Growing Carnivorous Plants from Seed

hey guys it's damon here at california carnivores and today i'm going to talk about what's probably my very favorite plant thing to do which is growing plants from seeds it's just so fun because you never know what you're going to get and it's that's how i built my entire collection here is by growing all kinds of new things and then picking out the best ones and that's really how you get the best plants because most of us who are growing things from seeds honestly we're keeping the best ones for ourselves the seconds and thirds and fourths are still really amazing but sometimes the only way you get some of these really special plants is grown from seed but that is kind of advanced planting and i know because plants have become so popular so recently that lots of you were probably kind of new to plants and since it is a little bit more advanced and we've been selling a lot of seeds i thought we'd better show you guys the best way to do it and we've been doing it here for 30 years and so we've really figured out and polished it up over the years what works and what doesn't work so we're going to talk about that here today and the first thing we're going to talk about are temperate seeds and that's going to include american pitcher plants venus fly traps cobra plants and temperate sundews like anglica intermedia rotundifolia filiformis those are all temperate sundews and if you're wondering if they are temporary or not just take a check and see where they grow usually ones from europe or north america are obviously going to be more temperate than ones from south america or south africa so the reason we're lumping these all together in that way is because we sew them all basically the same way in order to have success there's really there's a few things of course but the really one big trick is there's a germination lock on all of these seats and a germination lock it means that there's something special that you have to do in order to get them to germinate if you don't do this they probably won't sprout at all it might take like a year or two to sprout and so it's going to be really frustrating and this special trick is called stratification and that weird word basically means cold and wet so you have to keep these seeds cold and wet for four to six weeks in order to get them to sprout and what i mean by cold is below 40 degrees fahrenheit um you know 50 doesn't really cut it and it can get a lot colder than that like the water can freeze they can get down to 15 really safely maybe even a little colder but they do need to get cold so there's a couple of ways we can do this we can sew them at the right time of year which would be around like january or february around here is usually when i sew them and then i'll just put them outside under the bench all sealed up so the rain can't get to them or the mice one one here we had all the mice come in and eat all of our serocena seeds off the top of the pots while they're stratifying outside it's such a bummer so you do want to keep them all sealed up and protected do that if you do that right around then then usually around march or so i'll take them from under the bench and put a dome on top of them so they're still protected but put them in bright light and then that's usually when they'll start to sprout about four to six weeks later after you get them into the warm and into the light but here we are this time of year and some of you were ordering seeds and you'd probably like to do them now so you can do them now it just takes a couple of tricks [Music] we'll get to that in a second i guess but first i'm going to show you how to actually get the seeds on top of the soil and you do put them on top of the soil there isn't a single carnivorous plant seed that you actually bury which is kind of weird um most like vegetable seeds you'd probably bury about a quarter inch deep but these you don't these are just going to stay right on top of the soil so i have some seeds here that i um collected in the video we just shot a second ago about how to collect these seeds and how to store them i had them in the fridge these are american pitcher plant seeds garcinia seeds i'm going to use these because they're the largest of these kinds and they're also brown so you'll actually be able to see them when i sprinkle them on top of the soil so i've dumped them onto this piece of paper and i like to put one fold right down the middle and that gives it a little wrap for the seeds to travel down so now we need to get them on top of the soil also notice that i've only filled the pot to about a quarter inch from the top of the pot that gives you like a little wall so that when i'm scattering these seeds they're not going to tumble over the edge and lose them you know a lot of times these are really precious and you don't want to lose them i've also been really careful to tuck in the soil tightly against the sides of the pots so that there's not a crack there if there's a big crevice there between the pot and the soil you're going to lose seeds down in there and this is like one of my super pro tips which is using this piece of paper to gently spread the seeds onto here now i'm going to do this at a very slight angle like that and i'm just going to start tapping them and you can see the seeds just start to march right down that little gutter like brave little soldiers oh there went one and you can just very carefully tap them in you don't want to be like really um steep like that because they go oh that was a little too fast i don't want that so you just keep it really light and let the tapping move them on down and i'm just gonna spread them really evenly across the whole pot you know you don't want to overcrowd them if you put them too close together you're gonna have to transplant them really soon and they also encourage this rot to happen sometimes if there are plants are all right up against each other but they can be pretty tight and remember not all of your seeds are gonna germinate which is a really important important point when it comes to planting seeds in the spring when i'm planting like hundreds of different varieties i know that some aren't going to work out that's just how it goes and it's not always your fault it's not always the seeds fault it's just some things work and some things don't all this is kind of an art and a science but it also takes a little bit of magic so sometimes it just doesn't work but anyways there they are that's pretty light here's another one that i've done it could be west thick like that and then once they're on top of there we're gonna mist them another pro tip is you can put like a splash of hydrogen peroxide in the water that you're missing them in um that's gonna help kill any bacteria or fungal spores that might be on the surface and we're just going to mist it and that gets the seeds wet and starts the stratification process so the next thing i'm going to do since it's not the right time of year i still want to grow these seeds so i'm going to take this gallon ziploc bag and i'm just going to take this one in here and then i'm going to put a little bit of rain water it distills water in the bottom of the bag you're going to grow them exactly the same way you would with grown-up plants which is sitting in about an inch or two