Carnivorous Plants tour and care unique houseplants for your collection

Hello you guys. So today we're talking about carnivorous plants and these plants make beautiful houseplants and I feel like they aren't talked about enough within the houseplant community. I think there's a misconception about carnivorous plants that they are very difficult to grow but in my experience they are actually surprisingly easy. I grow all of my carnivorous plants as houseplants within my home. They grow really fast, they easily produce these really beautiful flowers, they also catch fungus gnats or other insects around your home. I'm also able to pair them with live moss on top so it makes for a very beautiful display and carnivorous plants just look super unique compared to most other houseplants and they can have very pretty colors as well. Also I'm able to pair these with very nice pots without drainage holes which I'll talk about later. It just makes for a very beautiful display. So in this video we'll cover potting, lighting, watering, and feeding. So my care for all of my carnivorous plants is more or less the same. I have them all in my bedroom underneath a grow light which actually let's go look at that right now. I grow all of them up here under this grow light. This is the Soltech solution grow light and they're very close to the light. They just grow within my home in my regular humidity. I don't have that many carnivorous plants but just to give you guys an introduction to what I do have, right here in front of me these are drosera, commonly called sundew, and they produce a very sticky substance on their leaves that look like little like globs, I guess you could say. These are my favorite kind of carnivorous plants because they just grow so fast and they catch a lot of fungus gnats and they just look super cool to me. Something else that I really like about them is these really beautiful flowers. Their flowers grow really tall and away from the actual plant so that way the pollinators that come don't accidentally get trapped onto their sticky traps, sticky leaves. This one is a drosera paradoxa, this one is a drosera regia, and then this one is a drosera adelae, and it used to look a lot nicer but I forgot to water it and the main plant died off. I have two pinguicula. In this bowl is a pinguicula leonii ex emerginata. So it's a hybrid and this one I don't know the species of, it was sold to me as a no id. What I love about pinguicula is the symmetry of their leaves and how they kind of look like flowers and the coloration of their leaves. They also produce flowers pretty easily, like this one made these very cute and pretty purple flowers and it just matches so well with this blue pot that it's paired with. Pinguicula produce a sticky substance on their leaves as well and they catch fungus gnats really easily. These two are saracenia, also called American pitcher plants, and these trap bugs by going into their pitcher and then I believe there is some type of acidic liquid at the bottom that then digests the bugs. This one here is a very young and juvenile saracenia leucophylla and this saracenia I can't remember the name of but I'll put it on the screen and I purchased this one because it was the cheapest saracenia I could get from the website. There's actually a spider living inside of one of these pitchers because I grow this out on my balcony and I wonder if there's like a symbiotic relationship with the spider and the plant to help it catch prey. Or maybe not symbiotic, maybe the spider is just taking advantage of the plant. This is a venus flytrap. This is probably the carnivorous plant that most people are familiar with except this one is a red form. I also have some pitcher plants called nepenthes that are growing inside my IKEA cabinet. I really need to clean this cabinet out because it's so overgrown but in this corner I have some pitcher plants. I can't really take them out to show you guys but I think I have three different kinds in here so yeah you can see how these two pitchers differ and then there's also this. This is a utricularia longifolia and it started as a very small plant but it sends out these runners that have overtaken this area and I love how it looks. They produce really nice flowers but I haven't gotten it to flower yet for me. My care for all of these is pretty much the same except I have this one growing outside on my balcony but other than that all of these ones right here in front of me are all growing in the same spot underneath the same light. The first category of care that we're going to start with is potting. So as you can see my carnivorous plants are more or less all in a very similar looking pot and that's because all of these pots are from the same brand which I love a lot which is called Hasami Porcelain. Unfortunately this isn't sponsored but if you want to sponsor me please sponsor me. These are actually cups or bowls and they don't have drainage holes underneath. Another option would be to have a pot with drainage holes and then you put it in a saucer of standing water. I like this method because it looks a lot nicer. Potting the plants in pots without drainage holes also helps the live moss that's growing on top to stay moist because it's able to pull water up from the bottom of the pot and keep the moss moist on top. In my previous plant care videos I actually potted this one on camera. It's grown a lot since then and I pot all of the carnivorous plants in the same way. I use dried sphagnum moss on the bottom as the main substrate layer and then I put live sphagnum moss on top which is what you see up here. Eventually I plan to only grow them in live sphagnum moss because I'm growing my own moss and I'm trying to reduce my consumption of harvested dried sphagnum moss mostly for sustainability reasons and because I also just like the look of live moss a lot more. The next category we're going to cover is lighting and I think this is where people really struggle with the care of carnivorous plants. These plants will actually really enjoy very very bright light. My saracenia it does very well out on my balcony and it receives direct afternoon sun. My pinguiculas as well when I give them a lot of light they'll develop a nicer coloration and grow a lot faster and same with the drosera. For them to produce that sticky sap that they have on their leaves they need a lot of light. If you were to give the sundew low light it just wouldn't produce that sticky substance. Like I said earlier they are directly underneath my soltex solutions grow light in my bedroom and they are extremely close like maybe six inches seven inches away and this is kind of one of the reasons why I actually started getting into carnivorous plants is because I needed a plant that could be in that location that was so close to the grow light because other house plants that I would grow there would just burn up and get bleached from too much light. These thrive under a lot a lot of light. I used to grow this one on my window sill and it did pretty well. The only thing that I think you need to watch out for is that if your carnivorous plant is receiving