First, a panorama of the open water area of the bog. Side note: I downloaded and tried Hugin as a panorama stitcher (the source pix were taken w/o any assist – I can never find the pano mode on the camera and it has never done me much good anyway) and found it to be really quite excellent.

A video of me settling in to the mat, posted mainly for the sound of the water percolating up as I sank down.

And two videos of the mat undulating, the 1st mild and the 2nd a bit more wild.

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You first see the bog itself through the trees – lots of oak and some pitch pine as befits the very sandy soil – at the bottom of a steeply sloped dish. Most of the bottom of the kettle is a quaking bog, with some open water at the center (and around the perimeter). Here’s a shot of the bog showing the open water edge and, through the trees, the black spruce growing on the mat:

And a shot from the mat, back at where the picture above was taken:

On the mat, Sarracenia purpurea:

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A flowering bog laurel (Kalmia polifolia):

And an especially stunted spruce:

Expect a second post soon with video of the bog quaking (I hope) and audio of the water gurgling through the mat as yr humble correspondent stops and settles (again, I hope).

Yr humble correspondent, gesticulating.

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It went quite well – decent turnout and no one fell asleep. I went through a viv build from start to finish: enclosures, substrate, backgrounds, lids and lighting, plants and, finally, animals. As you can see above, I brought a 16″ cube and (on top of the cube) a small carrier with a Phyllobates vittatus inside. The Ranitomeya ventrimaculata Iquitos Red that inhabit the cube are shy at the best of times; no way were they going to show themselves after a car ride.

Good Tuftian that I am, the slide show was just that – a bunch of photographs loosely related to whatever I was talking about. Luckily -strike that- By design I have accumulated quite a few build documentation pics and they were put to good use. I thought about posting the presentation here for download, but I think for the moment I’ll make it available on request: if you’d like a copy of the presentation in .odp/Open Doc Presentation format, send along an email addy or share a Dropbox folder with me and I’ll get you a copy.  A few of the slide images after the jump.

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Click the flyer or here to go to the main New England Carnivorous Plant Society conference page.

]]> http://hawkdog.net/wordpress/archives/4116/feed 0 http://hawkdog.net/wordpress/archives/4104 http://hawkdog.net/wordpress/archives/4104#comments Sun, 02 Oct 2011 10:23:24 +0000 dr.hypercube http://hawkdog.net/wordpress/?p=4104 The bog garden (construction posts here and here) is doing nicely; the sphagnum is taking off with the onset of some cooler weather, the cranberry foliage is turning red and the sundews are getting a second wind.

The whole thing.

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Drosera rotundifolia

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Drosera intermedia

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Spiranthes cernua v. odorata – blossoms are just opening

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And a couple shots of potted plants: Sarracenia minor Okefenokee Giant fenestrations

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An unknown Sarracenia hybrid

Click through to see notes on what went where.

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Sarracenia purpurea

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Sarracenia rubra

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Cypripedium reginae (1 year old plants, just getting started after dormancy)

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Sarracenia flava (also year-old plants)

They’re either ornata or rubricorpora – I lost the tag on the pot.

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And finally a tribute to Watkins Glen in the ’70s. I was there before the rowdiness got going, but read about it in car magazines. As I recall, burning the bus was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

“The Bog wants the bus! The Bog wants the bus!”

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Info on how they did it is here.

Rather than use a preformed plastic pond, I decided to use pond liner (should be available at any nursery/greenhouse with a water garden section; I got mine from Wentworth Greenhouses). It went like this:

Layout – I used a garden hose to outline the bog. I wanted a teardrop shape; since my liner was 8′ x 10′, I sized the bog at 5′ x 7′ at its maximum. The 3′ extra is to accommodate an 18″ depth (obvious, but…). the teardrop is oriented so that the narrow end points at the low spot in the layout. We’ll see whether I pull it off, but what I want to suggest is a seep/spring that peters out into the grass – I’m going to transplant some Siberian Iris into the drainage area.

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Digging out. A bamboo culm to span the sides, a tape measure for depth readings and a level. Getting the sides perfectly level is less critical with a bog that it is with a water garden – sphagnum will hide some sins. That being said, it’s probably best to avoid pitching the thing like a dang ski jump.

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Dig? Dug!

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Most pond-liner how-tos I’ve seen recommend putting down special underlayment to protect the rubber and if my soil had been a little bonier I might have considered it. It’s not though; I’ve got nice sandy loam down to 18″, so I took the swamp yankee approach – a newsprint protective layer.

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Laying the rubber in place:

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And beginning the fill with a sphagnum peat/rainwater slurry:

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I used 3 1/2 bales of peat

to get it mostly filled up

and then topped it with a bag of long fiber sphagnum (I’ll add another bag if I can find one).

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Voilà!

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Pink Ladyslipper Cypripediun acaule getting ready to bloom.

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Frond unrolling.

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A new-to-me bog. I shall return.

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Update – here’s a link to the spinny version.

Update II – pano taken during a lunchtime walk to a local bog here.

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The commensalism in the title?  Lichens are a symbiosis of fungus and algae. For Sarah, my favorite lichen (because my mum taught me it’s common name when I was about 8 or 9) – a Cladonia, too: