Monthly Archives: October 2011

Curious about the context? Check out the introduction.

Some of the content in this series appeared, in much shorter form, in Gothic Beauty magazine.

Step 3: Water it with tap water.

As related before, I constantly hear from kids who want to know why their Venus flytraps died, but they’re afraid that I’m going to yell at them about their mistakes. Anything but. In fact, I spend a lot of time talking down kids and teenagers who think I’m going to get angry. It’s not just because only an idiot yells at a kid who literally had no way of knowing better, especially when they were given bad care instructions in the first place. It’s also because I’ve been there myself.

My first experience with growing Venus flytraps, or attempting to do so, was similar to those of most kids in the 1970s. I was living in upstate New York at the time, and spotted a “growing kit” in a local Big N, a chain department store. One dollar later, and I had a styrofoam cup full of peat, a plastic bag for retaining humidity, and a basic instruction guide on the lid. Add water, it said, and put the cup in a sunny window and wait for the seeds to sprout. As with Big N itself, the end results were disappointing: the only seeds that germinated were for grass, and to this day, I have no idea whether the company selling these ever put any flytrap seeds in it in the first place. By the end of summer 1977, my cat Morris got the grass, the peat moss was dumped in the garden, and I was leery of any grow-your-own kit for nearly 30 years.

Two years later, my family was living on the south side of Chicago, and I saw my first live flytrap in a garden center. After poking through the flat of flytraps for the one with the biggest and most traps, I settled on one particularly hirstute specimen and took it home. It did rather well through the autumn, but was still green and presumably live when we moved to North Texas. And then everything went kerblooey.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Chicago’s municipal water was extremely soft at the time, particularly compared to what we were going to encounter. In Chicago, the flytrap was doing well, and it survived the move across country to Texas. In fact, it moved in the car along with a travel-loathing cat, a carsick dog, and four hyperactive kids, so I can attest that Venus flytraps are tougher than most people give them credit for being. However, it wasn’t ready for Texas, specifically a little wide spot in the road at the time called Flower Mound.

Now, there’s a lot that can be said about life in Flower Mound at the time, and one of these days I might be able to say it without peppering it with profanities. (This might be a challenge. According to family legend, I said my first words to my paternal grandmother, and those words were “Damn you”.) The one absolute is that Flower Mound got its municipal water from a combination of wells and from nearby Lake Lewisville, a reservoir constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers. 90 million years ago, Flower Mound resembled South Padre Island, being a narrow barrier island on the North American Seaway. Today, the area is mostly mesquite and live oak scrub, but a little digging turns up multitudes of fossil shells, gypsum crystals, and the occasional dinosaur.

The upshot of this is that both the wells and reservoir are in what used to be marine sediments, and those sediments were and still are loaded with salt. Lots of calcium and iron, too, to the point where the dissolved iron stained concrete and stucco a bright rust red on surfaces exposed to lawn sprinklers. Even today, the taste of the water is distinctive, and using municipal water for watering houseplants leaves the pots full of thick mineral crusts after a month or so. Sometimes the salt was strong enough to kill cactus after a while.

As I mentioned before, I didn’t know any of this at the time. All I knew was that while we were holed up in a hotel waiting for the moving truck to schlep our stuff from Chicago, I figured that my flytrap needed a touch of water. It went into the sink for a quick soak and drain, and I removed it and put it back in the windowsill.

An hour later, as I passed by, I saw that the flytrap wasn’t green any more. Flower Mound water had killed that plant in less than an hour, and with no warning.

23 years went by between my last attempt and my revival in interest in carnivores, and I never forgot what happened. Once I discovered what happened and why, when confronted with the “I used to have a Venus flytrap…” lament, I asked first of all “Were you using tap water to water it?”

Some individuals are lucky enough to have municipal water that’s sufficiently free of minerals such as salt or calcium that it can go directly onto their carnivores: both Chicago and Portland (Oregon) have municipal water that’s sufficiently pure to take a chance. Here in Dallas, though, I refer to the local water as “crunchy”. It’s good for showers and for drinking, but for carnivorous plants, you might as well spray them with napalm and Agent Orange with a Roundup chaser.

