I'd like to start a terrarium in my classroom with carnivorous plants, anyone interested in trading CP seeds or plants for a variety of seeds from my AZ desert garden: palo blanco, creosote, brown cotton, chaparral sage, cat claw vine. I've also collected mesquite and shoe string acacia seeds, and I can also get palo verde seeds and octopus agave pups. Please let me know if you're interested in trading! Thanks, Rich

The VFT and Sarracenias generally are best started about now, in spring. Make sure you stratified your Sarracenia seeds before placing them in warm damp weather or they will not germinate. What kind of Drosera do you have? If it is tropical, it is fine in a south window.

Brian, There are several books on tissue culture that give more details on zygotic embryo culture than the In Vitro Plant Breeding book that I referenced. I mentioned it first because it is introductory, and I happen to have a copy of it. I think "zygotic embryo culture" is the technical term for the subject of your inquiry. Many of the books in this subject area are relatively expensive, so you will benefit from learning to use Amazon's Search Inside! feature. You can find more detail in the book, Introduction to Plant Tissue Culture by M. K. Razdan, in Chapter 11 (beginning on page 128) titled "Zygotic Embryo Culture". Apparently you can't link directly to specific pages within a book. At least, I don't know how to do it. But this link, Search Inside! Introduction to Plant Tissue Culture should get you inside where you can enter the search string "129" in the Search box and press the red Go button to get a list of hits for that string. At the top of the list is hit 1. "on page 129" and clicking on that will link you to page 129, which is the second page in Chapter 11. Just use the left arrow in the margin of page 129 to go to the beginning of Chapter 11 on what would be page 128 if it had a page number, which it doesn't. At $49.50, that book is fairly affordable, but it is temporarily out of stock at Amazon. Another good book, Plant Tissue Culture: Theory and Practice by Bhojwani and Razdan costs $370, so there is motivation to use Amazon's Read Inside on it. Once you get into the Read Inside your target is Chapter 11, titled Zygotic Embryo Culture, beginning on page 297. Entering "297" in the Search box is the quickest way to find a link to that page, because it does have a page number. There are a bunch of good books on tissue culture, and tissue culture techniques can be used to culture embryos that otherwise wouldn't develop into viable seeds. That makes it possible to grow interspecific and even intergeneric hybrids that wouldn't grow without using zygotic embryo culture techniques. You might be interested in the Kitchen Culture Kits, Inc. website. Dr. Carol M. Stiff is the proprietor, and she might be able to put together a kit specifically adapted to your zygotic embryo culture needs. MM

