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How I turned 2 VFTs into 49 VFTs

Presto

wicked good plants!
Staff member
Moderator
This weekend marked the end of a little experiment, inspired by posts made by Cindy and (who else?) Jimscott. And it turned out quite well!

Back in September or October, I bought a couple of Dionaea. One was relatively healthy for being trapped in a cube, maybe a little etiolated. The other had been in a dark corner of an air-conditioned supermarket for at least a month, and looked like hell. I took them home and uprooted them.

I then completely divided the rhizomes. I pulled off every leaf so that it had its chunk of rhizome still attached. Towards the center, there were little leaves just starting to form. They got their own chunk of rhizome, too. I cut off the traps. I put all the leaves in a small plastic dish filled with distilled water. As an afterthought, I sprinkled some rooting hormone on top. Problem with that was, it didn't absorb into the water as well as I thought it would, so it kinda clumped on parts of the leaves. But I left it, and covered the dish with a piece of plastic wrap, and stuck it in a northeast window. A week or so later, I think I read somewhere that it was bad to let rooting hormone stay on a plant's leaves, so I changed the water to pure distilled.

I neglected the thing, changing the water maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks. Most of the leaves from the sickly plant turned completely brown, and I threw those out. Around mid-November I moved the dish into a lowland-style terrarium, and a week afterwards I started seeing new growth on some of the leaves. I then moved the leaves to a new dish, with a layer of LFS on the bottom and filled with distilled water. I let the water evaporate, letting the leaves settle into the LFS and grow.

I then neglected it some more, keeping it damp but leaving it in the terrarium all winter. This past weekend, early April, it looked like this:

babyvftsincontainer.jpg


(sorry for the slime mold.) I thought, maybe a dozen plantlets. I decided to pot them all up. But as I uprooted them...

uprootedbabyvfts.jpg


it seemed I had underestimated. 4 hours of repotting later...

repottedbabyvfts.jpg


Assuming everyone lives, there are 49 plantlets. From just 2 original plants...mostly from the healthier one. :boogie:
 
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Wow, that's so cool. I'm gonna have to try that sometime :)
 
:0o: :0o: I'm gonna do that. Now. :) Thanks for the tip!

- Jeff
 
Wow congratulations! Thanks for sharing. How well do you think it will work without using a root hormone?

There goes another project to put on the list. :)
 
interesting....something to try with the 5$ walmart VFT....lol! take off every leaf and see if it germinates on its own. :D
 
yea, I got the walmart one and after it recovered, it got ENORMOUS!
Tissue Culture maybe? Either way none of mine are ready to be separated yet. Next winter, however...
 
How well do you think it will work without using a root hormone?

mm, see, that's the part that's bugging me...I had no idea how the whole project would go, so I tried a lot of different ideas at once. I didn't isolate the variables or have any sort of control. Now I want to go back and do it again, but pick it apart to see what exactly made it work. I have no idea whether the rooting hormone was the reason for the success, or whether it had no effect, or if it even hindered them.
 
Indeed, 49 pots would be a pain.
 
  • #10
In my experience, nearly every time I pull a green leaf off of one of my VFTs, it sprouts a plantlet. They seem pretty vigorous by leaf cutting, even without rooting hormone. I usually stick mine in live sphagnum, so that might play a factor. Nice pics Presto. I especially like the last one - such composition! ;D
~Joe
 
  • #11
thanks for the compliments!

Wow.. where did you get 49 pots? XD

I got a pack of 50 disposable plastic cups for like $2 and poked holes in the bottom with a thumbtack.
 
  • #12
Cool thread and Awesome Pics!! I hope you post more pics of these same guys when they take off!
An I like how you made the pots:-D
 
  • #13
Very nice! Perhaps you could make a presentation at an NECPS meeting with those results.
 
  • #14
Great!

Imagine if you could get hold of a nice cultivar - you'd make a bit of cash on ebay!
 
  • #15
Or at the show...
 
  • #16
Great job!!!!!!!!!!!!!

.... oh.... and BTW.... guess what's sending up a flower stalk?! No picture of proof until it actually opens!
 
  • #17
So the real question is.. how many times did you poke a hole in your hand instead of the cup? xD
 
  • #18
I tried leaf cuttings with a green dragon and a red dragon....both didnt germinate...those wheere when I just recieved the plants from an online store which apparent had them in soil for 5 months.

However, I used a 1 yr old VFT with a nice corm size.....took some pieces of the white corm that was left over from cut leaves from last season and put them on peat....it germinated into like 6 plants (from 3 cuttings).
 
  • #19
Varun- just a termiology thing- cuttings "strike", seeds "germinate ;) (someone's bound to correct you sooner or later, figured I'd beat the rush)

That's a cool experiment Presto, I should try something like that too, thanks for the inspiration :D
 
  • #20
Now imagine if you were to tissue culture the VFT. 2 or 3 sections per leaf, one section per flask. Each successful flask yielding on the average of 30 plantlets (wild guess). Then you can reflask those plantlets and maybe again yield 20-30 plantlets per flask. The mind boggles.
 
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