Ordered 40 seeds today, 3-18-13, from Flytrapcare.

http://www.flytrapcare.com/store/carnivorous-plant-seed/venus-fly-trap-seed

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I put seed that I acquired from Steve Doonan of flytrapranch.com in vitro on March 9th.  I had written a couple of blog entries updating their growth:
Dionaea Seedlings in vitro Dionaea Seedlings in vitro - Update #1

Well, two weeks and two days ago on August 6th, I took some of them out of their safe little jars and brought them into the world.  You can see a thread I started with photos here:
Dionaea seedlings forum post

I thought that I would provide a little update on their status now that they've been ex vitro for two weeks.  They're doing great!  They look a little dried out, but I'm guessing that this is normal for plants coming out of 100% humidity into 40% humidity.  I kept them wrapped under plastic wrap for 2 weeks to artificially raise the ambient humidity for them and the last two days they've been on their own with whatever humidity level is in the house, which is around 40% right now.

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I put a lot of Dionaea seeds into cultures on the 9th of March.  Most of the seed came from Steve at flytrapranch.com (Thanks Steve!).  I don't know for sure how many seeds I had, but nearly all of them germinated within 3 weeks or so.  Initially I wasn't keeping the temperature high enough, but once I raised the temperature, they started germinating almost immediately.

I replated most of the seeds that were germinating near the end of March.  Then I went out of town for basically 4 weeks and I hadn't checked on them at all during that time.  I came back last week and to my surprise, many of them had grown like crazy!  Most of them are already larger than the seedlings I started in August 2008 and they're only 2 months old!

I did a head count on these babies and there are 109 of them total.  Out of those 109, 4 appear to have the all red trait and 3 of them are very yellow and one of those 3 actually looks white!

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After a few hours of cleaning and sorting the plants...today I finaly planted the tiny dionaeas I bought from VFT shop. There was a moment when I realy hated those plants...after planting the 100th plant I even lost the count.

But when all the work was done  I was so pleased to see all those babies together :-) I'm already very impatient to see what kind of VFTs I planted...

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Well, now that some of my plants have started growing again and some of them actually put up flower stalks, I decided to go ahead and make my second attempt at tissue culture with new explants.  I made my second attempt on February 11th, 2009.

Last time I did tissue culture, back in November 2008, I created the media, gathered the explants and did all of the sterilization in the same day.  It was way too much work.  So this time I decided to make the media one day and do the explant gathering and sterilizing the next day.  It worked out really well!  I made the media on Monday, February 9th and then gathered the explants, did the sterilization, and put them in vitro on Tuesday, February 10th.  Breaking it up into two days made things much easier.

This time I actually made 3 liters of media and each batch was slightly different.  All of them had 1/3 Murashige & Skoog (MS) because I used one 1L packet and split it evenly between 3 1L containers.  Also, each liter had 20g of table sugar.  Other than those similarities, all of the other ingredients were different.  Below is a summary of them.  I used one drop of food coloring this time in two of the 3 liters to be able to tell them apart:

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Well, I have successfully started seedlings in vitro now.  For those of you who don't know what tissue culture is or what in vitro means, tissue culture is growing plants in containers where disease and pests can't get to them.  In vitro literally means "in glass."

On November the 18th, I made my first attempt at sterilizing Dionaea plant tissue and seeds along with s 3 species of Sarracenia seeds. I am using the kit ordered from Dr. Carol Stiff's website: Kitchen Culture Kits.  Basically I followed the instructions for preparation of the media except that for carnivorous plants, the media needs to be at half strength.  The media formula is:

1) 1 liter of distilled water
2) 1 packet of standard Murashige and Skoog (MS)

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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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