New Hampshire outdoor bog after winter

I’m located in New Hampshire, USA, and started my first outdoor bog last summer, so this was its first winter. It’s a bunch of sarrs and one VFT. I’m happy to report that they all survived, and a few plants are starting to develop flowers.

Since I got the additional plants last summer, they’ve lived in plastic pots in plastic restaurant bus buckets in my yard. I added distilled water and mosquito dunks as needed. (We were in a severe drought, so rain water wasn’t cutting it.)

On November 22nd, I put extra water in their tubs, sprinkled some Bonide sulfur fungicide on them, and put a couple of the Bonide rodent repellent pouches down. I then buried them in a pile of leaves and staked a tarp over everything.

Sometime in March, I shoveled all the snow off, pulled the tarp off, removed all the leaves, and threw a bit of the snow back on top of them.

I wasn’t sure how they fared until last week, when I finally started seeing signs of life.

I plan to improve the bog this year by putting them in a much larger basin, which I’m going to dig a recess for. I’d like to be able to get their roots further down for this year’s overwinter.

Interestingly, my indoor bog plants are having a tougher go of it. I usually overwinter them in an unheated sunroom off my kitchen, uncovered. But this was the most consistently cold winter we’ve had in a few years. Even though they’ve been back under the grow lights since sometime in February, they’re still struggling to wake up, which is unusual for them. Typically, just keeping them out of the windchill has been sufficient.

I got a new sarr delivered in December, so I put that one in a dark, unheated mud room that only gets down to lows of 40s in the winter. That plant is lightyears ahead of the ones that were in the sunroom, growth-wise. Next winter, I think I’ll put all my indoor plants down in the mud room for the winter.