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Radagast

NECPS Editor
Hey Folks,

Before I decided to post and ask for help I've attempted to do lots of searching, homework, and cannot come up with an explanation for this.

About a week ago I woke up one morning and went in to check on my plants (I have my collection on a grow rack. Mainly sub-tropical Drosera. Temps range from 60's to upper 80's, sometimes hitting low 90s. % humidity ranges from 40-70. The plants are about 8-10 inches away from a 4 bulb T5HO fixture. I grow them all in the same water tray that I keep filled with roughly 1/2 inch of water. See my grow list for the species I have currently in the tray. I feed them once every 2 weeks w/ rehydrated blood worms).

Well...That morning every plant in the tray looked great except my Drosera spatulata. My Drosera spatulata was a clump of 2 spatulatas and had been sending up several flower stalks, and it always looked dewy and awesome. It was my first CP and I've had it since this past April. The plant appeared to have lost ALL of its dew and the tentacles were curled inward. I noticed there is a tiny Drosera seedling to the side of the plant. I have not seen any insects or anything out of the ordinary that would indicate a problem.

Anybody have any ideas? I can provide a pic if necessary. ALL of the other Drosera look great.
 
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I don't know. D. spatulata is a weird plant for me. Especially after flowering.
 
D. spatulata is typically an annual if I'm not mistaken, or at least there certainly are many annual spatulatas out there. Seeing as it's been around now for over a year, it's time might be up. If that's not the case, it also could be flowering, which tends to suck energy out of the plant and can cause dew loss, but my money's on the first option.
 
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Yeah, D. spatulata can poop out by flowering. One thing that can help is if you feed it heavily while it's flowering, but definitely collect the seed and re-sow it on your media. You'll probably have new plants within a couple weeks. I actually had a plant sprout up in a pot I had taken off the tray and which was drying out since the mother plant died. That was 5 months ago and now the seedling is blooming itself. It's definitely a weed!
 
D. spatulata and D. tokaiensis both do tend to randomly die off, usually after flowering but sometimes for no reason at all. A little TLC and some fresh soil can bring the original plants back, though, and they will live for years if done right.
 
Ok thanks everyone. Your input has made me feel like I'm not such a failure lol. My thought was "if I can't handle spatulata I may as well quit."

I'll keep an eye on it, maybe transplant it into pure dead LFS or fresh media of peat-perlite. I'll take care of the seedling growing next to it. I did manage to harvest a tiny amount of seeds so perhaps I'll attempt to germinate those.
 
I noticed the same thing with mine right before it sent up a flower stalk. It lost probably 80-90% of it's dew for about 4 days, just as the stalk was forming. Once the stalk started growing, the dew came back. ???
 
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My Drosera x tokaiensis just dropped dead over the winter for no reason. I've also noticed loss of dew randomly.

At any rate, Bio is right. Drosera spatulata is definitely a weird plant.
 
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