U. subulata and D. felix flowering

I watched the Superbowl at a friend's house today and ate a truly massive amount of ceviche. I hope your day was similarly fruitful. It's been a week and a half since my last post! I've been all over the place lately. One of the nicest things going on in the collection right now is this Utricularia subulata flower stalk.

Such a yellow flower!

U. subulata is a very frustrating plant. It's got a wonderful flower with a cool zig-zag flower stalk and these weird dew drops at the base of the peduncles. Very cool! Except it mostly produces cleistogamous flowers for me. Cleistogamous flowers form buds, but never bother to actually produce a flower – they just self-fertilize within the bud, then spill seed everywhere. I probably get several hundred cleistogamous flowers for each real flower stalk. Why can't you be better U. subulata? I want to love you!

Another plant that has been looking pretty legit is this Pinguicula moctezumae I received in a trade a bit ago.

I should separate these two out.

I've never really cared for P. moctezumae, but I think that's because it tends to clump (which is not my favorite characteristic in a plant). These are actually really attractive under lights. Also, the flowers of this species are really nice. Someday!

My Pinguicula gigantea is blooming again for the first time in a while. But I'm posting today because it's been doing pretty well on the gnats lately.

It's not good to be a flying insect in my garage.

You can find photos of P. gigantea that are absolutely covered in gnats, which I think is super gross and ugly. Those are mostly grown in pretty humid greenhouses – I just don't have that many bugs in my growing areas. Still, good to know that mine can actually do work once in a while.

My Drosera brevifolia has responded well to feeding and is pretty much full-sized now.

So tiny! Those wedge-shaped leaves are so distinctive.

Gotta feed these again soon. Gonna want to re-seed this colony to get a few more going. Very cute plants! Nice red color too.

I recently took a trip to California Carnivores, where I picked up this sweet Drosera hilaris.

It's just starting to color up under the lights.

This is one of the neater South African species. I've heard conflicting reports of it being a summer dormant plant. It may just be that it is optionally dormant in hot weather. Apparently this one really likes cool temps. We'll see how it does!

Finally, the delight of winter so far has been my blooming Drosera felix. The other day I was lucky enough to catch a flower open.

So. Cute. Oh my god.

This plant is hands-down the cutest thing in my collection right now. Look how fuzzy the flower stalk is! I got another good picture of this flower from a different angle and shared it on my Instagram. I always try to have different pictures up there!

Winter's not so bad.