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Ancient Drosera Seed Project

One of my friends who has been in the hobby longer than I have been alive gave me some Drosera seeds he had stored in his fridge, some dating back to 1993 and possibly older! I decided to give the seeds a shot and put together the setup you see below.

Plant tags, note the D. sp. "Rhodesia", I believe we call it Zimbabwe now....
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So many seed packets!
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This is a temporary setup until I finish working on my grow cabinet.
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Showing off my shiny new LEDs!
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This is amazing! Good luck with this project, Im extremely interested to see how the end results will look.
How many seeds did you put per plot?
 
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Thanks Nem! Each cell got however many seeds were in each packet, some cells I even added two packets of seeds if that's how many I had. I am expecting to have a low germination rate which is part of the reason why I wanted to keep the setup to a 72 cell nursery tray.
 
Best of luck. keep us posted
 
This is great! There are some awesome old-school labels in there. Definitely looking forward to seeing how things progress.
 
Ah... makes me nostalgic. Good old 90s...
 
Did you treat them with GA3 before sowing ? I see D.arcturi in there, even fresh seeds of that one will need stratification to germinate. Good luck with these, I'm sure at least some of them are still viable.
 
Good luck! Can't wait to see what comes up.

Those seeds are older than I am lol.
 
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This is an amazing project cant wait to see how this goes! The fact that you referenced "Ancient Drosera Seed Project", with the year 1993 seems to be the biggest problem you have so far...carry on. : -D
 
  • #10
Did you treat them with GA3 before sowing ? I see D.arcturi in there, even fresh seeds of that one will need stratification to germinate. Good luck with these, I'm sure at least some of them are still viable.

I didn't have any GA3 on hand at the time so I didn't tread the seeds. Honestly there were so many seeds that I had to work with I am not sure if it would have done it even if I did have some on hand! Getting everything setup and sewed took quite a long time!
 
  • #11
Very cool, man! Look forward to seeing how many germinate for you.
 
  • #13
Awesome! Any idea how old these are?
 
  • #15
I had some time this morning to take pictures of the germination progress!
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Some have a much higher germination rate than others so far...
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Will have lots of burmannii!
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Other species only have a few seeds that have germinated
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Lastly, there were a few packets of seeds that had no ID, so I put them together in this cell.
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  • #16
Joe, do you have storage dates for the ones that are germinating the best? IE: how long were those specific seed lots kept before sowing? That would be interesting to know!
 
  • #17
Hi Paul! Unfortunately I did not keep the specific storage dates for each specific seed lot. I was planning on doing so in the beginning of the project; but what I found as I sorted all the seeds was that for nearly every species of seed I had, there were usually two or three multiples with different dates. Since my space is limited to a 72 cell tray, I decided to combine the seed lots of identical species to the same cell, making specific storage data impossible to track. I was dealing with way too many seeds!
 
  • #18
After looking at your labels, there was one name I'd never heard of....who else knew the sessilifolia x burmannii hybrid was called D. x thelocalyxiana?
 
  • #19
I am amazed that such tiny little seeds can make it that long and still be alive. Wow.
 
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