direct sunlight you have to be careful about the pot and the plant getting too hot because if there's just direct light coming through the window and there's no air circulation to cool it off then your pot will probably overheat and your plant will overheat as well. This can be solved with a little bit of airflow so if you crack open your window then it'll probably help cool down the pot and the plant. I know people do grow carnivorous plants as window sill plants but I do highly recommend growing them under a grow light just because I've had much more success with it. The next topic which I think is also extremely important is watering. Carnivorous plants are sensitive to minerals in their water so it's recommended not to use tap water for these plants and instead use reverse osmosis water or distilled water. I've previously grown a nepenthes which is a pitcher plant with just tap water and it did fine so you might be able to get away with tap water depending on how hard your water is but I think if you want a very good chance at success it's better to use distilled or RO water. So I use reverse osmosis water which is also called RO water on all of my carnivorous plants and I just realized that I talk about reverse osmosis water a lot but I never told you guys how I get it or what my setup is. So I have a reverse osmosis filter out on my balcony and there are a lot of reverse osmosis systems that you can hook up to your sink or to your shower or to your garden hose spigot. So I have mine out on my balcony spigot and I'll actually go and show you guys and I'll leave a link to the system in the description. It's just down here and it's kind of dirty but pretend like it's not and it's hooked up to my spigot that's over here and I just turn on the water and then it filters out the tap water and produces reverse osmosis water. I'll leave a link to this in the description and I also use reverse osmosis water sometimes for my fish tanks and aquariums and stuff. Okay let's go back inside and the way I know when I need to water is by using the live moss as an indicator. When this sphagnum moss gets kind of light colored and dry on the top that's when I know that the plant needs more water and when the plant is well watered the moss will have a darker more lush green appearance. So this one over here is lighter colored and kind of has a whitish pale green color but this one is much darker and has a richer deeper green coloration on it. So this one is good with watering but this one looks like it could use a little bit of water. I just use my spray bottle and I spray the top of the moss like this. I kind of just keep going until I feel a little bit more weight in the pot. If I water it too much I'll just tip it over like this and allow the water to drip out. The act of watering my carnivorous plants is kind of satisfying. The sound of the spray and then the way the moss changes color. So the next category we're going to talk about is feeding. So I don't actively feed any of my carnivorous plants. I just allow them to catch what they can and I've read that if they don't catch anything then you don't actually really need to feed them. They're fine just receiving a lot of sunlight and the occasional bug. My sticky plants, my pinguicula and my drosera, they probably catch the most bugs and they predominantly only catch fungus gnats. Recently they haven't actually caught anything because I think my fungus gnat problem is pretty much gone now. If you look at these leaves you can see the captured dead fungus gnats on them and they produce just like slightly sticky leaves. Here's another pinguicula and you can see these small black dots. Those are all fungus gnats. My sundew or my drosera, you can see all of these are fungus gnats and this is a very sticky substance. This is my saricenia that I keep out on my balcony and I just checked recently and it has captured a couple of bugs. I can't tell which bugs, I think maybe flies. And then there's also a spider that is living in one of these pictures. There's a live spider so I'll make sure to put this one back out on the balcony because I don't want this in my house. Now I'm going to talk about the maintenance that I do on these plants. I really don't do that much other than just watering them whenever the moss looks dry. Other than that I'll occasionally trim the moss once it gets too tall. Because it is live moss it keeps growing upwards and eventually it could choke out the plants. Especially my drosera, I've noticed that if the moss grows up too tall I think it might cause the stem or the rhizome of the plant to rot which causes the plant to get suffocated, choke out, and eventually die. This happens a lot in my IKEA greenhouse cabinet over here just because I don't really notice things as much because there's so much going on in there. But a lot of my sundew in my cabinet have pretty much died. Something that I have a lot of fun doing is trimming my moss on micro-nervous plants and I've made a couple of TikTok videos of me doing it and it's like satisfying to cut it and then the sound of the scissors and how the moss looks after you cut it. I will show you guys right now. So this is my drosera paradoxa that has moss growing like as a huge mound which is definitely choking out the plant. And I do need to cut this back so I'll show you guys how I do it. Wow look at that, so nice. I keep this moss to then put on the top of other carnivorous plants or I use them to make terrariums or I'll find something else to do with them, I don't know. But I do keep this moss and it's easy to propagate and then from where I cut it, it'll just grow back again. So I've cut this probably like three or four times all the way down to the base of the pot and it grows back every time. Here's this side that I trimmed and then here's this side that I still need to trim and then here is the moss I collected that I will be using for terrariums. The other method of care that I do at times is I remove the dead leaves that accumulate on the bottom. I just snip them off. Ta-da! Much prettier. Other than trimming the moss sometimes and trimming off dead leaves and watering the plants, I really don't do that much in terms of maintenance. I think that carnivorous plants are deceptively easy. This drosera regia is supposedly very difficult to grow but I personally haven't had any issues with it. A common question I get about my carnivorous plants is where I get them because they're not commonly available in most plant nurseries. I got all of these plants either from friends or from eBay or Etsy or specialty carnivorous plant online stores. I'll leave links to all of the carnivorous plant stores that I've ordered from. I really recommend giving carnivorous plants a go because look how pretty they are with the moss and the uniqueness of them compared to most of our typical house plants. Also, I just noticed that this drosera caught a mosquito so very helpful as well preventing mosquito bites. Thank you guys for watching. I hope you have a good day and that you learned something and let me know if you have any questions down in the comment section. Goodbye!