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.