The discussion of water quality for carnivores, much like that of the proper potting mixes, can be a point of debate and even anger among enthusiasts. This is often aggravated by varying water authorities in given parts of a larger community, and different sources for said water through the seasons. (Both with friends in Louisiana and with a great-aunt in northern Michigan, they depended during the summer on well water so loaded with iron and copper that anyone drinking it for more than a month was left temporarily ginger. One of those friends had been drinking that well water for so long that she didn’t know she was blonde until she moved to Dallas and her hair faded out.) Therefore, some will swear up and down that their tap water is perfect for carnivores, and that everyone should use it. I just smile and nod, and put in more rainwater collection tanks. The summer of 2011 was so foul that 500 gallons (1,892 liters) of rainwater in early June was down to ten gallons by the time we saw any rain again in September, but using tap water simply wasn’t an option.

Okay, so to play it safe, no matter what: rain water or distilled water. What else?

• Contrary to popular opinion, “steam distilled water” is not the same as boiled water. Steam distillation means that you boil the water to leave behind the calcium, iron, lead, mercury, and other contaminants in water and then recondense the steam into nearly pure water. This happens in another container, unconnected to the first. The only thing boiling water will do is kill microorganisms and volatilize dissolved gases. It won’t remove minerals at all, which explains why I was honestly gobsmacked when I came across a book on carnivores that advocated this. Boiling water to remove minerals will actually concentrate them in the liquid left behind. Do this for carnivores, and think of it as boiling maple sap of death to make death syrup.
• Likewise, bottled drinking water is just as bad. Pure water tastes flat to us, so most of the time, bottled water is extracted from a good-tasting source. Said good taste comes from dissolved minerals and gases, many of which may be lethal to your plants in large quantities. Even better, many bottled water companies add various salts for flavor. If using commercially bottled water, make sure it reads “distilled water” instead of “drinking water”.
• Even when using rainwater, consider the source. Minerals leach out of concrete or stone rooftops or gutters, and they’ll definitely leach out of concrete pools unless those pools are sealed well. Likewise, with the current understandable concern about collecting rainwater for summer use, make absolutely sure that your container is scrubbed and rinsed before it’s used for capturing water for carnivores. That 55-gallon rainwater barrel you liberated from the side of the road may have been used for transporting olives or soft drink syrup, but it may also have been used for transporting hydraulic fluid or soap. Ironically enough, the first two can be just as lethal to your carnivores as the latter.
• Finally, reverse osmosis filters can be a godsend for those who can’t depend upon rainwater, but make sure that your unit can provide nearly pure water. More importantly, check the filter cannister and its prefilters on a regular basis. Dallas water is particularly rough on reverse osmosis filter operation, and the last thing you want to do is discover that the osmotic membrane blew out after you’ve used the output to water your prize-winning Sarracenia.

With all of this talk about water quality, you want the punchline? Remember that “Grow Your Own” cup I purchased in upstate New York? I’m glad that it didn’t work out. What I didn’t learn until I was older was that most of the available water had rather high levels of dissolved radium in it from the local granite in the Adirondack Mountains, and many of the mineral springs in Saratoga Springs have enough radium per liter that drinking more than a glass per week could lead to radiation poisoning. Just what the world needed: radioactive mutant Venus flytraps on top of everything else. Laverne & Shirley reruns were bad enough.

Next: Step 4 – Keep it in a terrarium.

Curious about the context? Check out the introduction.

Some of the content in this series appeared, in much shorter form, in Gothic Beauty magazine.

Step 1: Buy your flytrap at Halloween.

About a month before Halloween, garden shops and grocery stores start carrying flytraps as impulse purchases. Sometimes, they’re in a larger bowl with two or three other species of carnivorous plant sharing the space. Most of the time, though, they’re in one of the dreaded cubes, or in a similar plastic sleeve or tube. They may come with a basic guide printed on the tube, or a sticker with basic care tips, or simply a label reading “Really Eats Bugs!” The one absolute, though, is that they’re usually stacked up in a well-trafficked area, sometimes with autumn mums and toy bats, encouraging customers to take a chance.

