Author: Tiong Soon
Date: 4 April 2007
Edited By: David
Allowing your Venus flytrap to flower actually may exhaust the plant and kill it. However, if you have extra plants to spare, you may take the risk by letting it flower and set seeds.
To help you decide, you need to ask yourself the question, “why?” If you want to experience cultivating Venus flytraps from seeds, then perhaps that may be a good enough justification. Or else you risk loosing that plant altogether
One thing to note is the character of the mother plant does not pass down to its offspring and you may end up with a common or typical Venus flytrap after a few years of growing. However, it is known that in some cases, some of the plants do inherit the traits of the parent plant.
The fastest way of getting a same form or cultivar is by division or leaf cutting. You cannot call the offspring (from seeds) the same name as the parent plant, for instance “akai ryu” even though it looks almost the same as akai ryu. All plants sold in the market are clones of the same cultivar.
The first and second day is the best time to use the pollen, as it is the freshest. The pollen needs to be placed on top of the stigma in the center of the flower. The stigma becomes receptive on the 2-3 day after the flower opens. You will know that the stigma is receptive when it splays apart and looks fuzzy and hairy.
Once pollen is transferred on the stigma, it will take about 6 weeks before you may harvest the seeds. Some growers use tweezers to pull the pollen anther off the flower and rub it on the stigma. Many growers just rub two flowers together to transfer the pollen.