FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hello,

I would like to know if from seedlings you may take leaf cuttings and get a mature plant from 1 year than waiting for seedlings to reach maturity in 3-5 years. Or it only works from plants that are already mature?

Thanks

The baby plants probably wouldn’t be able to handle that stress. So I’d say to wait till they get mature

I mean not just after they germinated but after 6 months -1 year. Im interested in knowing if it’s possible from a non mature plant get a mature one faster using leaf cuttings

a new vft will grow faster from a leaf cutting or a flower stalk strike. young vft seedlings are way too small to even consider taking a cutting. any way around it you will need 2 to 4 years for the fly traps to grow to maturity. i started growing 4 years ago and now i am just realizing i am on a 3 to 4 year plan now. lol so i guess for me i like to watch them grow. I liker the little plants.

Mostly Im not just going to trim off all my seedlings, I am mostly doing leaf cuttings from almost dead leafs with great success and that is what Im planning with my seedlings, I am just curious if from a non mature plant you can grow a mature one from cuttings

yes. i have a whole tray of strikes from leaves from baby plants. re:non-mature plants. and it happened and i didnt try to do it.

So theoretically you can get a mature plant in one year from leaf cuttings from a non mature plant that needs 3-5 years to reach maturity, right?

No. you might get a mature plant a year earlier. But it still takes a long time. I have 2-year-old strikes that are still tiny. I might see some maturity by the end of this Summer. And then again it depends on genetics. There are super-fast growing fly traps and super-slow growing and/or small fly traps.

If I wanted a super-fast performer, I would buy a bunch of typical fly traps. And if you do some research, there are a few super-fast dividing and superfast growing typicals out there on the internet.

And Matt and Leah have typicals as well.

Typicals, in my opinion, grow faster and divide faster than most cultivars... that is why its a commercial fly trap. (although I do have a sawtooth x piranha I got 2 years ago. It had 6 adult plants that I sold or gave away last year. And I have 4 more s x p in pots that will be adult-sized in the Spring.

And, oh, umm 100 small divisions. So some cultivars will go crazy. Maroon Monster and Purple Ambush also divide like crazy.

And if you want a bunch of little plants fast, I'd check into tissue culture.

And you can get the fly traps to grow faster if you feed them, but that's too much work for me.
I think if you get some fly traps seedlings growing, you'll see you can't really cut the leaves off. They are too small. But as they get bigger, you can take cuttings or leaf pulls. I would buy mature plants and do leaf pulls. you have nothing to lose. you figured out how to get them to strike... that's a big accomplishment!

My cultivar is red dragon, I don’t know if it takes long time to reach maturity, and in my country only through seeds they sell so I have no way to get any plant for cuttings

Well bummer then. Where do you live? I am a little jealous you could get strikes so easily. Its pretty tough for alot of people

I live in Russia. They are pretty easy to me. I just put them in moss inside a container and in 1 month or less the strikes appear then I carefully repot to 6cm pots each

What is the light you have on the strikes? or in a window? I have not had a problem with strikes in average conditions, but last Summer just baked the flower stalks I put in the pots.