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How to Feed Venus Flytrap Seedlings

February 20, 2017 tarzan Comments 0 Comment

Feeding VFT seedlings from the beginning

Seed grown venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) are known as slow growers. They usually take at least a couple of years to reach maturity, which makes growing flytraps from seeds less tempting. If you start feeding the tiny little traps early, you can speed up their growth considerably. First traps are usually way too small to consume whole insects, which means they need to be fed much smaller chunks. I use the same food as with my Drosera capensis seedlings – beta fish food.

What to do about those tiny little traps?

Oral setae on the other side can be used to stimulate the trap to close completely

The main problem, when it comes to feeding the young Dionaea seedlings is the size of their traps. They are way too small to eat anything larger than square millimeter. I’m using wet beta fish food, further diluted with distilled water. I grind larger chunks with toothpick, so they can fit into juvenile traps. Toothpick can be a bit too thick to fit ‘jaws’ of small sized traps, so I decided to use a sheath of my bamboo seedling. You can also sharpen the toothpick, it should do the job just as good. I am using bamboo sheath because it has oral setae on the other side, which comes handy when you have to stimulate the trap to close completely. It is hollow and can hold the fish food paste much better than toothpick.

I use scissors to make the pointy end sharper, which enables me to reach small traps easier and successfully deploy the food. Trap usually closes almost completely, but as it needs to be triggered a few more times, I brush it from both sides with the bristles. Traps usually fully close after they capture a living insect that moves inside the trap. If dead insect or in my case, fish food is used, traps need to be stimulated to start the digestion. I make two rounds brushing the traps, sometimes even more, just to be sure the traps will close. I have been quite successful in doing so.

Digestion

1 month old seedlings growing faster after the first feeding

In most cases, traps reopen in 3 to 10 days. The more food you place inside, the longer they need to digest. There are other factors as well, such as seedling’s health, amount of light and temperature. At higher temperature and higher light level, the process speeds up considerably. A week or so after the feeding, seedlings start showing increase in growth speed, putting out numerous new traps that also get larger. The larger they get, the easier it gets to feed them and larger chunks of food they can digest. As they grow larger, their growth speed also increases, considerably!

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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! 😉

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