Friday, January 16, 2015

Drosera intermedia 'Cuba' gets a haircut

My Drosera intermedia 'Cuba' have been looking a bit messy since they went dormant.

Drosera intermedia 'Cuba' dormant plants
Dormant sundews aren't particularly handsome, especially not covered in dead leaves.
There's also a lot of seed in there waiting to be harvested. I started off trimming the flower stalks.

Dorsera intermedia 'Cuba' flower stalks.
There ended up being a lot of flower stalks.
D. intermedia 'Cuba' seed pods hold their seeds fairly securely, so I had to pinch and roll a bit to get the seed out. This left a bit of a mess.

Dorsera intermedia 'Cuba' seed harvesting.
Messy messy.
I used a wire mesh strainer to get the big bits out, and then I used the cleaning method I covered in this post to separate the high-quality seeds from the low-quality seeds and other chaff.

Good Dorsera intermedia 'Cuba' seed.
Good, high-quality seeds.
Bad Dorsera intermedia 'Cuba' seed.
Terrible seeds and chaff, same magnification.
Lots of Dorsera intermedia 'Cuba' seed.
A satisfying pile of seed.
Quite a nice bit of seed, that.

The plants were looking a bit better by this point.

Dorsera intermedia 'Cuba' getting trimmed.
Almost there...
But I still wanted to get rid of all of those dead leaves. A bit of (careful) scissor work later, and they look positively military.

Dorsera intermedia 'Cuba' hibernacula.
Nice and freshly-trimmed.
There's even one waking up on the bottom left of this picture. I'm going to donate at least one pot of these guys to the BACPS raffle, if only to make more room in my collection.

3 comments:

  1. Aww, they are awfully cute when cleaned up. That slightly awkward fresh haircut look!

    Did you pollinate the flowers to get seed or just left them alone?

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    Replies
    1. D. intermedia 'Cuba' readily self-pollinates. I'll be bringing some seed to the next BACPS meeting, along with at least one pot, if you're interested!

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    2. I work on Saturday :( but I'll soon have weekends off! Looking forward to finally attending the meetings!

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