The Next Generation of Veitchii

Despite this being a rather miserable year for the plants, I also got very lucky because I finally got to accomplish one of my biggest goals in the hobby: make my own crosses and produce seed. 

    Freshly harvested veitchii (k) x (m) seed

For most types of plants, this wouldn't be much of an accomplishment but with Nepenthes, it can be quite difficult. This is due to the fact they flower sporadically and that each plant is either a male or female, so there is no 'selfing' when it comes to Nepenthes. In order to make a cross you must have two plants in flower at the same time, and they must be of opposite sexes. Not an easy feat unless you have a sprawling greenhouse with hundreds or thousands of plants at your disposal. Usually this means you have to find somone else with a plant in flower to pair up with your own specimen. However, sometimes luck can be on your side.

Stress flowering is a fairly common phenomenon in Nepenthes, this is when a plant experiences a drastic change of conditions or is disturbed by repotting/shipping/etc and causes the plant to produce a flower in a last ditch effort to survive. In most circumstances, it's best to remove stress induced flowers so the plant can stabilize and become established. In my case, my plants experienced hot, dry conditions for about 2 weeks due to a climate control failure while I was on vacation. While this was stressful enough to kill many of my smaller, sensitive plants, most of my larger plants began to recover quickly and push new growth, but it was enough to make all of my large veitchii flower simultaneously. I seriously considered removing all the flowers, but as the plants all were pushing out healthy looking new leaves, pitchers and basals... I decided to leave them and make some veitchii babies!

    Emerging flower stalks on several veitchii

As the flowers opened up, I began crossing them to try and get as many possible grexes as I could. I ended up crossing 3 different combinations of veitchii (k) x (m), veitchii (k) x ('Candy Stripe' x 'Candy'), veitchii (m) x (m) and even a cross of veitchii (m) x 'Cobra' thanks to Drew over at Carnivero.

After you pollinate, it's then a waiting game to see if the cross was successful. You should see noticeable swelling of the pods within a few weeks, if you don't, its likely the cross didn't take. Out of 6 female flower stalks, only one stalk didn't take and was removed. Again, I got lucky and all the rest quickly began to swell.

    Healthy, swelling seedpods!

Several months later and the pods will begin to mature, I prefer to harvest before the pods dry and split on their own which can result in inadvertent seed spreading and mixing if you made multiple crosses on a single stalk. This is the most exciting time of the process as you get to see the fruits (or seeds) of your labor! 

This is where I find myself now, and I will personally be sowing the majority of it in order to grow my own veitchii horde...

Hopefully in a few weeks I'll have another batch of seedlings to watch grow! (Pic of a previous batch of SG veitchii 'Pa'umor, Borneo')

However, due to space constraints and an a lot of very successful crosses, I will be selling some surplus. Feel free to follow me on Instagram and keep your eyes peeled for an announcement, as I'll be listing it right here on the blog under the plants for sale/trade page!