Tips for Growing Pitcher Plants From Seeds

Hi! My name is Wes on behalf of expertvillage.com and in this video segment I am going to talk to you about propagating your sarracenias from seeds. If you want to know more about carnivorous plants, you can visit us at equilibriocarnivorousplants.com. So in the spring the sarracenias produce a flower structure like this. This is a dead dried flower structure but after this flower has been pollinated, they then produce seeds that take usually all summer long to produce the seeds. Right here we have a seed pod that is full of seeds. Each flower should produce hundreds of seeds so when we are propagating from seeds, we take the dried flower, you are going to empty it over a piece of paper so that you keep track of all its seeds. As you can see here, this flower is just absolutely full of seeds. You want to keep track of all the seeds that you can because each one of these seeds potentially can grow a new plant especially in cultivation where you have controlled environment. You can get a new plant from almost every single one of these seeds. So we are going to go ahead and start potting up a few pots with our potting soil, peat moss and pearl light mixture and we are going to sprinkle a few seeds on top of each one of these pots and you want to be careful when doing this because you want to get maybe a dozen seeds per pot. Some of these seeds won’t take but most of them probably will and you can have multiple seedlings growing in each pot. Once you’ve done this, you need to put these plants, these seeds rather, through a period of cold stratification. You can refer to cold stratification in our introduction to growing carnivorous plants videos on the Expert Village website. After these plants go through the period of cold stratification, they will start to grow and you will get small little seedlings like this sarracenia here. This has been growing for about 10 months and this is what the small little baby sarracenias look like.