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is this a good life choice for petriolaris?

i was thinking...would it be a smart idea to remove a couple of leaves from a wooly sundew for propagation, if you saw signs that it was heading towards dormancy? or would this kill the plant?

it just seems like a good idea, since if you "lost" the plant because of failure to maintain and bring it out of a successful dormancy, you'd have "backups" via leaf propagation.

has anybody tried this?
 
It's almost always a good idea to try making clones of your plants if you feel reasonably confident in your abilities. So long as you can make the pullings without injuring your plants, I say go for it. I think it's better to take a little extra space and effort to make clones than spend money filling a collection and then replacing individuals when they die.
That said, I haven't tried cloning petiolaris 'dews - I've yet to get the hang of them.
Best luck,
~Joe
 
Follow Joe's advice.
I normally do this with Filiformis and D. x hybrida that are about to go dormant. My rationale is that the leaves are going to die anyways (granted the plant may lose out on nutrients that it would re-absorb from the leaf). However, they always do just fine the next season.
 
Petio leaf propagation was as much art as science - at least for me. Iirc, even in my good weeks, I don't think I ever got above 50% strikes with them - and there were a number of batches of leaves that got zero, nada, rien. The hairless species tend to be somewhat more receptive to water propagation - but all are possible. I eventually got strikes from all of my plants - but it required some tenacity... These are very different from capensis, hybrida, rotundifolia, filiformis, binata, etc - where water propagation is virtually guaranteed to give you more babies than you can handle.

So, you can takes leaves for propagation but you may or may not get results. ???

Unlike many temperate species, which are hard-wired for dormancy, the petios can take it or leave it depending on the conditions & their mood. While growing them, I was particularly unlucky with them entering dormancy. 80-90% of my plants never came out the other side. Thankfully, few decided to enter. One time I had 2 of my favorite plants - 2 D. kenneallyi's entering dormancy. Afraid that I would lose them, I repotted both. This disrupted their cycle. Both skipped dormancy and grew like gangbusters & flowered for the 1st time. :banana2:
 
Ron, I've got lanatas and petiolaris doing dormancy. I think I'll repot them. How do they go into dormancy if photoperiod and temperature relatively stable?
 
Ron, I've got lanatas and petiolaris doing dormancy. I think I'll repot them.
Realize this is sort of a 'Hail Mary' attempt to avoid dormancy. I lucked out once, other times it didn't work...

How do they go into dormancy if photoperiod and temperature relatively stable?
There have been all sorts of rationales & theories on this & I won't pretend to know the answer. Since many people (myself included), have issues with dormancy or just don't want to deal with it, they try to avoid it. Maurizio on CPUK took another tact and grew them outside during spring, summer, fall & allowed them to adjust with the seasons & go dormant & wake up (but brought them in when it got cold). By somewhat duplicating their natural rhythm, he had the bonus of synchronized flowering when they emerged from dormancy. Since these guys are neither self-pollinating nor self-fertile, this was a real boon for seed production. If I start to grow them again. my plan would be to try something similar to Maurizio...

On the blog Marvin references, it is definitely true that grabbing 'clumps' of leaves will yield a higher degree of success. The difficulty is trying to keep the leaves in a clump & not pulling into individuals. Iirc, PetiolarisSean used to recommend taking a razor blade & cutting a plant into 4 pieces...
 
thanks everyone for their input. you've given me a lot to think about. in the meantime, my D. lanata is still alive, but it's leaves are continuously shrinking closer to the growth point. the traps are still developing.
 
I can do the spring thru fall thing, but probably with more limited time, being in Western NY. But there would be a fairly significant change once they were brought back in.
 
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