Cold-hardy.com * Gardening is fun!

Growing Dionaea From Seeds

January 20, 2017 tarzan Comments 0 Comment

Buying Cheap Dionaea Seeds

I tried my luck by buying Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) seeds on eBay. As I’ve already found out, it’s not really the best idea to buy carnivorous plant seeds from eBay or Aliexpress. It’s almost impossible to receive the seeds you would like. I’ve learned my lession when I bought Carolina Reaper and Trinidad Moruga Scorpion Chili seeds. I received some seriously interesting hybrids and a nice collection of yellow, red and orange habaneros. Despite my better judgement, I decided to try getting Dionaea muscipula seeds from 3 different sellers. I have bought Dionaea ‘Dark Red’ (10 seeds) and a bag of mixed random seeds (15 seeds) that might be crosses of who knows what from German seller.

The seeds arrived quickly and I planted them on January 3rd. In a bit more than two weeks, first seeds started sprouting. In the pot with red form, the first sprouts actually arrived with a red tint. The sprouts of VFT seedlings from the Dionaea mix seed pack on the other hand all appeared green. Perhaps the seller was truthful after all!

Slightly red sprout of Dionaea muscipula — Slightly red sprout of *Dionaea muscipula*

Germination occurred in less than 3 weeks

I also bought two packages from different Chinese vendors. 10 Dionaea Muscipula Giant Clip seeds from eBay and gigantic pack of 100 Red Dragon Flytrap seeds from Aliexpress. The first package did not arrive after more than a month and the seller kindly offered to send me another package. The large pack of seeds from Aliexpress arrived quickly and I have instantly noticed that the seeds looked different – I’ve been scamed. I opened a dispute and got my 40 cents back. 🙂 I might try to grow the fake seeds and write about what the seller actually sent.

The seedlings

2 weeks old Dionaea seedling — 2 weeks old *Dionaea* seedling

The seedlings grew faster than I had expected. I was a bit worried they would not do well in pure peat, but they accepted it quite well.
I have decided to remove the plastic cover as soon as I’ve seen that most of the seeds have sprouted. Mold was already starting to grow as there were white threads growing all over the wet peat. Uncovering did not harm the seedlings. I was doing my best to keep the air moisture as high as possible. Air humidity was between 40% to 60% during most of the time.

Red trap colour was evident from the beginning

Seeds from Dark red cultivar were showing sings of red coloration from the early start. Cotyledons seem to be a bit darker green, but as soon as the first carnivorous leaves appeared, the red color was evident. Strangely, the pot with mixed seeds should also have red variety, yet none of the 15 seedlings turned out to be red. Most of the seedlings pushed out one true leaf at once, but there were a few that managed to start with two. There was some diversity among the seedlings. Some had thick and others narrow cotyledons, there was one, with only one, conjoined cotyledon, some were more glossy and some had rough edges.

As the young seedlings grow and mature, it will be fun to see if any of them starts showing some kind of unique characteristic that would make it different from other Venus Flytraps. Seller took the seeds from cross-pollinated plants, grown outside in the open, which means the resulting seedlings can be interesting. I hope to get some interesting and hardy Flytraps from these seeds.
I’m definitely going to grow more Dionaea seeds in the future, but before that, I want to go step further by growing Nepenthes seeds. I am trying my luck again by purchasing the seeds online. Wish me luck, I will need it! 😉

What do you think of this post?

Interesting (9)
Awesome (2)
Boring (1)
Sucks (1)
Useful (0)

Using Aspirin on Plants

January 16, 2017 tarzan Comments 0 Comment

Salicylic acid (SA)

Aspirin’s active ingredient is acetylsalicylic acid. It is chemically similar to Salicin, which naturally occurs in willow bark. When dissolved in water, acetsalicylic acid breaks into acetic and salicylic acid. Salicylic acid is a plant hormone (phytohormone) which works as a defense mechanism against pathogens and environmental issues like drought, heat and chill stress, heavy metal toxicity and similar. Plants can also make the hormone signal reach nearby plants by producing volatile methyl salicylate.

Plant hormone

Plants produce small amounts of salicylic acid when stressed. The defense mechanism allows them to fight environmental stress and pest damage. It became evident that there are also other benefits of SA growth hormone, related to growth and plant development. Usually plant response is slow and SA levels are low, which means we can speed things up by activating plant’s immune system by exposing it to Salicylic acid. Possible reason of high concentrations of salicylic acid in willow is the fact that it usually grows in water logged conditions. SA hormone allows it to keep the stomates opened which allows transpiration.
Diluted salicylic acid is helpful when germinating seeds as it speeds up germination and boosts their resistance to pests and infections. Pretreating seeds with SA also improves germination rate.

How to use Aspirin?

As mentioned above, acetylsalicylic acid breaks down in water, making salicylic acid available to the plant. Usually it is applied as foliar spray. I use one Aspirin tablet dissolved in 4 liters of water. Some use stronger concentrations, but I’m trying to keep it safe, rather than burning my plants. I usually leave the water with dissolved aspirin sit for a day, so it can hydrolysate completely. Positive effects should be visible a week or two after application.

What do you think of this post?

Interesting (8)
Useful (1)
Awesome (0)
Boring (0)
Sucks (0)

Bamboo fungal infection?

January 6, 2017 tarzan Comments 5 comments

Temperature outside dropped considerably, and I’m afraid that some of my less hardy bamboos will get completely toasted this year. In late fall, I have taken my variegated Phyllostachys arcana ‘Luteosulcata’ seedlings inside for overwintering. In just a week or so, I have noticed dark spots on some of their leaves. All the plants seemed to have been affected, but the issue seemes to be a bit different on the greener seedling. The darker, less variegated seedling started getting larger spots on it’s leaves. These spots appeared on old and on new leaves, young leaves seemed to be much more affected than the hardened ones. This seedling is overall happy and started shooting vigorously. New shoots are affected, but at this time, it seems like the infection is slowly fading out as new leaves take longer to develop the spots.

Upper sides of leaf surface are holding much better

Other two, more variegated seedlings, took the same time to develop tiny black spots all over the leaf. These are much less visible from upper side of the leaf and hit the bottom side first. New leaves appear healthy at first, but when they age to a month or two, they start getting dark brown. Bottom side of the leaf gets hit first with just a couple of brown spots, eventually, it spreads all the way to the leaf tip and through the leaf to the upper side of leaf. I have cut off all the leaves from the largest seedling at the very beginning, when I first saw the issue. It doesn’t show any issues for now, but it grows really slow. It shows signs of recovery. I thoroughly sprayed all the seedlings with insecticide and it didn’t do much good.

Bamboo grows vigorously despite the infection

When I took the seedlings inside, they all started growing rapidly. All of them started shooting and don’t really seem to be bothered by their infection. Especially the greener form started acting like the super-aggressive seedling from last winter. I keep temperature around 21°C – 25°C, relative humidity around 45% and around 16 hour light cycle. They have a fan nearby, which makes sure there is always some airflow. I will leave the seedlings inside for the winter and keep an eye on them. If they start to decline, I’ll bath them in fungicide, if not, I’ll wait for the spring to come and thoroughly spray them before planting them outside the next season.

Did any of you ever noticed anything similar on any of your bamboos? Hopefully I can identify the bamboo fungal infection, so I can get rid of it before the spring.