What are Carnivorous Plants？ Plantzilla Part 1)

Hi, I'm Jared with Fun Science Demos, and we are back with another science story, and today we're highlighting the book Plantzilla by Jardine Nolan. In the book, a young boy named Mortimer actually wants to take home his class plant for the summer so he can take care of it, but it just isn't any class plant. It's a carnivorous plant, which means this plant eats meat. At one point, Mortimer actually thinks the plant, which he has called lovingly Plantzilla, has actually eaten his dog. It turns out the dog is just fine in the end of the book, and as we go through the story, Plantzilla is very happy in his new habitat, and Mortimer's house actually becomes the perfect habitat for Plantzilla to grow big and strong and even flower at the end, and the end is perfect because the plant loves Mortimer's new house, which becomes the perfect habitat, and that's the idea for our video today. We're going to talk about planting and creating perfect habitats for carnivorous plants, so let me introduce you to three of my carnivorous plant friends, which means they eat bugs. The first one is a pitcher plant, and it has these little tiny pitchers where bugs crawl into, and then the plant digests them. Then we have our Venus flytrap, and our Venus flytrap have these little mouths that have hairs in them that get triggered when a bug crawls in, and they close up around the bug and digest the bug, and then we have our sundew, which has sticky leaves where if a bug or an ant or some kind of insect is crawling on the leaves, they get stuck to the leaves, and the leaves wrap around them, and they digest the bugs. So where did I get my neat carnivorous plant friends? Well, I got this one actually in a hardware store, a box store that sold certain times of the year. If you check out the plant section, you might actually be able to find them in these little boxes or containers, but these guys I bought online, and they weren't that expensive. For all three of them, I was able to get these cool little carnivorous plants, and now my work really begins. I have to create the perfect habitat for all of these plants to grow and thrive. Now in this video, we're only going to focus on the sundew and the Venus flytrap because the pitcher plant requires a little bit of a different habitat, so that's our next video. Put him over here, and now we're ready to start. Now the first thing to point out is that these are plants, which means they make their own food like all plants through photosynthesis, so I don't really need to feed it a lot because it's making its own food. The bugs that it eats creates like a fertilizer. It creates all the minerals and protein that it needs extra besides the food it makes through photosynthesis. Now just like all plants, this plant also has roots, so I un-potted this Venus flytrap and pulled out the soil so we can zoom in and take a closer look at these roots, and these roots are interesting because these roots cannot pull the nutrients out of the soil like most other plants. That's why this plant gets its nutrients through the bugs that it eats. So these Venus flytraps actually grow in their natural habitat around North Carolina all the way up through New Jersey and into Pennsylvania, and it typically does not grow in good soil. It grows in peat moss where there's not much nutrients in the soil at all, and that's really important to keep in mind when we're trying to create a habitat for these plants. We don't want to have rich nutrient-filled soil, so if we want to create a soil base that these plants love and thrive in, we do not want to use normal garden soil. We do not want to use compost that has way too many nutrients in it. That will probably kill the plant if you use that those things. We're going to use two basic ingredients. We're going to use peat moss, which is just a plain kind of powdery brown substance. It's just dried out peat that's broken down organic matter, and then we have something called perlite, and it's just this light, almost feels like styrofoam substance that we're going to mix together in equal parts. So I have my equal parts peat moss and my equal parts perlite, and now I need to add some water because these plants actually live in their natural habitat in boggy areas, which means they're wet. So I have to add water, but I just can't add any water. I can't go to the tap and just pull water out of the sink. I have to use natural rainwater or distilled water. You don't need to panic because you can find distilled water in any food store. Just walk down to the water aisle and find and make sure the label says distilled water, you're good to go. That means there are no minerals or nutrients in this water that you would find under the ground. In the ground level, that water seeps down through those rocks and minerals. It gets dissolved into the water. Distilled water does not have any of that, nor does rainwater. So we're going to open this up, and now the dirty part, the fun part, we're going to saturate the peat moss and the perlite, and this is going to act like a sponge. This is actually going to absorb a lot of water, and we want it to absorb that water. Now you do want to do this rather slowly because if I oversaturate this, it would be really difficult to get the water out. But you're going to notice that this is really quickly absorbing the water. I'll leave that sink in a little bit. I'll pour half of this in, then I'm going to get my hands in there and start to massage the water around and mix everything