Some recent trading

I've been doing a bit of trading lately, after having been out of the game for a while. Got some fun new plants in!

First off, it's my first Cephalotus follicularis!

So little!

I've been overdue for a Ceph. This is a small one, but it holds great promise! This (and the next two plants) are from a trade with David Flocken, who I recently profiled in a Grower Interview.

This is Drosera spatulata 'Tamlin', a well-known cultivar of the infamously messy D. spatulata complex.

A D. spatulata with an actual identity. Nice!

D. 'Tamlin' is named after Tamlin Dawnstar, a very well-respected member of the community who has been in prison for (if I recall) growing small amounts of marijuana. Tamlin unfortunately got arrested before the recent relaxing of the law around marijuana, but he was known as a very giving member of the community in days past (and hopefully will be again soon). I've seen mature specimens of this cultivar that look quite a bit like Drosera ultramafica × spatulata, so I'm interested to see how it grows in.

Finally, I couldn't do a trade with David without getting my hands on a Drosera capensis "Big Pink".

Drosera capensis "Big Pink".

I'm very excited to see how this plant matures. Given how David talked it up I've got high hopes indeed. Getting a good new form of D. capensis is always cause for rejoicing.

A little bit ago I also did a trade around some South American Drosera. Unfortunately, it looks like the Drosera latifolia leaves I was trying to start from cuttings didn't take off.

Poor dead leaf cuttings.

I'm pretty sure that I'm to blame with this. I've been absolutely terrible at keeping water levels high lately, and I think it just got too dry for these cuttings. I've got a scheme for improving success with leaf cuttings though, I'll have to trial it soon.

My Drosera graomogolensis root cutting, on the other hand, has 2 strikes and I'd be amazed if I don't get more soon.

First strike on D. graomogolensis.

Second strike on D. graomogolensis.

Root cuttings are the obviously best way to go for propagating a lot of sundew species, but I'm glad these guys have been so good about it. I can't wait to have some D. graomogolensis – it's a beautiful sundew.

Finally, I've very nearly hardened off my Drosera felix a.k.a. Drosera kaieteurensis.

I think it looks very happy!

Apparently the specific epithet "felix" is currently considered synonymous with "kaieteurensis", which I think is a bummer, because the word "felix" means "happy", which is a great specific epithet. In any case, it seems to be doing well. I almost wish it was a bit less blushed, since it actually seems a little over-lit currently. I'm not too worried though, it's got some decent dew there.

Trading is fun, but it's a lot of work! I've got some space in my collection recently (I've cleared out a few old pots), so I've still got room too expand. There are always more Drosera out there!

A bit of trading

I haven't done much trading lately. I've been a bit too busy to deal with receiving bare-root plants, and I don't have any space in my collection anyway. But I've recently started hunting for South America Drosera (if you've got extra and would like to work something out, email me at sundews.etc@gmail.com), so I wound up doing a couple trades.

Drosera felix is getting acclimated to its new home with a bit of boosted humidity.

Time to get in shape little guy.

Actually, I just looked it up on Wikipedia and I guess D. felix is now considered synonymous with Drosera kaieteurensis? That's too bad, felix is a cuter specific epithet (it means "happy"). Cute little plant in any case!

I also got some leaf cuttings of Drosera latifolia.

Leaf cuttings always make me a bit anxious.

And a nice big root of Drosera graomogolensis.

Root cuttings are much less fraught.

I'm looking forward to these guys striking and growing out, but it'll be a few months at the earliest.

One of the people I was trading with wanted some Drosera hamiltonii, so I decided to take some root cuttings. The roots had gone insane and grown into the pot, and I ended up with several extra. So I potted them up too!

I'm running out of room still.

Hopefully these grow in pretty quickly, since I oriented the root vertically.

In other propagation news, I finally managed to get a strike on Pinguicula "Yucca Doo 1717".

New baby plants!

I've done several pulls of this plant, but this is the first one that didn't wither away immediately. It's just in time too, since it looks like one of my adult plants above it is melting away itself.

Cultivation Guides: Plant Trading

 This is part of a series of posts describing various aspects of cultivation, which will hopefully be useful to new growers trying to solve the challenges of growing carnivores, and experienced growers who are always looking to improve their collection. The full series can be read here, or by topic on the Series page.

Trading is an essential part of the carnivorous plant hobby. There are only a handful (maybe a dozen) sundew species/cultivars that are consistently available to buy anywhere (online or at nurseries). Nepenthes and Sarracenia are a bit easier to find, if significantly more expensive. Pinguicula are difficult and Utricularia extremely difficult to find for sale, outside of one of two beginner varieties.

