As I type this hail is battering at the window, Well it has been a little while since I added a page to my blog. My little plants are still doing well and feeding like mad but due to the low light levels growth has all but stopped. Each plant now has about eight leaves and two that have yet to unfurl. All in all the plants look like they have gone into a slow growth phase. I now see the importance of light for them, not that I don't know that all plants need light my ficus is also slumbering waiting for longer days but it does go to show that without light feeding of Drosera is little close to pointless.

On the note of feeding one of my little seedlings has caught its first big prey, a fungus gnat. It is also the first time I have seen all of the tentacles come into contact with a trapped insect and the curl to engulf it. The leaf in question is only approximately two millimeters wide by four long and I am still having to observe any action with a magnifying lens.

The dew on the seedlings comes and goes, some days it is heavy and visible with the naked eye, others it is only a very thin film over the glands only discernible with magnification. This has also let me see that the glands on the outer tentacles are on the side rather than on the top as in the ones closer to the middle of the leaf, I do not know if this is a trait of Drosera capensis and I will have to look into this.

I have seen something the same in pygmy Drosera and labeled as 'snap tentacles' although the ones on the D. capensis do not show any faster movement than their counterparts.

I wait like the plants for longer days so I can again see the rate of growth...