FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

So, I had some really old wild chile cultures I needed to replace over a year ago. Because I was making new media anyway, I decided to try some CP cultures. I did VFTs and 3 kinds of sarr from seed. I’d already stratified the sarrs.

Because I’ve got a Drosera ‘Anemone’ and it’s still relatively uncommon, I want to figure out how to get it into TC. Mine is a bit small to be running tests on, so I am also doing an experiment with some D. ‘Tamlin’ leaves to get the right time for sterilization — the leaves are about the same size, so what works for ‘Tamlin’ will probably work for ‘Anemone’. I tried 3, 4, and 5 minutes in 10% bleach for sterilization.

The CP cultures are all on plain 1/3 MS. For the chiles, I’m experimenting on a variety of rooting and multiplication media. I’m also trying a medium I found in a doctoral thesis to induce shoots on callus — which is supposed to be difficult on chiles (when I tried multiplication media, I pretty much only got a bunch of callus instead of shoots).

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens!

Dang. Sarracenia seeds are hard to sterilize. They were in the bleach for 12 minutes, but every jar of them looks like this: I have absolutely no contamination so far in any of my 12 other jars. It looks like I’ll finally get some cps in TC — my VFT seeds all are clean: Unfortunately, I don’t think my Drosera leaf experiment succeeded — they’re all mostly brown. Surprisingly, there’s no contamination in any (even the one that was only in bleach for 3 minutes!). There’s some tiny bits of green, so I might get lucky, but I’m not all that hopeful: Now for some of the wild chile jars. The plant was over 1’ long (I needed to replace it a year ago!), so I got lots of cuttings. They are pretty sensitive to hormones, so I’m just doing plain MS and one with a tad bit of IBA. Both already have started elongating the buds: Just for fun, I’m trying to grow plants from callus. I don’t expect success, as only a handful of people have done it. Plus, the hormone sensitivity varies a lot by cultivar, and I haven’t seen any studies on the wild chile around here. But I did try a media that had some success in one paper. It’s not like I had anything to lose — I ended up with a stupid amount of callus instead of adventuitious buds last time.

None of my Drosera leaves took... There was no contamination, but they all got killed by the sterilization process — even only 3 minutes in the bleach killed them.

My VFT seeds still haven’t sprouted, but there is no contamination.

The chiles, on the other hand, have exploded. Especially those on media with IBA. For all of you TC guys here, would there be any downsides to just doing cuttings in-vitro and replating them on the same medium?

I’m kinda tentative to try using cytokinins again — last time, I didn’t get any bud initiation, just a bunch of callus. But just by playing cuttings with two or three buds into media with auxin, those buds have elongated into branches with many buds, while also growing roots. It seems like I could just plant-out from some jars, while taking cuttings from others to repeat the process. Does that sound reasonable?

Here’s some pics of some of the chiles on auxin, so you can see the growth:

Your Chile cultures look great to me. I do not see an issue with simply keeping your cultures going on this medium. I also looks, if you wanted to, that you could easily double or triple your jars by taking two node "cuttings" and trimming the leaves back. Even commercially, this is an acceptable increase rate.
Normally, the tips of the leaves control leaf expansion. So, when you do your transfers, simply shaving the leaf tips will keep the leaves from taking up a ton of space (and nutrition).

Thanks a lot for those tips — I didn’t know leaf expansion was controlled by the leaf tips. I’m super excited for it.

In other news, one of the VFT seeds has begun to germinate! I’m not surprised it took a while, as these seeds were selfed and had slow germination ex vitro, too.

I’m now up to two flytraps in TC. The first one is already working on it’s second leaf. It’ll be fun to see what happens! These are my first cps in vitro.

My little flytrap cultures are thriving. Idk when I’ll replate them, but I want to produce enough plants to giveaway. Some of them already have multiple growth points! It certainly seems that they’re a lot faster in TC than outside of TC.

Congrats, those VTFs look good! What types of chiles are those?

Question, did you just drop your seeds on top, or did you bury them just under the surface? I can't seem to get an answer to this online.

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Cross wrote:Question, did you just drop your seeds on top, or did you bury them just under the surface? I can't seem to get an answer to this online.

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Just drop them on top. Works for CPs and should just fine for other plant seeds. If you want the seedling’s root to grow, make sure the media is super soft. Around 3 grams agar in a liter. I think no sugar when they’re sprouting might be good too

Copper2 wrote:Congrats, those VTFs look good! What types of chiles are those?

Thanks! I’m looking forward to growing these guys out and seeing how they do.

The chiles are all a single clone of the wild chile that grows here — C. annum var. glabriusculum, also called tepin or pequin. They’re very nice plants: while the chiles are tiny, the plants are perennials that can literally be 4-5’ tall and get covered in hundreds of chiles. They’ve got a very nice flavor.

Cross wrote:Question, did you just drop your seeds on top, or did you bury them just under the surface? I can't seem to get an answer to this online.

The seeds were sitting on top of the media. The plants that are buried are buried because one or two jars tipped over and the agar slid around, submerging the seeds.