Drosera peltata complex

There is a native tuberous sundew that grows naturally in my area, I am entirely certain but think they are Drosera peltata.  Peltata are said to be one of the easier species of tuberous drosera to grow.  

They are so local that there is a population of them less than 50 metres from my house!  

I have grown this species years ago, but only ever got 3 or 4 years before they all died.  

Back then I grew some from seeds, some from tubers, and always had similar results.  They did well for a few years, and then my entire collection died out.  I figured growing them long term was beyond my ability.

As these grow locally I figure that the climate here is good for them and decided to give growing them another try.  Hopefully this time I get more than a few short years out of them.

Drosera peltata starting to flower

These used to all be lumped in to species Drosera peltata.  Now this has been broken into several very similar looking species, all within the peltata complex.  I am not entirely convinced that these are distinct species, or if they are subspecies, or if they are merely local variants of the same species, but it really doesn't matter.

These sundews are perennials, but are only above ground for a few months each year.  They have an active growing phase over winter/spring, this is where they flower and set seed, then they die back to tubers over summer.  

It is over summer that the tubers must be kept a lot more dry, otherwise they will rot.

They can pe propagated by seed and the tubers tend to divide a little.  I have not tried to grow them using cuttings so have no idea how difficult that would be. 

Foreground D peltata, other carnivorous plants in background

I am by no means an expert at growing tuberous sundews.  I have grown this species before using either peatmoss or the poor soil that they were originally growing in.  I don't think either of these are ideal mixes for growing them in pots.

This time I am growing them in peatmoss mixed with sand.  There is more sand than peatmoss in this mix.  I hope that this is a better mix for growing them.  

This year I am growing them in a plastic cup with a few holes punched in the base because I only had short pots at the time.  Next year I plan to use a taller plant pot so the tubers can bury themselves deeply.

I have them in a tray of water that is very shallow.  'Tray' is probably a misleading term, I cut off the bottom of a milk bottle and am using that as their water tray.  I plan to let this dry out completely as summer approaches.

Tuberous sundews

Tuberous Drosera peltata

Drosera peltata are not the most effective hunters of the sundew world.  They tend to catch a few ants and moths and other little things.  I still find them interesting and hope that they grow for me.  

If they perform well for me I have a few people who I plan to send a few tubers to let them have a try at growing them.  Hopefully between us we can work out how to successfully grow these fascinating native carnivorous plants. 

Basic Beeswax Candle Making Instuctions

Simple Beeswax Candle making Instructions: 

I sell candle making kits through my for sale page.  I thought it would be remiss not to provide instructions on how I make candles using these kits.  While I am not an expert, this is a simple method that I use.  Making beeswax candles is far easier than you think.  

WARNING: While candle making is fun you will be dealing with hot molten wax, hot items, and sources of heat.  Candle making carries an inherent danger of: fire, damage to property, injury to yourself and others, and death.  Read the instructions, always be careful, never leave anything unattended, never leave children or pets unsupervised, if in doubt please stop, and ring 000 if needed.  

STEP 1 - first time set up

Your mould has come complete, if this is the first time you are using your mould you will need to do two things. 

1) poke a hole for the wick.  This can be achieved using a bamboo skewer or a large needle.  I use a needle so I can thread the wick through at the same time.  Somehow, like magic wax never drips out of this hole.

2) you may need to slit the side of your mould to make release easier.  If the mould has detail that will get stuck, I slit the side using a craft knife/stanley knife.  You will also need a rubber band to hold the mould together.  Note: If you don't think the candle will get stuck in the mould then don't cut it.

STEP 2 - collect your things

Collect everything need:

Weigh out 40 to 50 grams of organic beeswax

Your silicone mould

The correct size rubber band

Double saucepan or some other way to melt wax (NOT on direct heat)

Large needle or bamboo skewer

Baking paper

STEP 3 - melt the beeswax

WARNING: NEVER allow wax to come into direct contact with a heat source.  Beeswax has a low flash point (where it spontaneously ignites) and burns fiercely.  If over heated beeswax discolours.  Always be careful when dealing with heat/fire.