Considering that the nearly universal mantra of one-time carnivorous plant growers is “I had a Venus flytrap, but it died,” it’s not hard to figure out what happens with the vast majority of those impulse purchases. Even if it doesn’t die right away from other reasons, the flytrap gradually goes black and appears to die off in November and December, and it gets thrown out or dumped on the compost pile as a bad job.

The funny thing is that most of the time, the flytrap, unlike the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, really is resting and not dead after all. Flytraps are native to a small area in North Carolina, with a possible relict population just south of Tallahassee, Florida, and regularly deal with at least one to three months of freezing temperatures in the winter. When sunlight levels start to drop in autumn, the plant prepares by growing a bulb belowground instead of new leaves. If the winter is mild, then the trap keeps its existing leaves (and the traps are really just modified leaves) for photosynthesis through the winter before growing new ones in spring. If the winter isn’t, then the leaves die off and the plant looks dead. Wait about three to four months, until temperatures and day length increase, and it’ll come back, hale, hearty, and ready to feed.

Now, this dormancy period is critical: if the flytrap doesn’t get it, it will die later, and usually with precious little warning. Not “may”: “will”. You can attempt to force the flytrap to keep going, by keeping it indoors under artificial lights to extend its photoperiod. What happens, though, is that the plant muddles through for a while. The slightest bit of change in that photoperiod, though, can set off growth of a bloom spike, and the plant dies in the process. In some cases, it doesn’t make it that far, and the flytrap simply blackens and expires. Attempting to feed it over the winter is usually a waste: if the traps even work, and they’ll usually slow or stop their standard trapping response, the flytrap may not be able to produce enough digestive enzymes necessary to break down prey. If you’re lucky, only the individual trap goes black, slimy, and dead. Sometimes, the rot spreads to the whole plant.

The length of time necessary for winter dormancy is just as important as establishing it. A minimum of three months works the best. Here in North Texas, I use holidays as a guide. By Thanksgiving, they should all be arranged outside, and they’ll stay outside in unheated conditions until at least St. Patrick’s Day. For the most part, if they’re being kept in a reasonably-sized pot, they won’t require additional care, other than protecting them from the north wind. If local high temperatures go well below freezing, particularly for more than a week at a time, I cover them with old sheets for insulation, and remove them when the cold snap ends. With last February’s record cold snap, where North Texas generally never got above 16 degrees F. (-9 degrees C), these were the only precautions needed, and every last flytrap at the Triffid Ranch came back without problems. (The record heatwave and drought was a different story.)

Warmer and colder climes offer slightly different solutions. In much colder areas, where the soil can freeze solid for months, flytraps can be dug up and sheltered in an unheated coldframe. (As a rule, unless the top of the flytrap has already died off, don’t put them in an unlit space such as a garage or shed, because any remaining green leaves will continue to photosynthesize.) Alternately, many experts recommend heavy mulching around the flytraps with pine needles or straw. In much warmer areas without extended cold periods, such as around Galveston or in southern Florida, it may be necessary to dig up the flytraps, cut off the tops, carefully wrap the bulb with moist long-fiber sphagnum moss, and put them in the refrigerator and NOT the freezer. Either way, too long of a dormancy period is better than too short of one.

Almost all other carnivores from temperate climes, including Sarracenia pitcher plants and temperate sundews, also need that dormancy period as well or they’ll die. Again, it’s not a matter of “may”: it’s a matter of “will”. If you absolutely have to have a carnivore on display in the depths of winter, consider an alternative such as an Asian pitcher plant (Nepenthes alata, for instance) or a tropical sundew (Drosera adelae from Australia is an excellent choice). And whatever you do, resist the temptation to buy that for-sale flytrap at Christmas unless you’ve got room in the refrigerator for it around New Year’s Eve.

Next: Step 2 – Plant it in your garden.