FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Two weeks ago, I ordered some drosera burmannii seeds from ebay and sowed them into a food container. I made the mistake of dumping the seeds in one spot, so I gently rubbed my hand along the soil hoping that I spread them out. I kept a close eye on them and kept them on a seed warmer when my room reaches 65 degrees.

At first I was thinking that they won't germinate because I might have buried or overheated them by accident. I checked the soil this morning and spotted these. Are they drosera seedlings?
I hope they are drosera and not some random weeds. These are incredibly tiny!

Unfortunately the pictures are too blurry to tell

Blurry and small pictures, but if you say that seedlings are tiny, they are most likely Drosera seedlings. They are really extremely small and it's more than hard to make sharp photo.
I've made photos of how it developed in a couple of months. If you're interested, here it is.

When they get a little bit larger, their growth considerably accelerates. No worries, just make them live for more than 2 or 3 months and they will be ready to start receiving their own food

PS: I'm growing D. capensis, in their young seedling phase, all Drosera plants look almost identical.

Yeah that's my bad :\ I was only using my Iphone so it's the best i could do. I'm also wondering if it's ok to move them when they get their first trap leaves? Some of them are very close to each other.

Leave them close together, moving them at this early stage could easily kill them

They grow OK even if they are a bit congested. The strongest one usually makes it and the weak ones die off. If you start picking them out, they will suffer and possibly you can kill all of them.

When they don't have roots established yet (until they grow more than 3 carnivore leaves they are practically rootless), you can try using toothpick and transfer some into separate pots - I did it with like 90% success. They did get weaker after transplant and needed a week to acclimatize.

I decided to wait some more and more of these guys are popping up.

Looks like you have lots of sundews growing there! Once they have a couple carnivorous leaves you can start feeding them to help them grow faster, but it's very delicate work.

The plus side of sowing so close together, as has been pointed out, is that only the strongest plants will survive. Some try to keep as many as possible alive, that's up to you really.

Feed all of them as soon a possible with a tiny amount of crushed up fish food. Don't use too much or you could encourage rot. Usually the ones that receive the most regular feedings are the ones that turn out the strongest Be sure to keep us updated!

I started writing about feeding young seedlings. They are growing like mad when you start feeding them. Some of the seedlings, as you can see on the photos are still small. There are huge differences from seedling to seedling how vigorous they are.

My D. capensis are almost 3 months old now, Alba version seedlings quite a bit younger .

I'm hoping I get a lot of strong seedlings that'll grow big. There's at least 40 of them. Many of them are close together so I'm not sure how many sundews are not going to make it. I'm keeping a close eye for any dew droplets on the leaves. I plant to feed them crushed freeze-dried mealworm bits.

Some of the dew droplets look like condensation on the whole plant so I'm not sure about feeding them. How do you know when the seedlings are ready to eat?

Oh and here is my young S. flava I got from ebay last thursday. The pitchers got bent from delivery and kept falling over so I tied them loosely lol. It's growing along with my burmannii seedlings.

You can start feeding them when there's a couple carnivorous leaves on the plant, 3 or 4 to be safe. You want to crush up the food so the particles are about the same size or a little smaller than the dew on the plant. Any larger and you risk fungus growing and damaging the plant. It's very delicate work but it really does help.

Here's an update on the burmannii seedlings 5/19/15.

They're so much bigger now! I can finally recognize the burmannii characteristics. I was able to feed them tiny mealworm particles and kept them from molding by wiping the excess the day after I feed them. I also began making bigger holes on the saran wrap to slowly acclimate them to dryer conditions.

Very nice! Do you intend to transplant or leave them all in 1 pot?

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