Journal May 3, 2014 - Watering carnivorous plants.

Several weeks ago I decided to try carnivorous plants again, so I purchased seeds for sundews, pitcher plants and fly traps from various sellers on eBay.

This time I did some research on growing these plants, so hopefully the results will be much better.   Previously we simply purchased a flytrap and treated it like a normal house plant.   We did not know that plain tap water would be deadly to the plant and it quickly perished.

For this project we began using distilled water and mixed our own soil using equal mix of sphagnum peat and perlite.  Also, I found that light, light, light, is more important to success than humidity.  To date the results have been encouraging, as the seeds are beginning to sprout and some tiny plants have been transplanted to larger containers.

Purchasing and lugging home gallons of distilled water has become a chore, so I decided to collect rain water which is ideal for these plants.

The greenhouse was recently pressure washed and the rain gutter was blasted clean, so I rigged a funnel, hose and container to collect run off.   This should be easy in our area, as we usually get a lot of rainy days.