FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

I have asked alot of questions recently and i am pretty much up to speed about my plants...except for one thing, winter dormancy.

I have 4 typical VFts, a pitcher plant (sarracenia purpea i believe), a drosera binata, and i have some drosera capensis & drosera alba clippings i hope to propagate ( as well as a fine tooth x red ).

I am wondering how to handle winter for all of these without it being some big hassle. From what i have gathered i can pretty much leave them outside unless it gets around freezing, upon which i would bring them in and put them in a south facing windowsill until it got a bit warmer.

I am in Georgia (Marietta/Atlanta area-Zone 8).

Could somebody help me form a plan, or just tell me the best and/or easiest way to handle winter and dormancy with these different plants? I would greatly appreciate it!

Yeah, you live in a great place to grow Venus flytraps. You can pretty much leave them outside all year. I was looking at average temperatures and record lows in your area. It looks like on average, the low in December is 31°F and January is 28°F with record lows of -4°F and -12°F respectively. That's pretty cold. You wouldn't want to leave your plants outside through a cold snap like that.

You should be able to leave your plants outside from mid February until mid November and then find somewhere to put them for the 3 months when it's just too cold. Do you have an unheated porch, garage, basement or unused room in your house? That would work well for the coldest months.

the only porch is the one they are on now (you can see it in the pics in some of my other posts) which is not screened in or enclosed, there really isnt an unused room to keep them in, and the garage/basement doesn't have a south facing window (it does but it is shrouded by bushes). I suppose i could cram them all into my tiny window sill (me and my fiancee live at her folks house right now so i have one window in our room) but it would be a stretch. It is pretty close to south facing, and it definitely gets enough sun. If you check out my post "I'm Addicted...." you'll see that i have a couple larger sized pots BUT...the biggest one is the one i have those clippings in. I guess if some of them take i could put them into smaller pots. Unless you have another suggestion? As i said, we do TECHNICALLY have an unheated porch..but it is the same one they live on now which is not an enclosed porch.

also...if some of those clippings DO take...they will be young when winter comes around (if they take in approx 5 weeks they would only be like 4 months old or so by then and probably small). Should those get the same treatment as the plants that have been around a bit longer? If they all take i will have like 3 d. capensis, 3 d. alba, and a fine tooth x red VFT.

My flytraps live outside year round. The Droseras that I gave you are all tropical (IIRC) so they won't overwinter well at all in the great outdoors.

Tropical Droseras should never be colder than 10'C (or 50'F)
Temperate Droseras and VFTs should have a period in winter of optimally between 0'C and 12'C (or 32 - 55'F)

Dormancy itself is more triggered by shortened day length than temperature however.

Chop off those bushes that are blocking the south facing window

lol..yeah, not gonna happen. just gonna have to make some room at our windowsill. itll be fine, maybe well have our own place by then which would kick serious amounts of buttock.