Drosera intermedia 'Cuba' gets a haircut

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

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.

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.

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, high-quality seeds.

Terrible seeds and chaff, same magnification.

A satisfying pile of seed.

Quite a nice bit of seed, that.

The plants were looking a bit better by this point.

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.

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.

Random updates

Once again, there are a few things I wanna talk about that don't all form a cohesive theme.

First up, I've got some strikes on my Dionaea 'B-52' leaf pulling.

Seeing a leaf pulling strike hasn't gotten any less exciting.

I received my D. 'B-52' from Brie back at the end of September, and in the course of shipping and repotting a couple of leaves fell off. I decided to give them a shot as pullings, and while one shriveled right away the other stayed strong and has finally struck, about 2.5 months later. Really looking forward to getting some plantlets from this little guy.

We've been having a lot of gemmae chat around here lately, and I noticed today that my Drosera helodes seem to be taking the plunge.

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

I think I also noticed gemmae on my Drosera callistos, Drosera enodes, and possibly on my (still struggling) Drosera pygmaea. I'll either need to buy more lights and pot these new ones up, or sell and trade my gemmae away.

In other propagation news, my Drosera aliciae seedlings have put on a bit of size.

A nice number of seedlings in this pot.

This is good cause my main D. aliciae plant is looking really weird. I'll have to make a post on it. It looks like it's got aphids, but I can't find any on the plant. Anyway, I guess you should always try to have at least a couple backup plants in propagation.

Finally, my Drosera intermedia 'Cuba' are forming hibernacula (dormant buds), probably in response to the reduced photoperiod.

Look at that cute little dormant bud.

It's good to see, since they've definitely died back a bit. I think the combination of less light, somewhat lower temperatures, and no food (I haven't really fed them at all lately) is was sent them into dormancy. Unlike with my Drosera filiformis, I'm positive these aren't dead.

It's cool how there are still seasons, even under my lights.