Beeswax chunks, in a pan over boiling water

Beeswax almost melted

Set up your double saucepan, adding the wax to the inner pot and water in the outer pot.  Heat this on your stove top to melt the beeswax.  Heating over boiling water prevents the beeswax from reaching flash point and catching on fire.  

 

I don't have a fancy double boiler, I use an old dish and I float that on a pot of boiling water.

These are instructions for simple beeswax candles, I only use pure organic beeswax.  These instructions do not cover adding essential oils, fragrances, colours, or anything else as that is more advanced.  Gain skills making pure beeswax candles, then you can learn more complex things.

Put some baking paper down where you plan to pour your moulds.  This will ensure than any wax that is dripped/spilled will be simple to collect and use later.  I use a piece of timber and sticky tape baking paper to it.

 

STEP 4 - add candle wick and rubber band

Silicone moulds, wicks, and skewers

During the melt process, prepare your mould.  Poke the wick through the wick hole that you made at step 1.  I use a needle to do this but you could poke it through using a kitchen skewer.  You only need a little poking out of what will become the top.  Silicone is 'self sealing' so won't drip.

The other end of the wick can be tied to something to keep it in the centre, then snipped off.  I tie a knot in it and poke a needle through the wick, but you could use a pen or anything that will hold it in place while the molten beeswax cools and hardens.  I find using a needle is simple and when the candle has set I just ship off the wick below the knot.

Place a rubber band around your mould, this will hold it together and ensure nothing leaks out of the slit you put in at step 1.

STEP 5 - pour the wax

Beeswax poured into silicone cnadle moulds

 

Put your mould on the baking paper before you pour anything.  As you can see above, I spilled a little while pouring.  This isn;t wasted, I can easily peel it off the baking paper and use it later.

Pour the wax to the desired level - most moulds fill to the top, but you could fill to a mm or two lower.  Beeswax usually shrinks a little as it cools.  Make sure you have the mould level, it will be easy to see if it is not.

 

STEP 6 - allow to set

Leave the wax in the mould somewhere safe to cool and harden.  Keep out of reach of pets and children.  You don't want hot wax to be knocked over as it will cause burn injuries.

I leave them overnight, but you can remove them from the moulds a lot earlier if they have set and cooled.  Don't put them in the fridge to speed up the cooling as this will cause your candle to crack.

 STEP 7 - remove your fancy new candle from the mould

Finished beeswax candles

Once the candle has cooled you need to remove it from the mould.  Remove whatever was holding the wick in place, I normally just snip the wick off just below the needle I used at the base of the candle. 

Remove the rubber band, and gently loosen the candle from the mould.  Once the candle is loose you should be able to carefully remove it from the mould.  Be gentle, your mould is reusable and should be able to make hundreds of candles.

Trim the wick to 5mm to 7mm before lighting.  Always light away from drafts, keep on a fireproof surface, keep well way from flammable materials/curtains/pets, never leave unattended while lit, always supervise children if they are near a lit candle, and be careful whenever dealing with fire.  If in doubt, don't light the candle. 

 

STEP 8 - pretend to be humble

Marvel at the incredibly detailed organic beeswax candle you have hand poured.  Give one to a friend as a gift, then stand back and pretend to be modest when they oooh and ahh over how incredibly talented you must be to have made such an amazing candle.

My daughter made this owl beeswax candle (with help)

   

Red fleshed apple tree seedlings

I used to live on acreage and we had several hundred mixed fruit trees.  Now we live in town we only have a small number of fruit trees.  One is a Huonville crabapple.  This is a cross between a crab apple and a domestic apple, and it has red flesh.  Huonville crab is a great red fleshed apple.

I like red fleshed apples, but there are too few varieties in Australia.  I tried to cross pollinate my Huonville crab with a Pink Lady apple in the hopes of a larger fruited red flesh apple that is sweeter and firmer.