So basically once you start trying to expand your collection you're going to have to start trading. At first it can be intimidating – beginners don't have much trading stock, shipping plants bare root seems risky, and the plants you receive in the mail usually look all ratty. Luckily, it's much easier than it seems.

I just completed a trade with a poster on Terra Forums who was initially looking for some Utricularia graminifolia (I've had a pot for a while, though I haven't posted much about it). In order to make everything worthwhile, we wound up with me sending some U. graminifolia, Drosera prolifera, Drosera filiformis Florida Red, and Drosera capensis 'Albino' and receiving Drosera affinis, Pinguicula 1717, Drosera capensis Bainskloof leaf cuttings, and seeds of Drosera sessilifolia and Drosera burmannii Giant Red (Hann River, Kimberley, WA, Australia). This was a very exciting trade for me, since I've been looking for D. capensis Bainskloof and D. sessilifolia for some time.

First up, sending plants. Sundews should be shipped bare root, with as much media rinsed off the roots as possible (this helps prevent accidentally spreading weeds or pests). These should then be wrapped in a portion of wet long-fiber sphagnum, and wrapped again in a damp paper towel. This can be placed in a plastic baggie. See below

D. prolifera plantlet, off to a new home.

D. capensis 'Albino' is the largest plant I shipped today.

Once again, D. filiformis Florida Red proves to be popular trading material.

For terrestrial Utricularia it's a little different. In their case, just dig out a plug of plants and media from your pot, and wrap it in a damp paper towel to hold it together. Then, into the baggie.

This is about the size of the plug of U. graminifolia that I started with.

All wrapped up safe.

Make sure to label all your plants clearly with as much information as possible. Species, cultivar, location data, etc. are all important pieces of information for the future owner. Once you've done that, it's time to pack up and ship.

I use the USPS small flat-rate Priority mail boxes.

Non-flat rate boxes can be affordable, but they're less predictable.

The boxes themselves are free, and shipping is only $5.80 for guaranteed 3-day delivery. That's about the sweet spot for shipping plants – anything quicker is exorbitantly expensive, and going cheaper puts the plants at risk with long shipping times. I find I can usually fit 3-4 smaller-sized plants in one box. If I were shipping mature specimens of larger species I'd have to use a different container.

I like to cushion my boxes with dry paper towels if I don't have other packing materials.

It's always best to ship at the beginning of the week, so that plants don't sit around in a post office over the weekend. Also keep the temperatures in mind – plants can be lost to freezing or baking hot weather on the receiving party's end.

When you receive plants in the mail, it's important to pot them up right away. They're probably stressed out from shipping, and getting them settled in quickly will make a big difference in how quickly they bounce back. It's good to have some media prepared in advance.

Looking forward to seeing this D. affinis get bigger.

This media has a lot of perlite in it for these pings.

One thing that I've come to find really helps my plants recover from any stressful situation, be it shipping or repotting or whatever, is much higher humidity. Therefore I now put a plastic baggie over the pots of my new acquisitions. This is also useful as insurance in case the plants you receive were accustomed to much higher humidity than your setup provides – the humidity tent allows them to be hardened off slowly, rather than potentially shocked to death.

I really like using humidity tents.

Since I received 2 leaf cuttings of D. capensis Bainskloof I decided to start one in water, and one on the media. This provides a bit of insurance in case one technique fails utterly.

I've not had much success with the water-float method and D. capensis previously, but maybe this time will be different.

My fingers are seriously crossed for this leaf cutting.

Finally, shipping seeds. Sundew seeds are tiny, sometimes hilariously tiny, which means shipping them safely can be a challenge. My personal favorite method is to make seed packets out of parchment paper, and envelopes out of printer paper. That way there is no tape or glue to catch the seeds, and the tension of multiple folds keeps the seeds well-contained. The fellow I traded with used pieces of rolled and then folded paper and tape that actually worked pretty well, but I still think the above method is the best I've seen.

Super pumped to be growing D. sessilifolia. Ever since I learned about its relationship with D. burmannii I've wanted some.

This is a different locality than my D. burmannii Humpty Doo, but I suspect it will look fairly similar.

Finally, remember to label your plants! Eventually you're going to reach a point where you no longer remember what's in each pot. Labeling will help you stay organized and make it much easier to trade in the future (nobody wants an unidentifiable mystery plant).

Happy trading.

New seeds for trade and sale – Drosera burmannii and others

Before we get down to business, take a look at these Drosera burmannii.

Those wedge-shaped laminae make such a lovely circle.

Yowza! They are really looking great! This is my non-competition pot of D. burmannii, which is pulling through the stress of blooming much better than my competition pot, below.

These plants put a lot of energy into making a million billion seeds.

