u/Berberis

Kinda neat to see how much it's grown in a year. I even put it through a winter dormancy, too.

I’ve had this b52 under this 5 dollar ring light for a few months. It’s doing pretty well! It’s about 250 PPFD, which is on the low end of great.

I don’t have the link anymore (it’s no longer listed on Ali express), but it is 8w and advertised as a plant grow light. It’s got a built in timer and is USB powered. You can find similar ones on Amazon for under 10 bucks.

Anyway- you don’t need to blast VFTs with light (and in my experience they don’t like it- they grow much better at 250-350 ppfd than >500. 2000 is full sun, for reference).

Anyway- I had some folks that expressed skepticism that this light would work last time I posted the light meter reading. Hopefully this shows it’s an acceptable option, especially for someone who only has a single flytrap and doesn’t want to invest in a fancy setup. They make great gifts!

Just doing some repotting today- this beast was deforming the 2.5” pot I had it in.

Growth conditions: pure peat, 250 ppfd light at a 2:1 ratio of red to blue photons, 16h a day light, my nutricote in the traps and soil feeding method.

I last repotted it 3 months ago (Feb) and it was a single large rhizome at that time, just starting to make new divisions.

I am currently growing about 1,000 Chinese Dumpling clones (from TC- you can buy them in my shop, Phamcliff.com), and one of them has a crazy symmetry-breaking phenotype: wildtype cilia on one side, dumpling cilia on the other. You can even see it in the young trap emerging in the second pic!

My guess is that it's a chimeric mutation in the shoot apical meristem, which is not generally stable. But hey, if it is stable, it'll be a tight clone. 'Two face', or "Jeckyll and Hyde' would be sweet names, hah.

Some D. capensis 'red form' in the back too, planted at the same time.

Grown under low light (238 PPFD, I just measured it) and high fertilization in pure peat, as is my normal approach.

I think people tend to over-estimate the light needs of most of our carnivorous plants, and of course, most under-fertilize them.

Hey folks, I am running a sale through Sunday on D. Muscipula 'Big Mouth', get 2 for the price of 1 (that's just 5 bucks each if you get the small size).

It's a really vigorous, pretty clone- as you can see, it's overgrowing my nursery trays! These were maybe 1/2 as big 3 weeks ago, they're crushing growth.

You can order at my website Phamcliff.com, happy to toss in a small bag of nutricote for free (what I'm best known for here, other than saying dormancy is not required in VFTs) if you mention it in the order.