I made a trade recently with a friend and I got two new clones. They are so cute! I got a Venus Fly Trap 'Royal Red' plant, two Venus Fly Trap "Maroon" plants and two typical Venus Flytrap plants. Here is a photo of all of them in their new home:

The 'Royal Red' is in the lower left corner, the right side of the pot is both of the "Maroon" plants and then the two typicals are planted really close together in the top left corner.  I'm so happy to have new plants!

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I am just now starting my carnivorous plant collection, but there really aren't that many good websites out there. The ones that are easy to find have bad plants and some of them don't exist at all! They are just frauds. Thanks to a few suggestions, I'm going to rate the websites I've ordered from based on experience. If you would like to add anything about experiences with a particular website, please leave a comment and I'll figure it in! Websites will be rated on a scale of 1 to 5. A website with a score of 0 means that they did not communicate and the plants were not received. The websites are in order from best to worst.

Criteria
1) Plant health upon arrival
2) Plant size
3) Shipment speed
4) Seller communication

Websites Ratings
www.flytrapranch.com: 5 of 5
www.kyleskillerplants.com: 4 of 5
www.connerscarnivores.com: 4 of 5
www.bugbitingplants.com: 3 of 5
www.flytraps.com: 1 of 5
www.tropicalcarnivorousplants.com: 0 of 5

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I let all nearly all of my typical Venus Fly Traps flower and produce seed this year. I didn't realize how much seed this would produce! I didn't actually hand count it, but I had to have somewhere around 2000 seeds. I couldn't decide what to do with all of the Dionaea muscipula seed that I harvested this summer. I sowed about half of it immediately and put it in my terrarium. Those seedlings look great now. I considered sending some of it to the International Carnivorous Plant Society seed bank, but they typically have a ton of Dionaea seed. I thought about giving it away, but I never advertised it. In the end, I decided to sow it as well. Now I have what I would guess to be well over a thousand seedlings (I'd say 90% of the seed germinated) that I planted at various times. Below are some photos of the ones I planted last:

In the above photo, I like how they look like they're wearling little black hats because of the seed pods on them.

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I thought I would show some photos of seedlings from seed that I sowed back in mid-August and also some shots of my dormancy set up. During dormancy, I keep my plants on an unheated south facing porch. If the sun warms it up too much, I will keep the windows open, but usually it's pretty cool out there with temperatures between 30F and 60F, which is perfect for dormancy. If you look at the weather in Wilmington, North Carolina (where Dionaea are native to), the average high in December is 60F and the average low is 38F. And in January, the average high is 56F and the average low is 36F. The temperatures on my unheated porch match the averages in Wilmington, NC well.

Here's what it looks like:

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Well, dormancy has for sure set in now. There are a lot of traps dying back on my plants and they look pretty sad. Below are some photos of them.

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My new arrivals -  Photos coming soon!                                    

28/10/08   Ok, today I ordered a swag of venus fly traps from Triffid Park.

  I have bought from these fellas before and have been very happy with both the plants and the service.  All up, I paid $74.00 for the following : Long Red Fingers, Bristle Tooth, Red Piranha, Gold Strike, Cross Teeth, Big Mouth, Pink Venus, Yellow,  about $20.00 of the cost was for postage, insurance and Plant Health Assurance Certificate.

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Well, it's getting late in the year now and soon my flytraps will stop growing. This is a sad time for me, but I know that they must sleep through winter in order to live another year. I'll be looking forward to springtime for the next 5 months or so. In the mean time, I will be watching the seedlings that I have growing in my terrarium which I will keep warm and on a 16 hour photoperiod throughout winter so that they have a chance to get ahead before I move them outside next spring.

My plants had a really good year this year. Spring was pretty late in arriving, so I had to keep them inside until May, but once I got them outside, they started growing like crazy and never looked back. They didn't develop much color until the middle of August, but they put out tons of traps and some pretty large ones at that!

About a week ago, which was sometime around the end of September, I noticed that the new traps that my plants were producing weren't growing far from the rhizome. The leaf bases are short, the traps are very slow to form and open, and the traps aren't getting very big. Also, the traps that have already been produced are turning black and dying off the plants at a much faster pace than the were during the summer. These are all tell tale signs that my plants are winding down their growing season and preparing to enter dormancy.

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Early in the summer it seemed like my Venus Fly Traps were mostly catching earwigs.  As the summer has progressed, they have moved to catching mostly winged insects and spiders.  I snapped a few shots of dead insects inside traps to show the wide variety of insects that Venus Fly Traps can eat.  You will see spiders, wasps, flies, centipedes, moths, and more in the traps.  All of these photos were taken after the traps had open and the insects had been digested.

 A wasp (or hornet):

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This is just a test for right now. I plan on writing a full-blown blog and updating it, perhaps as often as daily, with the status of my plants and any cool things they catch or talk about their growth, color or whatever else I think is interesting about them that day!

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