The main plant in the middle is looking especially ragged – its leaves are half the size they were at competition time. I hope it can pull through! I know blooming is particularly stressful for D. burmannii, and they don't always make it.

On the plus side though, I do have lots of D. burmannii seed, and since I recently confirmed that my Drosera tokaiensis is fertile (and also that Drosera capillaris doesn't need cold stratification), I decided to update my Sales and Trades page.

Right now I've got seeds of 7 different species for sale or trade:

• Drosera capensis typical
• Drosera capillaris (Alabama) white flower
• Drosera aliciae
• Drosera intermedia 'Cuba'
• Drosera brevifolia (Kountze, TX)
• Drosera tokaiensis
• Drosera burmannii (Humpty Doo, NT, Australia)

In the full course of time I'd like to build up even more of a seed offering, since it's often hard to beginners to find seeds for sale. I also intend to start selling live plants soon, but I'm working on getting some propagating done first. If you're looking to trade for live plants, the following would be easiest for me to trade:

• Drosera capensis, typical
• Drosera capensis 'Albino'
• Drosera intermedia 'Cuba'
• Drosera adelae
• Utricularia livida
• Utricularia gramnifolia

 Send me an email if you're interested in doing any trades. I'm always interested in new Drosera and terrestrial Utricularia, and can definitely be tempted by Sarracenia and Pinguicula.

Gotta get new plants somehow!

Plant trade update, 2 months later

Back in March I set up a trade with a grower in Florida – Drosera capensis, both 'Albino' and typical, as well as some Drosera 'Marston Dragon' root cuttings in exchange for Drosera filiformis Florida All-Red, Drosera binata var. multifida f. extrema, and D. binata dichotoma T-Form. Pretty reasonable all 'round, though the plants, as always, looked terrible when freshly shipped. A week later, however, and they were settling in.

It's been just about 2 months since the last update, so let's see how they're doing since then.

I gave it lots of room in the pot to get as extreme as it wants.

This is Drosera binata var. multifida f. extrema, which I will henceforth refer to as "Extrema," since the full name is cumbersome without even being botanically valid. It's doing great! This is the one that wrapped up blooming a couple weeks ago (no I never cut the stalk, though I'm not sure why not). It's got a bunch of big, dewy leaves, great color, and is generally just an awesome plant. It has even had the kindness to divide itself for me.

Check out that color gradient! It's awesome.

I suspect that flowering may have led to division (I'm seeing something like that with my Pinguicula gigantea too), and since that business all wrapped there's been some nice new growth forming too.

The other D. binata plant I got was implied to be the Dichotoma T-Form, though I'm not 100% positive on the issue, and some of the laminae are split, so I guess I'll just refer to it as an unidentified D. binata clone.

The D. binata complex is really vigorous, from all of my experiences.

This plant has longer petioles and is more upright generally than the previous one, but is doing just as well. It didn't flower (which I don't mind), but was already 2 or 3 separate plants when I received it. There was also a broken root segment that I buried when potting up the new plants, and in the last 2 weeks or so I think, it's sent up new baby growth.

Little tiny guy! It's precious.

How cute! And robust! I need to do more D. binata complex root cuttings.

The last plant I received was the one I was most excited about – D. filiformis, the All-Red form from Florida, which is supposed to have very light dormancy requirements. The two plants I received are doing fine, but aren't particularly impressive, especially compared to the D. binata clones.

I wish these D. filiformis looked a bit better. I bet it's the humidity.

Maybe D. filiformis is just a slower grower. I know these two had much less in the way of roots than the D. binata clones did. They have fairly light dew production, and sometimes the leaves don't even fully unfurl before dying back. Still, they're larger, and hopefully with feeding will continue to size up. The one on the right is producing an offset, which might account for its somewhat slower growth.

The smaller plants tend to be really red.

The big bright spot about my D. filiformis is in the leaf cutting that I didn't believe would strike – not only did it strike, but I've got 4 plantlets out of it, the largest of which are more than an inch and a half  (4 cm) tall.

At least the leaf cuttings are looking good.

These seem, relative to their size, more robust than the parent plants. Maybe its the slightly higher humidity – the large plants are in the corner of the tray, which of course has the lowest humidity. Maybe I should try moving them to the other rack, which has higher humidity over all, being a bit enclosed.

It's like the plants grow all by themselves!

One week plant trade update

Last Friday I posted about plants I had received in a trade – Drosera binata var. multifida f. extrema, Drosera binata var. dichotoma T-form, and Drosera filiformis Florida All-Red. The plants looked a bit stressed out by shipping, but I potted them up and stuck them under the lights.