I saved seeds from the apple, put them in cold wet stratification until they started to germinate.  I only had five seeds, and all five sprouted.

apple seeds 01/08/2021 germinating in the fridge

Once the apple seeds germinated I carefully planted them in a pot of soil.  Then for a really long tim nothing happened, it was just a pot of soil.  

It seemed like it took forever, but eventually all five seedlings popped up.

Not too long after being planted

Even as the cotyledons were just emerging from the soil, it appeared as thought three have red leaves and two have green leaves.  

The genes for red leaves is linked reasonably closely with the red flesh genes, so there is a good chance that the three red leaf plants should also have red fleshed apples.  The green leaf ones may have red flesh, or they may not, there is no way to know until they fruit.

Three red leaf seedlings

Red flesh isn't guaranteed in the red leaf apple trees, and there is no guarantee that the green leaf ones won't have red flesh. The only way to know it to grow them out until they fruit. 

Apple tree seedlings should have been separated at this size

I should have separated the three seedlings into individual pots at their first true leaf stage.  But I didn't.  I left them to grow and now they are larger.

Growing apples from seeds takes a considerable amount of time.  With mature apple trees you can induce them to fruit by girdling, bending branches, and generally slowing the sap flow.  Seedling apple trees are almost the complete opposite because they are in the juvenile phase.  

The trick with growing apples from seed it to get as much growth as possible so they get through the juvenile phase faster.  More sunlight, lots of water, fertile soil, low competition, and they should produce fruit in the lowest amount of time.

Apple tree seedlings first year

Apple tree seedlings can take around 10 years to fruit.  This timeframe can be as little as 5 years or well over 20 years depending on a lot of factors.

At this stage I don't know what to do with any of these trees.  I should divide them before they break dormancy but don't know where to plant them.  

Perhaps I will keep them as trees, perhaps I will graft them onto a mature tree and have them as separate branches, or perhaps I will do something else.  I wish I thought of a plan for them before I grew them, but I didn't, so now I will have to think of something to do with them.

Lichen Glowing

Lichen has always fascinated me. Ever since I was a small child there was something intriguing about lichen, I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was. It comes in a variety of colours and shapes, some look like tiny delicate flowers (they are not flowers), others look like bizarre coral (they are not coral), and others look like an unsightly mess. 

Lichen seems to grow in some of the most inhospitable, unlikely, and sometimes unbelievable places. Lichens are a pioneer species, often colonising a barren rock somewhere, paving the way for moss and eventually higher vascular plants to start growing. 

Different lichens 

When I was younger there were a few hills that were covered in old abandoned mines. Very little grew in these places as the top soil was gone and they were just rocks and sub soil that had been dug up by hand a hundred or so years ago in gold rush times. Some of these places were covered in thick beds of lichen. I used to scrape some of this off and take it home to bury in the vegetable garden. I figured it had probably liberated some of the rock minerals that may be useful for my vegetables. Now I am older I think I was onto something, on the other hand it may have contained high concentrations of heavy metals and other toxins, I will never know either way.

Lichen often slowly dissolves the rock they are growing on and releases minerals that were locked up and other organisms can use them. Some types can also absorb heavy metals and other toxins and can be used in bioremediation. Different types of lichen grow on the trunks of different trees. For years there has been debate among horticulturists whether or not lichen is harmless to apple trees or if after the lichen reaches a certain density that it can cause any issues.

Some types of lichen are extremely slow growing, while others seem to almost grow while you are watching them. Some can take extreme heat and dry, others can be frozen solid for months with no ill effects. Some lichens are simple to grow, some people might say they are almost impossible to kill. They can be hot glued onto surfaces or even mashed up and painted on to colonise a larger area quickly. Some people paint them onto gates and artworks to give a new creation an aged and distinguished look. I have seen some growing in interesting low maintenance terrariums. Yet you won’t often find lichen for sale in garden shops or online.

