back. What fascinated me was the extensive root system all of these plants have. For such small plants, their roots are massive! Everyone at the meeting was very friendly and helpful and weren't total nutters, so it was a very enjoyable night. We met one guy from Hobart who was visiting for the evening, so when we got to Tasmania in October, he has offered to give us a tour of the carnivous plants in the area. Apparently the better time to see canivorous plants in Tasmania is in late February, but we should still be able to see a few things.

Our cobra lily - RIP. Sorry for overwatering you!

Some very cool plants

One of the members generously donated this little one to us! Not sure what it is exactly, it's from South Africa though. Hopefully we will have more luck with this one than the scorioides...