FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

davinstewart wrote: ↑Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:49 pm Give it a shot. I successfully grew venus flytraps in 300ppm water for many years before I learned "better".

I bet you grew them outdoors where they received lots of rain water. I found that I could use water with higher mineral levels as long as the plants were regularly flooded and flushed with rainwater by being outdoors.

Yep, got it in one. I will say, though, that everytime I tested the water sitting in their trays or flowing out of the pots it was testing in the hundreds of ppm.

I suspect the real killer is the accumulated salts and minerals rather than the ppm of the water. So if the salts and minerals are flushed out periodically I suspect vfts would grow just fine.

Maybe an experiment for next year.

Panman wrote:

davinstewart wrote: ↑Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:49 pm Give it a shot. I successfully grew venus flytraps in 300ppm water for many years before I learned "better".

I bet you grew them outdoors where they received lots of rain water. I found that I could use water with higher mineral levels as long as the plants were regularly flooded and flushed with rainwater by being outdoors.

My bad, I got mine for $12. I mixed up the price with something else I bought.

Barlapipas 6 wrote:I don’t live in the US. I live in Greece. Here it is very hard to find CP soil, even just pure sphagnum moss. The soil in the picture above is the only one I could find that is labelled as CP soil (but it’s not good for CPs because it has 300ppm). Only a few shops in the entire country sell sphagnum moss and they sell it for orchids or animals (amphibians, reptiles etc).

You have a lot of fir and pine trees in your country. Flytraps and many sundews, along with pitcher plants are often found in moist/boggy pine savannas...open, sunny, flat areas with pine trees growing thinly there. Some folks were attempting to use the debris, mostly bark and needles, from these trees...the older debris that had gradually piled up beneath the trees. Only material that is above soil level (to avoid minerals) was probably used. This material might be mixed with perlite, coarse silica sand, glass sandblasting material, pumice, etc.,...anything that will not leach minerals into the growing mix. The last note posted in that thread mentioned something about using a 50:50 mix of pine needles and sphagnum moss. This might be something to look at. Here's the (very) old pine needle thread: vft-growing-in-pine-needles-t12841.html

Best wishes!

Thanks for the info