Carnivorous plants....

Originally Posted by Outcast

Nice collection Rich. I am hoping to add some pitchers and sundews to my collection soon. I plan on building a nice sized bog outside in the near future. The issue will then be getting the necessary distilled water, since rain is rather difficult to come by out here in the desert, and the water from our well is high in sulfur, salts and other solutes.

We have a small water distiller that we are using, but lately rain hasn't been a problem. This is normally the dry season around here, but we're getting rain every day. I've got another tub sitting out just to catch rain water so we can store it in bottles. I want to set up a second mini-bog, but want to see how the first one does before setting up a second one. I sure as heck don't want to kill the plants trying to figure out how to work with them.

Originally Posted by steve roylance

These plants are like a vegetarians worse nightmare!!!

Yeah..... now if I can only get them big enough to take on squirrels....

Maybe I can graft them to kudzu.

Here's pics of the two original flytraps that are out in the mini-bog exposed to full sun most of the day.





I'm leaving them there so I can see what happens. Maybe they'll bounce back and the new growth will be better able to withstand the sunlight.

Here's a pic of the mini-bog Connie and I set up. Nothing fancy, to be sure.



The two sundews there look like they are doing just fine, I guess..





Of the newer flytraps that got burned from that half day of full sun, these look the worse for wear.





Of course the largest of the bunch was one that got really zapped by the sunlight. But hopefully they will bounce back for me.

Originally Posted by Rich Z

Yeah..... now if I can only get them big enough to take on squirrels....

Maybe I can graft them to kudzu.

For the love of all that is holy, NOOOO! Carnivorous kudzu would not stop with squirrels...

Well, I went and put a piece of fairly wide meshed burlap over top of the plants in my mini-bog to try to filter the sunlight a bit. I may move a couple of the others into the bogette to see how they fare there. Got the newer ones on the porch to just catch a bit of morning sunlight, but they still look pretty puny from their short stint in FULL sun.

Well, I'm not real crazy about this perlite stuff I'm using with the insectivorous plants in my mini-bog. We got a good amount of rain yesterday, and apparently my drain holes aren't doing the job and the water level got up higher than I had hoped for in the tub. And that darn perlite junk apparently floats to the surface.

So all that while crap got stuck all in the sundew traps and made a heck of a mess of them. Also got some into a few of the venus fly traps. I used a water bottle to try to spray the perlite off of the plants, but only was partially successful. Two of the fly traps shut on the perlite when the water spray evidently triggered them.

Guess I need to change something in the way I am doing this. This evidently isn't working out as well as I had hoped.

Yeah, I have had a similar experience with mine recently.

The venus fly traps and sundews I bought a while back seem to be doing real well in the mini bogs we set up, so I decided to buy a few more.

These potted venus fly traps are right colorful, pretty nice sized, and look in excellent shape.











The sundews don't look to shabby neither.

I also bought some bare root fly traps that are smaller, but they should do OK in the little pots I set them up in.





I'm letting them all gradually get acclimated to the sunlight before putting them out in the mini bogs. Don't want to burn them like I did that first batch I got.

Well, the mini bogs appear to be coming back nicely this spring. I lost some things because I didn't have the drain holes deep enough to account for the amount of settling the soil would do. So I drilled a few more somewhat deeper, and the soil isn't as mushy as it was before. Also had some varmint root around in one of the bogs and scattered a bunch of the flytraps here and yonder. Perhaps he even ate some of them.

One of the mini bogs has sprouted a whole slew of little yellow flowers on string thin stalks.



Anyway, I took a bunch of photos of the flytraps and sundews....