Another fascinating thing about lichen is that they aren’t one organism, they are two or more. Lichen is a combination of fungi and algae living in symbiosis, with each organism benefitting from the other. The way they reproduce and disperse can be rather bizarre and intricate, but I am not going to talk about any of that in this post.

As I said, lichen is fascinating, but it gets better. So much better, and that is what I want to talk about in this post.

Lichen glows in the dark but it isn't bioluminescent. 

If you turn out the lights lichen won't glow, they are dark just like everything else. Nothing to see here, move on, they are boring, go do something else. Put lichen under an ultraviolet light and it is an entirely different story.

Most lichens will fluoresce under ultra violet light, different types will be different colours and different intensities. Some are pretty uninteresting, they kind of glow a little. 

Others glow bright orange, or bright green, or any number of other incredible intense colours. Some lichens have one part that is one colour and other parts that glow another colour, others will have one part that glows and other parts that do not glow.

My photo didn't work, this was bright orange under UV light

 
Some types glow very bright under UV light and are incredible to see. These lichens tend to fluoresce under UV light alive or dead. This means you can plant out a terrarium with these more impressive lichens and even if the conditions are not to their liking and they all die they will still look unbelievable under a black light. 

The one on the right glows orange but didn't show in the photo

Another fun thing that can be done is to set up an enclosure for something else that glows under UV light, and include different lichens.

Scorpions fluoresce under UV light, they look amazing and I am unable to capture this in a photo. I would not leave a UV light on them the all the time as over time they lose some of their glow and they aren’t really fond of UV light. Putting the UV light on every now and again when you really want to show them off is fine.

If there are lichens that fluoresce bright yellow or orange or green, as well as a scorpion, the enclosure can take on a look that is impossible to describe but is a sight to behold. 

All scorpions have a sting, but none of the Australian scorpions are deadly to people. Some species are certainly grumpier than others, some are more laid back while others are very fast, and some species are far easier to raise than others, so not all are suitable for beginners.

Scorpions are a fascinating animal, they give birth to live young and the female carries the young on her back for some time. Another interesting thing is that adults and young of many species fluoresce different colours under ultra violet light. 

Scorpions shed their skin to grow. I have an exoskeleton from a baby scorpion I had that shed its skin in the year 1999 or 2000, this will still fluoresce when I shine a black light on it. I think that is absolutely remarkable after all this time. If I kept a black light on it all the time it would eventually grow dim and lose its glow, but still glowing after more than twenty years is just incredible.

Baby scorpion exoskeleton 

The same scorpion exoskeleton under UV light 

Drosera burmannii

Drosera burmannii is a small annual sundew that is native to warmer parts of Australia.   

This species has snap tentacles, which are longer tentacles on the edge of the leaf which flick prey into the sticky tentacles further in the leaf.  These are meant to be the second fastest snap tentacles of any species, and they can move very fast.

Ever since I saw a picture of these I wanted to grow them.  I think they look really cute, plus I found the concept of snap tentacles to be alluring.  They produce a lot of seed and I am told they are so prolific at self seeding that they can become weeds in carnivorous plant collections.  

Drosera burmannii sending up a flower stalk

One day I bought some seeds of Drosera burmannii.  Like all sundew seeds, they were tiny.  

I grew the seeds, the seedlings looked great.  Then winter came and the seedlings all died.  Apparently this species does not handle cold weather.  Not just frost, but low temperatures above freezing made them die.

The following spring some more seeds in the same pot germinated.  By this time I had planted some tiny venus flytrap offsets in that pot.

This time my plants flowered and produced seed.

Drosera burmannii and venus flytraps

The snap tentacles really can move fast.  They do not have dew, instead when triggered they flick up pretty fast and throw prey into the sticky tentacles.

I have a little trouble growing these.  If they get too hot they die, if they get too cold they die.  They are only annuals so if you wait long enough they die.  I have no idea if I could grown them from cuttings, but assume the cuttings would die from cold before maturing.

D burmanii mature plants

That being said, I really like Drosera burmanii.  They are small and cute, but not too small.  The leaves are nice and round, but not too round.    

