Can you grow Venus Flytraps in an AeroGarden?

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Jacob here with Sarracenia Northwest. During the past year, I’ve seen a few growers try their hand with hydroponic devices. This particular device is by AeroGarden, and I picked it up during Black Friday, 50% off. Anyway, I got it because I got a question from a grower who grew his Venus flytraps in this type of setup. These devices are actually meant to grow herbs, and the idea is to make it convenient to have a supply of fresh herbs when you’re cooking.

A device typically includes a water chamber, an adjustable LED light fixture, and pods to hold your plants. The pods contain peat moss and seeds to start your own herbs. The unit also comes with liquid fertilizer to add to the water chamber. The compact nature of this device means you can grow herbs on your kitchen countertop. The unit also has a built-in timer, programmed to come on 15 hours each day, making this unit virtually fuss-free. Instead of growing herbs, a grower used it for his Venus flytraps. And this is what he wrote:

“Eleven months ago, I started growing my Venus flytraps in a couple of AeroGardens. Everything was doing well, then all the tops died on one garden, and now the tops on the other garden are starting to turn…”

The grower sent his question in November. Since he started his garden eleven months prior, I suspect he may have gotten his hydroponic garden during Black Friday, like I did, but during the previous year. And then he took his flytraps and set them up in the garden.

Now, he probably had to remove the peat moss from the pod to make more room for the flytrap bulb. He also didn’t use the liquid fertilizer that came with the unit. He just popped his plants in, added distilled water to the chamber and turned on the unit.

His plants were growing well initially, but after a while, the tops on his Venus flytraps were dying off. Now, if you’ve been watching videos, you probably already know that Venus flytraps go dormant in winter, so you might think that his plants were simply going dormant since he wrote to us in November. But, he did send us a couple of photos of his plants. When he removed a pod from the water chamber, this is what he found.

That's a very unusual presentation for a Venus flytrap. They look severely elongated. Now, Venus flytraps are not a true bulb, but they should at least resemble a bulb. Ideally, the bulb should be allowed to enlarge and expand sideways. Instead, in the AeroGarden setup, the bulb was growing downwards, it elongated downwards. The unit uses small pods to hold the plants in place. With regular plants, roots would just hang in the water chamber below. But the way the pods are designed, the flytrap bulb couldn’t expand sideways. Instead, it expanded downwards, as you see in his photo.

That was partly why lots of traps died off in this setup. As the bulb expanded downwards, the growing center of the plant moved away from the opening on the chamber. You can see it happening in this photo, how the growing center is now underneath in the water chamber.

So, I recommend to the grower to get his plants out of the setup and pot them up in a mix of equal parts peat moss and perlite. Because the bulbs are extremely elongated, he should position them so that they’re parallel to the soil line. The white portion should go beneath the soil, and the green portions above the soil. Over the course of several months, maybe six months, his plants would eventually correct themselves.

Since we’re in the winter months and he’s had his plants under artificial lights like this, his plants didn’t experience the cues for winter dormancy. Flytraps naturally go dormant in winter, and they get their cues for dormancy from a gradual exposure to cold temperatures and short days. Because his plants were grown in a tropical setting with a constant 15-hour daylight cycle, he might as well keep his plants under those lights until spring. The plants will miss out on dormancy this winter, but that’s the trade-off given the situation he’s in. In spring, he should grow his plants outdoors in full sun and let his plants experience seasonal changes.

Incidentally, the grower also lives in Virginia, very close to the plants’ natural habitat in North Carolina, so he didn’t need to grow his plants in this type of artificial condition. His plants would have done perfectly well outdoors in his region, just like they do for us in Oregon.

So, based on this grower’s experience with this type of hydroponic growing method, I would say that this device isn’t suitable for Venus flytraps. Not only that, Venus flytraps are temperate plants that require winter dormancy, which won’t happen growing them indoors. 

So, what types of carnivorous plants would be appropriate for a hydroponic device like this? Short answer, I don’t know. At least for now. All I know is that any plant with a bulb or a rhizome isn’t be suitable, so that would rule out Venus flytraps and Sarracenia. I also don’t know the science of hydroponic growing, so I don’t know how to grow any plant successfully hydroponically. But, I have a suspicion that the Cape sundew, Drosera capensis, might be a suitable candidate for this type of setup. And that’s exactly what I intend to do, grow Cape sundews in this type of setup for the next 9-12 month. Now, that means I won’t have a video to show until then. But that’s something to look forward to.

If you want to learn more about growing Venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants, visit growcarnivorousplants.com. We have tons of information to get you started on the right track. Thank you so much for watching. I look forward to seeing you in another video.

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