FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

I got some keiki paste for Christmas. For those unaware, it's a mixture of chemicals and hormones that's used to encourage keiki growth in orchids. You gently strip a layer off of an orchid's growth node, apply the paste thickly, and wait, and a baby plant sprouts out of the node. Orchids occasionally do this on their own, but the paste makes it massively more likely.
Does anyone know how well it works on CPs? I know I read about someone doing it on a heli. I'm assuming that the growth-encouraging hormones in most plants are similar enough that this could fool a CP into sprouting as well.

Which CP are you thinking of? Keski paste is encouraging orchids to do something they do naturally anyway, just like rooting hormone encourages rooting, which generally happens anyway but maybe not as reliably. But there are some plants that never root from cuttings naturally and no amount of hormone will make them do that. Venus Flytraps occasionally produce plants on flower stalks so maybe you could encourage that with keiki paste...you could always try. With plants like Nepenthes adventitious buds activate pretty readily, while rooting is the bigger issue. No harm in trying tho!


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I'm thinking of all of them, actually, in different areas. I'm definitely gonna at least try the ones I have.
Definitely worth trying on a VFT stalk. Maybe even in a few little scrapes around the base to see if that does anything.
Nepenthes, maybe it can stimulate the growth of basal shoot.
Bladderworts are just one long mess of growing out of nodes, so I don't think it would have much of an effect overall.
And I'm not sure if/where it would work on a sundew, but I have some sundew seeds coming in the mail. I'm gonna give those a couple months to get big-ish, then take some of them and mess around. I'm sure a few D. capensis are durable enough to tolerate me experimenting on them.

Make sure you let us know what happens!


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Keiki works on Nepenthes and Brocchinia at the very least. I haven't seen any tests on other CP genera.

I have an N. sanguinea and N. ventrata that I'm now planning to bother with hormones. I'm curious; if I trim off the very tip of a beginning pitcher, before it grows past a tendril, and apply the paste, will that do anything? That's a lot of growing tissue. Will it turn into a weird not-quite-pitcher mess, kinda like what happens when you use the wrong hormones in tissue culture and nothing differentiates properly? Will it just die?
They're both reasonably sized, very healthy plants, so they can take me snipping a few areas.
I also have a pair of B52 flytraps. They're dormant right now, but when they start growing, I am DEFINITELY gonna try and get the flower stalks to sprout babies.

I have found kekei paste works on:
Cephalotus
Pinguicula
Nepenthes vines
Heliamphora

For Heliaphora, I rub the paste on the white center growth point where all the leaves come from and it produces an offshoot which you can divide.

My C. "Hummers Giant" has a nice, strong, woody stalk which I apply a pea sized ammount to and it produces another growth point, similar to how it works on neps.

For pings, I rub it on the base of the leaf (still attached to the plant) and it makes another growth point, which you can just pull off with the whole leaf.