D burmannii full size plant

Hopefully one day I work out how to grow these properly and I can have a lot more of them.  Until then I will do my best and hope that they set seed for the following year.

In summer I should have a few extra plants available for swap or sale.  I am not keen on posting these just yet, so would be limited to people who can pick up from the Canberra region.  If I do have any extra plants they will be listed on my for sale page.

Drosera burmanii and venus flytraps

Ultra Violet torch

Recently I bought a small UV torch.  Mostly because I want to look for scorpions, but also because a lot of things look incredible under ultra violet light.  

While I have no way to measure or confirm this for myself (and have to go off what it said on the order spec sheet) this torch emits light in the range of 365nm 395nm.  

Anything below 400nm is often referred to as invisible, but that isn’t strictly true.  In small torches like this there is always a trailing off of light to the edge of the visible spectrum.  The 365 emits a dull bluish light that is almost invisible to the human eye.  The 395 emits a blue purple light that is more easily seen by the human eye.  

If it only emitted invisible light I would not know if my torch was ever working, so I find that the little visible light they produce is a good thing.  This little torch runs off three AAA batteries and can make things glow intensely even from a reasonable distance.

Parts of corn stalks fluoresce under UV light 

There are a bunch of things around the house that glow under UV light.  Some plastics glow, while others do not.  I can't work out by looking at them which will and which won't.  Interestingly some white paper glows intensely, and other white paper does not.  Some fabrics glow, while others do not.  Under UV light my daughters' room looks somewhat like what I imagine a fairy princess rave party would look like.

Some clear plastics glow, some white ones glow, and some of the dark colours glow.  Below are some photos of things under UV light as well as under normal light for comparison.  

I can't take photos that really look the same as the UV light looks, my phone alters some of the photos and makes them less bright, but this gives you a decent idea of what we are seeing.

A plastic jewel

Some plastics glow, but not others

The plastic container on the lower shelf looks the same but did not glow

My little pony under UV light

My little pony under normal light

This glows a lot more in real life

The same bottle 

Some foods also glow under UV light.  Some things I would have guessed, such as milk, while others took me by surprise.

Honey under UV light looks cloudy

The same jar of honey under normal light

Peanut butter under UV light

Peanut butter under normal light

Ripe bananas under UV light - not a great photo

The same bananas under normal light

White sprinkles glow

I took the kids for a quick walk around the yard to see what would glow under UV light.  We found something under a log that glowed which I think was eggs of something.    

One thing I found interesting is that some spider webs glowed.  No other spider webs glowed, so I think this one had an egg sack under it.  Once the weather warms up and more things are active I would like to see if all spider egg sacks glow, or if it just some species.  I have a feeling that most do not glow.

This spider web glowed, most others do not

As we were walking past the guinea pig hutch something glowed brightly.  

I had a closer look and it was part of a corn stalk.  I wasn't sure if it was due to guinea pig urine, or if corn stalks normally glow under ultra violet light.  

I noticed something in the guinea pig house glowed brightly

This photo does not show the colour, but the corn stalk was bright yellow/green

Glowing corn stalk under ultraviolet light

I still have some corn in the garden that is standing from last season, so we went to have a look at it.  To my surprise, parts of the corn stalks glowed green/yellow, other parts glowed bright blue.  Some of the corn stalks glow intensely under UV light.  I looked on the internet and have not been able to find any other mention of corn stalks glowing under UV light.

To be honest, I thought the corn looked a bit creepy under UV light.  Blair witch style creepy...

I am interested to see if corn stalks glow when they are alive and growing, or if it is only once they are dead.  It may be that there is some fungus or something breaking down the dead stalks that makes them glow.  I don't know yet but I plan to find out in Summer when I have new corn plants growing.  

Corn glowing under ultraviolet light

My photos don't do it justice

I need to look around and see what else glows under ultraviolet light and take some photos.  I really should also put up a blog post of scorpions under ultra violet light because they look incredible.