No more room below for roots to grow? Carnivorous Repot!

So this is what we are going to accomplish today. Some of the larger Drosera plants are growing well above the rim of their pots. I will be doing a step by step on how to repot these bad boys.

This one is a large Drosera, or sundew as they are called due to their sticky leaves which look dewy. I suspect the roots are all the way at the bottom of the pot which used to be small for this plant, but such is growth and I've had lots of it this year.

It is important to me to save the larger plants if I have to prefer one to another, and I have many plants that are growing out of their pots and you can tell when they have done that because it looks like the roots are showing.

Here is what we are dealing with. It looks like the Drosera has fallen over. On windy days, it would possibly flop from side to side and eventually break off where the stem meats the roots.

You can see, in the background, the upside down project we are working on to get chilli peppers to grow upside down. A quick update pic on that project since it is still occupying my counter top.

The first thing we have to do is get it back upright, sticking straight up in the air. We do that by trimming off the lower branches but none of them that are in the dirt, then we pack new sphagnum moss around the base of the plant.

Oops, we found some babies and it looks like there may be three or four of them. I'm going to pot those real quick before I move on with this repot.

Now that those little guys are happy, we're going to move on with the repot.

I have trimmed all the lower branches off and if I hold it up, you can see how much space we have to add moss.

We can just add moss until it can no longer flop left or right.

Now we are going to prepare the new, taller pot with some perlite at the bottom and some long string sphagnum moss in the middle.

You can see how much taller the new pot is. It will give the plant a place to grow deeper roots and more room to add moss at the top when it loses old branches (leaves).

Next we're going to split the pot, top to bottom, leaving only the top near the rim connected.

We will be placing this pot into the new pot so that none of the roots are disturbed. This is key for carnivorous or other plants that have a delicate bond - roots to soil.

We split the pot on both sides, 180 degrees apart so that the sides will be able to be removed as two halves. You will see in a minute how that works.

Next we tape the pot so that it doesn't completely fall apart in our hands.

Now we slice the bottom of the pot completely off, allowing the roots to go deeper in the new pot.

Okay, so we have the pot split in half up and down, we also have the bottom cut off, and now all we have to do is drop the entire pot into the new pot. We can get the side walls of the old pot out later. So here's the prepared pot.

I have added several inches of depth and soaked the moss in distilled water. I will now drop the old, bottomless pot into the new deeper pot. I have measured so that the new surface level of the moss is well below the rim of the new pot.

And here's the finished product. I need only fill the gap between the border of the old pot and the outer walls of the new pot, let the plant get accustomed to it. I can leave the old pot in there or clip the rim ( the only part still connected at the top ) and remove the two halves. I think some of you have seen me do this method before. The method is designed to make sure that the plant, and it's bond between the roots and the moss are not disturbed, as I said.

Now it is back where it was, only now it is standing upright in a deeper pot, ready to keep my garden insect free!

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