of good pure water and then i'm going to seal this up and then i'm going to put this whole thing in the fridge make sure you put it like in the vegetable crisper and the very very back so your loved ones don't see it and think it's old spoiled chili and throw it away we've heard of these such tragedies happening before people non-plant people don't always know what this is and of course i've labeled them so another thing i should point out is i've labeled exactly what the seeds are and pencil another pro tip don't use permanent markers almost every employee we've ever had here has for some reason want to do more attacks and permanent markers but this is a lesson that i learned when i was 12 years old permanent markers are not permanent don't listen to what they say if they're outside in the sun after six to eight months you're not going to read those tags at all but if you do it in pencil like this they can last for 20 25 years and you'll still be able to read them even if they're really super faded so you keep that in the fridge for four to six weeks and then that means that they're gonna come out right now it's october so that means they're gonna come out like november december which is not a good time to be planting them outside you know they're gonna know that it's still winter and they're not gonna sprout but you could put these underneath some t5 grow lights and you can do that any time of year i use two of the thin tubed t5 grow lights about six to eight inches maybe about a foot away from the top and you can even leave it in the bag just like this that'll keep fungus gnats out of there they'll lay their eggs on the top of the soil and their little larvae can eat rootlets off of small plants like this so it's good to keep it in the bag all sealed up plants don't necessarily need a whole lot of air in there to make it all happen even after they've sprouted um and they'll probably start to germinate about four to six weeks after you put them underneath the lights it could take longer than that so be patient you know we get people who've planted their seeds like four weeks ago and they're like why are they not johnny on spot on time that's just not how seats work um sometimes like i said they won't even sprout this first year without if you don't do the stratifying they won't spread at all this first year and then weirdly i know the next year maybe they'll sprout so don't give up on them i almost never throw a pot of ceilings away for a long time um and then how long is this going to take right so these are little baby american pitcher plants um i always put the date when i sow seeds so i can remember like how old are these little buggers so we put 12 23 19. so i planted these guys these are little um white trumpets little lucofola seedlings and we planted these the day before christmas eve last year which means they're kind of creeping up on about a year old and this is pretty typical for about a year's worth of growth now if you're growing them under lights you can skip the dormancy altogether probably the first two without hurting them adult plants definitely need to go dormant every year but you can skip a couple when they're little like this keep them all sealed up under the t5 lights and keep the photo period like 12 to 14 hours so that they think it's summer all year round and then that way they'll grow quite a bit faster probably normally if we're growing these outside they would grow about this tall and then they're going to go dormant right about now and then next year in the spring when they grow they'll be about that tall so if you grew them all winter you could probably get them that tall by next spring and then they'll grow again like that and so you can skip a couple years if you do it that way also fertilize these little babies when they're this size they actually have little functional traps their very first leaf is actually a little functional trap but they're not super functional like maybe they'll catch a little fungus knot they could if it's jammed itself in there but they're not going to catch a whole lot at this size so you can wait a long time with not that much growth waiting for them to move but a little maxi fertilizer we just put a quarter teaspoon in a gallon of water and sprinkle the plants lightly with that you can even kind of get them into the pictures if you want to be really neurotic about it it's like a little syringe or something to get them in there and that helps even more but i just sprinkle the whole thing and get it into the tops of the plants and into the soil a little bit and you can do that as often as once a week um we recommend a quarter of a teaspoon per gallon as your dilution rate i've done these about once a month you know they'd probably be twice as tall if i did them once a week but we don't even grow that fast here we're still potting up the ones from last year um but if you have a few at home and you're really excited to see them grow fertilize them a lot that'll make them grow a lot faster now venus spy traps here's a pot of little baby venus flytraps from seed they're a little slower um peter's always said it can take seven years to grow a venus fly trap to what we sell for ten dollars from seed and that's true if you're doing them outside and you're not fertilizing them that can take a really long time but if you grow them under lights like we talked about the fluorescent lights and skip a couple winters they can get pretty big like these would be like five or six year old plants probably from seed if they're grown outside and so we've probably grown them about twice as fast by doing them under lights and fertilizing them more frequently and when they're big enough to eat like this feed them a bug because feeding them a bug is better than any kind of fertilizer it'll really make them grow faster you get a mealworm in there and step back they're gonna big fast um anyways i've been doing this since i was just a little kid i still have plants that i've grown from seed when i was like 14 years old and they're probably with me my whole life it's just something really special about making your own plants um and growing them and keeping them so hopefully you guys have been inspired you can go to our webpage right now californiacarnivores.com we have a whole bunch of different american pitcher plants and venus flytrap seeds in particular and we're collecting those seeds from like our really amazing plants you know don't buy your seeds from ebay you know there's no blue sundews there's no blue venus flytraps but you can buy seeds for those on ebay probably today they'll probably come from china they probably won't be anything close to being a sly chop lots of times there's sunflower seeds or cactus seeds or something weird so make sure you buy your seeds from a good reputable source because nothing more frustrating than going through all the trouble of planting these and having them be nothing or turning out to be something else anyways i hope you guys give it a shot thanks so much for listening

Channel: California_Carnivores

Views: 23,493

Keywords: Carnivorous Plant, California Carnivores, Seeds, Seed grow, Drosera, Sundew, Sarracenia, Pitcher plant, Venus flytrap, Dionaea, Plant, Gardening, Plant care

Id: s7BYnk-NxaA

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020