A week later though, they're all obviously getting settled in nicely. All have dew on at least one leaf, and all are putting out new growth.

Drosera filiformis Florida All-Red. Both plants have new growth!

Drosera binata var. multifida f. extrema. Lots of new leaves coming out.

Drosera binata var. dichotoma T-Form. There are also some leaves up above that are unfurling, but I couldn't get the shot.

Feeding will follow shortly, and hopefully we'll get some robust new growth in the next few weeks. I'm especially excited about that D. filiformis – well-established, mature plants look great, and are somewhat uncommon in cultivation. Exciting!

Plant Trading, part two

Yesterday I got home around 12:30 a.m. (I had been visiting my dad for his birthday) and found that my plants had arrived. All the way from Florida!

A charming sack of plants.

Yeah they don't look like much. I'm still getting used to receiving plants in the mail. In any case, I decided not to wait until morning, and potted them up right away. It was cold and I had to scavenge some pots leftover from other plants I had repotted, but eventually the deed was done.

You make do with what you have, but eventually I'll want to transfer my whole collection to square pots.

Back left is Drosera binata Multifida Extrema, back right is Drosera binata T-Form, front left is Drosera filiformis Florida All-Red, and front right is an extra pot I ended up with that I stuck a D. filiformis leaf cutting on, in the vain hope it will strike (the leaf had fallen off in transit).

Getting everything arranged under the lights was a real challenge. I finally moved the Sarracenia purpurea out to join the rest of the sarrs outside, and moved a couple other pots around, but I am pretty sure that this is it. I cannot acquire any more plants until I get more lights. Probably.

This morning I took some close ups of the individual plants. They're all a bit droopy and sad looking from a lack of light and air and water in transit, but hopefully they'll perk up quickly.

D. binata T-Form drooping over the D. scorpioides tray (which now also houses the VFT).

D. filiformis Florida All-Red, with D. capillaris Alabama and D. capensis in the foreground.

D. binata Multifida Extrema. Mature plants fork like crazy – sometimes with 40-50 points per lamina!

The Hail Mary leaf cutting attempt for D. filiformis Florida All-Red

I strongly doubt the D. filiformis leaf cutting will strike, but if it doesn't I can just remove it and use the same pot to start either some D. capensis or D. 'Marston Dragon' plants for a few friends who I'm trying to lure into the hobby. I'll make sure to post some updates once these plants get situated and start looking nice. Fingers crossed.

Plant trading, part one

Trading plants is one of the best ways to develop your collection. I remember when I first started really collecting plants I was sure it would be a long time before I would have enough material for trades, but it's amazing how one can accumulate plants.

This last week I set up a trade with a grower from Florida. He's looking for D. capensis and its cultivars, as well as D. binata 'Marston Dragon', among others. Excitingly, he had D. filiformis 'Florida All-Red' to offer. As you may remember, that's the plant I thought I ordered with my other seeds, when I actually got D. capensis 'Albino' instead. I also got some D. capensis 'Albino' hitchhikers along with my D. 'Marston Dragon'. So it's trading time!

First up, I needed to unpot my D. 'Marston Dragon' to get at the little D. 'Albino' plants hiding in there. This was no mean task. I had hoped to get more pictures, but there's only this one from the beginning of the process.

An intimidating bundle of plants.

After that my hands were just covered in peat and mucilage, so I didn't want to handle my phone. It was sort of stressful, and I was glad when I was done. I got the plant into a bigger pot, and managed to get out that little D. 'Albino'. Luckily there were just bunches of roots, so I got several cuttings to share.

I also separated off a D. capensis typical form to send. It's one of the plants in the background in this photo, from Feb. 15th (it's bigger now). In the end, this is what the shipment looked like.

I'm still learning the best way to pack these. Guess that comes with experience.

I actually wrapped the cuttings and the roots of the plants with a damp paper towel as well before packing it into a small flat-rate priority mail box and sending it off to Florida. They should get there on Thursday at the latest, and should still be in decent shape, though they'll take a bit to get acclimated to their new conditions. Hopefully he's happy with the shipment! I'm looking forward to getting my new plants.

As a brief side note, I noticed a bloom stalk on one of my plants for the first time today. This is a mystery hitchhiker that came in the pot with my Drosera aliciae – in the thread where people identified the D. aliciae guesses for this one included D. venusta and D. collinsiae and D. tokaiensis, so basically I don't know what it is. Maybe the flower will help in the ID. I have a completely unfounded suspicion it might be D. spatulata. Who knows.

This is my mystery pot. I feel like any collection will end up with one.

There's that D. allantostigma in the foreground, looking great.

I'll make sure to make another post on Thursday or Friday when my plants get here. Happy growing!