Publishing Update

Hello all,

It has been a busy few weeks with the start of this college semester. I've also had a snow flurry of publications.

The book review I wrote over the summer has made its appearance in three different publications thus far! All of which are linked below.

Evangelical Church Library Association

The Waynedale Newspaper

My Bread of Angels book review was also published on the Aboite Independent website.

I'm also digging into the art of devotionals and journalism and hope to see many more publications before the end of this semester.

On that note: the easiest way to keep up to date with me and my writing career is to like and follow my Author Page on Facebook.

Following my social media links will also help me build my career as a writer.

Other social media where you can find me is my Pinterest page and Goodreads.

You can also find these links on the right column of this blog page.When my social media platform expands, I'll continue adding to that area.


Thank you all for your interest in my writing. 

Meat-Eater Monday: Growing Carnivorous Plants by Seed

It is Monday again! This week I'm going to talk about the struggles of growing carnivorous plants by seed.

Reproducing carnivorous plants is easiest by letting them grow and dividing the rhizomes. However, producing fascinating hybrids requires you to grow them by seed.

Most plants are easy to grow from seed. Carnivorous plants are difficult -- at least that is my experience.

After over 8 years growing carnivores, I've yet to successfully bring a plant from seedling to adult. However, I have high hopes for the seedlings I planted last year.

Part of the trouble with baby carnivores is that they take 3-5 years to fully mature and are extremely finicky until then. Mine have always fallen prey to drought, flooding, mold, or too much sunlight too soon.

Hardy sundews and American pitcher plant seeds need a few months of a cold winter climate for stratification. This can be done in the fridge or naturally outside.

Venus flytrap seeds can be sown immediately after harvesting.

Unfortunately, seedlings grow painstakingly slowly. But, I suppose the best way to show this is through pictures.

First off, the seeds are incredibly small.

Venus flytrap seeds

Top: Venus flytrap seeds Bottom: American pitcher plant seeds

 Last fall, I sowed my American pitcher plant seeds and stuffed them under a blanket of straw with all my other plants for the winter cold.

A 4-6 weeks after the weather finally warmed up, tiny sprouts started popping up. The first two leaves are not carnivorous.

 Just to show you how slowly these things grow, below is a picture of the seedlings this fall. After a full season, they are still tiny pitchers. Each plant only has 2-4 pitcher leaves on them, and they are about half an inch tall.

As an experiment (and because I can't live without some carnivorous plants in my dorm room) I'm keeping half of this years seedlings in my dorm room for the winter so they can get a jump start.

A quarter is shown for scale

 I believe the seedlings below are 1-3 years old. There are a few yearling sundew seedlings volunteering in the pot.

Quarter is shown for scale.

 The plants below are four years old. I'm not entirely sure they were from seed, but I suspect they sprouted from accidentally dropped seed. This spring I need to re-pot them into their own "adult" pots.

 Below is a close-up of my volunteer baby sundew. Almost all of my sundews are accidents.

So, this blog post ended up being more of a show and tell. But then, like I said, I haven't had much success with growing carnivorous plants from seed, so there are better websites than this blog to teach you how to do it.

Basically, you care for seedlings as you would an adult. They are just far more sensitive to mistakes and changing environments.

Growing carnivorous plants from seed is NOT recommended for beginners.

Meat-Eater Monday: Flowers

Many people think the attractive leaves of many carnivorous plants are flowers.

This is a leaf NOT a flower.

In reality, carnivorous plants have leaves like any other plant -- they are just modified to attract, trap, and eat insects. To reproduce they flowers in the spring, which look more or less like normal flowers.

Venus flytraps and sundews have the most normal looking flowers.

Venus flytrap flowers

American pitcher plant flowers are far more complicated. They all look about the same but can be different colors, peach colored, butter yellow, to red and any range in between.

Is it hard to tell what you're even looking at?

Hopefully, this label picture will help a little. (There are better-labeled photos is you google Sarracenia flower labels)

So basically, the flower hangs upside down. There are five petals hanging down in the dips of the style. There are five stigmas which collect the pollen. The pollen falls down onto the umbrella-like style.

This flower encourages cross-pollination because bees must climb through over the stigma, which collects the pollen from a different flower. The bee then picks up the pollen from this flower and exits by ducking out under the petal.

Becuase of this tendency, American pitcher plant hybrids run rampant in the wild.

Hybrids are fun because they aren't sterile. They can be crossed over and over again, and you can create amazing complex hybrids.

Every year, I try to cover my flowers with cheese cloth so I can pollinate the flowers individually with a Q-tip. This allows me to cross a plant with the pollen from a flower that bloomed earlier in the spring.

I try to keep a close record of the crosses I make, so I have some idea of the ancestry of my plants.

The petals only say on for about 10 days. The flower is able to be pollinated for about a week before the petals fall off and the flower starts tipping upward. It is as if once the flower sheds the weight of the petals, it can look back up to the sky.

A flower after the petals fall off.

Throughout the summer, the seed pod swells until the entire flower drys and turns brown and the seed pod cracks open. The seeds can be harvested in the fall.

seed pod mid-summer

As a general rule, unless you want to try your hand at growing carnivorous plants from seed (it is terribly difficult) it is best to cut off the flowers before they bloom. This will preserve your plant's energy and help it grow bigger, stronger leaves. Producing a flower takes a lot of energy, and unless your plant is healthy and growing in full sunshine outside, it may harm your plant. If it is too stressed, producing a flower might even kill it.

If your plant hasn't had a dormancy or if you divided the rhizome, cut off any flowers it tries to produce.  There is always next year. Let your plant recover its strength.

There is no greater joy than seeing your big, beautiful plant in full bloom and creating your own hybrids can be fun.