Saturday 15 December 2012

How it started..

Hi everyone,

When I was young, maybe 8 years old or so, I began a fascination with carnivorous plants after watching a tv programme about them. I watched this programme over and over again and I knew I wanted a venus flytrap. Im not sure what it was exactly that I found so interesting about them, perhaps it was the way they looked, maybe it was the way they closed their traps, maybe it was the fact that there is a plant that eats insects out there, or maybe it wa sa combination of all of the above.

Of course, there was no internet back then, so it was a case of my parents taking me to the local garden centre's. Most of the time, they told us there were none there. If there ever were any, there's only be a couple. When I eventually got one, it died off quite quickly, mainly due to me sticking my fingers in the traps to make them close, or opening traps while they had flies in them, or even trying to force open baby traps (I was no older than 10).

Years sometimes came and went before I would get the next one, but my naivety would finish them off. Ironic really considering these were like goldust at the time. Then after a while, I stopped fiddling with the flytrap I had and just let it be. It still died off though. Maybe the conditions weren't perfect for it? Maybe I was doing something wrong? It turned out that the issue was that I was watering it with tap water. Tap water contains chemicals that can harm the plant which killed it off over time.

Then the internet came along and I bought a selection of plants. I got myself a mini greenhouse (one of those plastic 4 tier ones). I got more plants. Started buying sundews (those sticky dewy ones). I then got so many plants that I had to get another mini greenhouse, this was also about the time I got my first pitcher plants.

Then I moved house and decided to buy a full sized greenhouse. With my 30 or so plants in my plastic mini greenhouse's, they took up most of the room, but in my 10ft by 8ft greenhouse, they took up so little space that I considered whether or not the greenhouse was actually worth it.



But over the course of the next couple of years, not only did I get many many many more plants, I also started dividing and repotting them. Something I had never done before. I had reached a point where I realised that I got so many more plants from dividing them, that I could cut down on buying new ones. 

Then, with a combination of buying some new ones and dividing some old ones, I realised I had gone from 30 plants to 160, in about 3 years.

I had gone from having so few plants that they took up a pathetically little space, to having so many plants that I was running out of space. Not only that, but as you can (hopefully) see from the middle photo below, I started to grow venus flytrap seeds. I bought around 500 of them, not entirely sure what to expect, if anything, but to my surprise, many of them (too many to count) have started to grow. (middle pic shows two seed propogators, I have 6 total)



Then, given the interest that my youtube channel had generated with my videos, it occured to me that I could start to sell them. I would have gone from being a kid who looked everywhere to find a single venus flytrap, to being an adult with enough plants to start making a business out of selling them. Assuming I do start selling them, it will happen in Summer of 2013.

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