together. It may take a while for the peat moss to soak in the water. That's perfectly normal. Just take your time with this. Massage everything around. You want to mix the perlite and the peat moss together. This is going to create a loose soil that's really good for drainage. It's not going to be solid like clay and hold the water. Just get your hands dirty. So we've made a mess, and we have our perfect soil habitat for our Venus flytrap and our sundew, and it's time to plant. Now it's important to note that this is just a basic how to get started video. You could go online and find long 30-minute videos that really go in-depth about how to really plant all of these. But the best thing is just to try and get started and see how it goes. You can do that for a reasonable amount of money, and we're going to get started. The next thing is you got to be careful of what you're planting these in. You could use plastic pots that you could get pretty cheaply, or you could use a ceramic pot, but it has to be glazed on the inside. If it's not glazed, the minerals in that pot would actually, the water would soak through that pot, and it would actually not be good for the roots. So you want this to be nutrient-free. The nutrients are going to come from the bugs. So you're going to take our little pot. It does have a drain hole. It's important that it has a drain hole, and we're going to just pack our pot full of our perfectly created soil. We have our perlite and peat moss, and you want to pack it in pretty well, almost to the top. If you get too much in, you can kind of scrape it out, and I want to create a hole for my venus fly trap. I'm making a mess here, but that's all right. Pack it down pretty well. You're going to see I have a little hole that my fly trap can go into. There we go. The cool part about this, you don't need anything fancy. I just made the hole with my finger. Now it's time to take my venus fly trap. If you notice that it's sitting too low in the pot, you could always go back in here, add a little bit more of my peat moss and perlite. Be careful. You don't have to be super gentle. I'm going to drop the roots into that container, and I'm going to use my fingers to kind of push the perlite peat moss mix around the roots. Now I want to go back and add a little bit more, so these mouths get in the way. You can just hold them back with one of your fingers, reach in, and pack this around it. We are going to water this in, which will make sure that soil comes into contact with the roots. Just take your time and go slow. You can even talk to the plants. The carbon dioxide is good for it, good for them. How are you doing? You might want to think about a name for your plant. The book called him Plantzilla. What are you going to call your plant? Now I'll probably go back and I'll wipe this up and clean it up, but I have a perfectly potted Venus flytrap ready to go for the next step. So we want to make sure we water these plants in so the perlite and peat moss mix comes into good contact with the roots, and we want to make sure we have a good amount of water sitting in a tray so that these plants can wick the water up and create almost like an indoor bog. So I could do this on a tray where I have all three together, or I could put little trays like this, and all of them allow me to water from the bottom. So I'm going to just keep them in here. Once you initially plant, we want to water them in by gently pouring water over top. Let it soak down in. That's going to make sure all the peat moss settles against the roots. And then what you want to do is make sure you water from the bottom. Remember I'm using distilled water, so what I can do is make sure that the bottom has plenty of water. Then as it begins to dry out, it'll wick the water up from the bottom. You do want to let them dry out just a little bit. You can research online that perfect balance of wet and dry, and basically let these plants grow. They will eventually flower like all other plants, which is really interesting. So we've created the perfect habitat for our carnivorous plants. We have the perfect soil habitat. We're using the perfect distilled water, but plants need something else to grow. They need sunlight for food and energy. And if I'm going to have these indoors, I have to make sure I'm putting them where they can get sunlight. But what happens if they can't get enough sunlight? Well, they have these really cool things called grow lights, and this is a perfect tiny little inexpensive grow light. It just fits right down in your pot. And as my plant grows, my grow light grows, and this gives the perfect amount of sunlight for these plants to grow and make food and thrive. These plants are the perfect plants to have as class pets or house pets because you have to take care of them. There's so much more to these plants than we have time to get into. Like, they actually go dormant in the winter, which means they die back and then regrow in the spring. But we're going to talk about that in another video. We'd just like to give a huge shout out to Jardine Nolan and her awesome book, Plantzilla, for inspiring this idea. Growing plants indoors is a really interesting experience, and it's actually a type of science called botany. Why don't you give it a try? If you want to learn more about plants or anything to do with science, check out our YouTube channel, Fun Science Demos. Science is so cool, especially when it's living right in your house. Thanks for watching. So what am I going to call you guys? I don't know.