FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

First off, I'm far from the most experienced pingologist (pingulist?) here, so don't be surprised if any advice I give you is later corrected.

That said, I grow my pings is a pure mineral mix (turface, gravel) which I adapted from the mix that Ron West of Cascade Carnivores uses, so I don't see any problem substituting gravel for perlite.

Ideally, I try to bury whatever roots I can but the reality is that most of them wind up on the surface. The problem with pings is that once they're free of the soil, the leaves can quickly turn under, almost forming a cage under the plant - which means that the roots are suspended and out of contact with the media. I've found two solutions to this and I don't like either one - I can build the media into a cone that touches the roots while letting the leaves remained curled. Or, I can trim the leaf tips to root level and/or remove the offending leaves.

I don't like the mound building mostly for ascethic reasons. But also, it is hard to see whether the roots are sufficiently touching the soil with the leaves blocking the view. You have to kind of push the plant into the soil like one of those old manual orange juice makers and hope for the best. Anyway, that's my experience.

Removing/trimming the leaves sounds terrible. Two things are in its favor. Firstly, it lets you be sure that the roots are actually in contact with the soil. And two, I've found that newly planted pings tend to lose their bottom (mature) leaves from the stress, anyway. At least if you remove some leaves intact, you can try to get them to strike and then they don't get wasted.

Oh yeah, from what I understand of Ron West's growing technique, he puts his plants in fairly deep water, lets the water evaporate to almost nothing and then repeats. So that's what I do.