FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Looks good Dave! Looks like the flytraps are really reaching for the sunlight with their flower stalks

I'm growing some drosera regia from seed and I decided to try tissue culture in addition to traditional germination. They have 26W of daylight bulb in the lid of the aquarium, in addition to the light from the window. The cat's helping.

Just a few pictures.

The first picture is a cool story. There was a spider that had been using a flytrap's trap as hunting grounds. There was webbing and dead gnats in the trap. One day I cam out and the adjacent trap had opened, exposing the spider. Flytrap wins.

The plant in the third picture is still alive two weeks after this picture was taken, but it really crashed. The maroon monsters are not handling flowering well at all. All the other plants seem fine but I just can't get my few red cultivars to flourish. Is there a trick?

Do 4 and 5 look like mite damage? Looks like it to me. I sprayed with pyrethrin a few times, and the damage hasn't gotten any worse in the past week, after the sprays. This leads me to believe it is not mite damage, as mites aren't that easy to get rid of in my experience. I'm wondering if I should get more acephate, but it seems it might not be necessary if they don't get any worse.

Note there was also a caterpillar or something else big chewing on the plant in 4. Not 4's day. Two weeks later still looks healthy though.

'Yellow' (6) is really one of my favorite cultivars. It's probably my second most vigorous grower consistently, behind low giant. I also really love how curved the traps get.

dmagnan wrote:Do 4 and 5 look like mite damage?

Yes, definitely mite damage.

Thanks for the story and photos

Matt wrote:

dmagnan wrote:Do 4 and 5 look like mite damage?

Yes, definitely mite damage.

Thanks for the story and photos

Alright, that's what I expected. Like I said, the mite damage hasn't really spread since I first noticed it on 4-5 plants, which is really confusing. But I think I may have just figured it out.

It is written in several places on the internet (and therefore possibly true) that ants eat mites. Starting a couple weeks ago I have also had ants on my plants, in numbers which suggest a colony close by. The colony might be in one of my pots, but there doesn't seem to be enough for a colony, and I've never gotten a colony in the acidic peat, even though I have gotten several in vegetables and such. I figured the ants were interested in the flytraps for the pollen, which I'm sure is true since they're all over the flowers, but maybe they took care of my mite problem for me as a karmic thank you. Anyways, they don't seem to bother the plants, so I'll leave them be and they might just take off after the pollen dries up.

Well, no more flowers, no more ants, no new mite damage. So I'd say that worked pretty well. I didn't even lose that Maroon Monster. Plus, my first blooms are already producing seed! At rough estimation, I might end up with 500 to a thousand seeds.My fiancee has informed me that I am not allowed to grow 1000 new flytraps, so I might have to sell some seeds.

So, since adding the supplemental grow light, my plants seem to be much healthier. Shorter, stronger looking leaves and big traps. This was a good investment I think.

Also, I got some drosera regia seed a while back, and out of ~50 seeds, only 3 germinated. They came from Heldros seeds, so I can't really recommend them after this. They were in the mail for a couple weeks, and only wrapped in paper, so it seems very likely that they either cooked, were crushed, or otherwise damaged in transit. I tried both traditional soil germination and tissue culture. Two seeds germinated in flasks. Unfortunately, at home in my terrarium, I found small insects were able to get into the flasks, and over the course of several weeks individual flasks were contaminated. I de-flasked the seedlings when their flasks were contaminated, and fortunately they had no problem with that process. So a week out, and they're still growing. Compared to the one that germinated in the soil I'd guess I gave them a few months head start at least, so worth the effort I think.

Ok, as of today I have over 1000 flytrap seeds, which is a little excessive. I can't believe how much was produced, for a limited amount of work. It's been really interesting seeing all this and learning more about it.

The plants do look great and that's definitely a lot of flytrap seed!

This is just an advertisement for flytrapcare, and also for long-fibered sphagnum, I guess. This is the first time I've tried this media, and I gotta say I'm having a similar experience as other people, the plants are really taking off. This was a starter plant (Southwest Giant) I got from flytrapcare 3 months ago, ready to grow for the summer. Instead of one medium plant I got multiple smalls, and this is what they look like this morning. It doesn't even look like the same plants!

dmagnan wrote:This is just an advertisement for flytrapcare, and also for long-fibered sphagnum, I guess. This is the first time I've tried this media, and I gotta say I'm having a similar experience as other people, the plants are really taking off.

That's been our experience with the stuff too!

Wow, Dave, that pot of Southwest Giants looks really impressive now! Great job with them

dmagnan wrote:This is just an advertisement for flytrapcare, and also for long-fibered sphagnum, I guess. This is the first time I've tried this media, and I gotta say I'm having a similar experience as other people, the plants are really taking off. This was a starter plant (Southwest Giant) I got from flytrapcare 3 months ago, ready to grow for the summer. Instead of one medium plant I got multiple smalls, and this is what they look like this morning. It doesn't even look like the same plants!

Thats amazing growing!!

Did you use 100% LFSM?

Hello all!

It's been a long time! More than 2 years in fact, and 7 years since I joined. Wow.

Just getting around to posting again as I was checking out my plants and everything is in happy summer growing mode. My flytraps are happily neglected, I mostly leave them to their own devices.

Several big mite attacks this year, and I have given away many flytraps, in the end meaning my collection is not any bigger than it was a few years ago, but that's maybe not a bad thing.

I was never really good at labeling cultivars, so for the most part I have no idea what they are. By this point though I've been growing them long enough that I'm betting I've started selecting for the breeds that do the best in this Houston climate.

So a new experience for me, I've never actually had flytraps start from an old flower stalk, so that's exciting. I've raised them from seed before so I hope I can keep these alive. Right now they're in with a capensis, which is wetter than the flytraps.

In one of the pics, you can see the survivor of the latest mite attack. I didn't lose any plants in the latest attack, because I have learned to be vigilant in this new apartment. This place is particularly bad for mites for some reason.

I also have a pic of my most robust flytrap, and my prettiest, just to show off.

I'll try to check back in a couple days and check in with everyone, hope everyone's doing well.

Dave

Good to see you posting again Dave! And your plants look good