I'm not saying this to discourage you from raising them from seed, but just so you will know....you can buy Cherokee Purple transplants in stores. I see them at Lowe's, Home Depot and Wal-Mart, as well as at smaller, local ma-and-pa type nurseries, every year. So, if you think you have to raise CP from seed in order to grow them...well, you don't. However, I prefer to raise tomato plants from seed rather than buying them at stores. I think I get healthier, happier, stronger plants that produce better for me when I grow my own. Mostly that is because I am able to start the seeds at exactly the right time in order to have them the size I want for the approximate planting date I have in mind. I've grown CP and the closely-related Indian Stripe from seed for over a decade and you have to be careful about your seed source. Some of the seed available commercially just isn't the "real" CP. Jay was the first person here on this forum to mention this years ago, so I started paying attention to the seeds I was using, and sure enough, I found I agreed with him. I changed the seed supplier I was using, and found to my delight that the seeds I purchased reminded me of the "old" CP I grew in the early to mid-2000s much more than the plants I'd grown from seeds purchased from other companies in recent years. The seed supplier whose seed produced the real CP for me is Gleckler Seedmen, and I'll link them below. I'm not saying all other CP seed will give you a lesser plant with smaller, less flavorful fruit, but that is what I found in several instances with seeds purchased from several other sources. For a starting mix, you can use any sterile soil-less seed-starting medium. I've used several kinds and find that any variety purchased off the shelf has worked for me. You can spend a lot or a little on a growing medium, and I don't necessarily think that the more expensive mixes give you any better result than the less expensive ones do when you are starting annuals from seed. I usually just buy the Jiffy sterile soil-less seed starting mix because that is what is on the store shelves when I am ready to plant. You can use whatever size container works for you. Starting small and potting up works, but you also can start with a larger container. It is just easier to manage smaller containers if you are starting lots of plants from seed. I usually start everything in 72-cell flats, planting multiple seeds per cell, and then pot up to individual containers once the seedlings have a couple of true leaves. When I pot up, I usually put two seedlings in each small pot (I use paper cups if I pot up while the plants are really small or larger plastic Solo cups if I am behind and don't get around to potting up until the plants are larger). As long as you have holes poked into the bottoms of the cups for drainage, any of them will work. Plain old shop lights work just fine. I've raised thousands of seedlings under them with no problem whatsoever. Just remember that no matter what sort of lights you use, the seedlings have to be hardened off to outdoor conditions gradually. I start with one hour the first day, two hours the second day, three hours the third day, etc. Remember that plants raised indoors are not used to direct sunlight or direct wind, so suddenly exposing them to a full day of sunlight and spring wind often will kill them that very first day. Proper hardening off is a vital part of the process you cannot ignore. A lot of us make our own seed-starting shelves by suspending a shop light from chains on a shelving unit. My first one was just three plastic shelves and it cost less than $10.00. Each shelf was lit by one shop light that had two bulbs. My current unit has 5 shelves and each shelf is lit by two shop light fixtures, each one containing two fluorescent tubes. It is easy to start small your first year and, then, if you find you enjoy raising plants from seed, you always can invest more money in a larger shelving system and more lights as the years go on. I went pretty slowly from using the 3 shelf unit for a couple of years to a 4-shelf unit for a couple of years and then to the current 5-shelf unit. Actually, my first couple of years of raising plants from seed indoors, I just raised them on an east-facing window sill because that was the only place we had direct sun. The house we lived in then was on a mostly shady lot, so I had to work with what I had. The plants got a little leggy, but not unbearably so. The seed company I'm linking below has seed that is true to type. The Cherokee Purple seeds I purchased from them produced plants that produced fruit that was larger and true to type and taste. I had become increasingly frustrated with growing CP from seed because the seed from many suppliers is producing smaller fruit that was not/is not the same CP I first grew in the early to mid-2000s, so I have been very happy to have found seed that produces the Cherokee Purple that I remember. It sounds nitpicky, but if I am going to grow and eat CP, I want it to be the best CP available and the one that is the most true to what CP is supposed to be. Victory Seed is another company whose seed usually is true to type, and so is Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. I've gotten really picky about who I buy tomato seed from because I'm seeing a lot of heirloom tomato seeds producing fruit that is not the fruit it is supposed to be, and that is very frustrating. I think too much seed is being produced without the proper protection and some seed is cross-pollinating and giving us plants that under-perform. I used to start seedlings in very small containers and progressively move them up every couple of weeks to bigger containers. One year I just decided to skip that step and went from the 72-cell flats to 20-oz. plastic cups and it worked just fine, so I no longer bother progressively potting up to bigger containers. I get ripe tomatoes about the same time every year regardless of how many times the seedlings were (or weren't) potted up while growing indoors. The important thing is just to not start your plants too early. If you start them too early and they grow well, you likely will have to pot them up to larger pots to avoid having them become rootbound. If you start your tomato seeds 6-8 weeks before your anticipated transplanting date, your plants will be just the right size at planting time and you shouldn't have to worry about potting them up more than once. If you grow peppers, by the way, you can start them at the same time you start tomato seeds, but you need to hold them indoors a couple more weeks because they do not tolerate spring''s cooler soil temperatures and air temperatures as well as tomato plants do. I like to put 7 or 8 week old tomato plants into the ground, but will hold my peppers in pots (and this may mean I have to pot them up twice to bigger paper or plastic cups or pots) until the night-time temperatures are sufficiently warm. So, often, my pepper plants might be 10-12 weeks old when they go into the ground. That sounds too old, but from plants put into the ground in early May, we're usually harvesting jalapenos before the end of June. I like to have the first big harvest of paste tomatoes and peppers ready together in June, along with onions, so I can make and can oodles and oodles of salsa from late June through late July. Some years it all works out that way, and other years the tomatoes are ready before jalapenos and onions are. I think you'll really enjoy starting plants from seed. I noticed how much thought you put into building your raised beds and how well they turned out, so I know that you can do this. The big secret about raising plants from seed is that it is pretty easy. Annuals, in particular are a cinch, and once you understand the stratification needs of biennials and perennials, they aren't as hard as you'd think. Once you start raising your own seedlings, you'll have so much fun you won't want to stop. The first couple of years after we moved here is where my seed-starting activity suddenly exploded and got out of control because I finally had enough full-sun areas to plant as much as I wanted. So I did! As soon as I moved one flat of plants outside and had an empty space on the light shelf, I started more seeds. I kept doing it until the weather really was too hot for me to be transplanting young plants into the ground. It amazes me how many flowers, veggies and herbs I can cram into my raised beds, and growing plants from seeds makes it possible to grow lots of interesting plants that you rarely see in stores. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: CP at Gleckler Seedmen