FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

So I've had this seedgrown Burmannii "Giant Red" from Kimberly Au for some time, but while it produces copious amounts of flowers, the seed pods just sorta shrivel up and die after blooming, with no seeds. I have it with the rest of my tropical sundews under lights, and most of my other dew's have no problem seeding so I'm quite worried at this, especially since I only managed to raise one seedling of this plant to adulthood out of ~50 seeds.

Two quick thoughts.
Is it possible that it is a hybrid, and a sterile one at that?
Did you try feeding it?
My burmanniis live longer and produce much more seed when they're well fed.

That's my two cents worth.

Good growing,
Mike

Could you give us pictures? It would probably be easy to tell if it was a hybrid or not with pictures. Burmannii have a very distinct shape.

I second Shadowtski's thought for feeding your sundew. I feed my drosera sessifolia and burmannii seedlings copiously almost every week. They respond with tons of flower stalks and plump seed pods.

Heres a picture, I'm pretty sure it's a pure burmannii, and it has the trigger hairs at the end of the leaves that Ik D.Burmannii usually have.

I also try to feed it with betta fish food every other week, but the flowers never seem to swell up. Could it be self incompatible?

What are your conditions? The fact that only one out of 50 seeds survived to flowering size seems to mean that something is up.

Its with the rest of my tropicals/subtropicals, under LED Lights and sitting in aprox~1-4 inches of snowmelt water I have left over from last winter. I originally had 8 or so germinate but only one survived, possibly because I only started feeding the seedling until after 2-3 of them had died. Imo, if my other subtropicals are doing just fine there shouldn't be much of a problem in the lights or water. The soil is pure LFSM.

Sometimes they just don't produce seeds. I've had D capillaris put up stalks and not seed then a few months later the same plant makes seeds. My D. madagascariensis just flowered and made zero seeds and I know for a fact they are self fertile.
Or it could just be a sterile plant. It happens.

KategoricalKarnivore wrote: Or it could just be a sterile plant. It happens.

That would suck, considering its a burmannii. Been hoping to get more seeds from this guy since he started flowering 3 months ago, but alas, the flowers just shrivel up.

Its also not as red as I thought it would be, especially compared to
from the same location.

Needs more light and less food and it should get red.

Well I might feed it less if it WOULD JUST FREAKIN SET SEED ALREADY.
I'm constantly worried that this plant is going to die on me, especially since it took some digging to find a seller for this specific form.

In nature, the plant is an annual so if you want it to survive past flowering, you must feed it regularly. No need to overdo it - just crush a betta pellet or some other form of food over one or two leaves a week, depending on how quickly it puts out new leaves. The plant should be self-fertile, i would just keep on persisting until you get some seed.

That's what I have been doing for the past 6 months, but since it started flowering this spring, it's never once set seed out of over 10 flower stalks. It's quite literally growing a new flower stalk every other week.