cross-posted from: https://gregtech.eu/post/15459920

There were a lot of them in the more watery areas:

Guess I'm doing something right.

Image alt text: a butterwort plant mostly filling a green 3.5 inch pot. Its leaves are about 4 times longer than wide. They curl up at the edges, hot dog style. Each leaf has sticky dew drops to catch prey. A few gnats are stuck to leaves. At the tips of some leaves are tiny baby butterwort plants. In the middle is a rising flower stalk bent over on itself. A hint of violet and white petals can be seen.

Alt text: a fly is resting all casually inside a venus fly trap, not moving and not triggering the trap.

I'd just about given up on the dwarf sundew seeds I'd planted. After a couple months though there are at least a dozen small little sundews.

[Image description A very zoomed in picture of 3 tiny sundews. They look like red hairy spikes things sitting on wet green cut sphagnum moss.]

If you look closely, there are tiny hairs with dew all on the stalk.

[Image alt text: a blank white background with the flower stalk in front. The stalk is straight but then curves over to the right point back downward. On the left side of this arc is a closed flower from the previous day. At the apex is the currently blooming flower in profile. It's petals are a delicate pink. The part od the stalk going back down has curled up immature flowers which will bloom every 1 to 2 days as the stalk unfurls.]

This is a White Pitcher plant (Sarracenia leucophylla), East Alabama variety. That tiny little stalk is its first true leaf and it's first pitcher.

Like other temperate pitcher plants, the seeds needed to experience a period of cold, aka stratification, to be viable. I kept the seeds in a Ziploc bag with sphagnum moss in my fridge for 60 days before planting.

[image alt text: A close up view of a 2.5 inch square black pot on a grow shelf. In the pot is a Dwarf Sundew. Its leaves are the shape of elongated rain drops, with the narrow point coming out of its center. Each leaf is covered with dozens and dozens of closely packed red hair like stalks, with a drop of sticky dew at the end. Some leaves have gnats stuck to them and are in the process of closing, others opening. A curled flower stalk is emerging from the center.]

I can't wait to have more seeds than I know what to do with. The original motiviation for getting native carnivorous plants was to help with the fungus gnat problem in my grow room.

The sundews eat a good number of gnats but I think I'd need a dozen or more to actually make a dent in the population.

A nursery episode of Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't.

[image alt text: Two small plastic pots sit in a square tupperware container full of distilled water. In the pots are the pitcher plant and butterwort. The pittcher plant has about a dozen small pitchers, all light green with red staining. The butterwort is a small rosette of pale green leaves.]

Both ordered from Secret Garden Plants on Etsy. I'm very happy with both.

I couldn't be happier with my purchase. Flytrap King shipped fast and the packaging was great. Plants arrived in good condition too.

This photo shows it about 2 weeks after transplanting the bare root plant. It took a week for it to get settled and then it started growing again and even put out a couple of new pitchers.