Herself’s Houseplants

I love carnivorous plants. There is something cool about a meat loving plant, myself being a meat lover as well. The eight known species of Sarracenia are native to the US and can be found in the wild through out the south east and as far west as east Texas in bogs and swamps.

Carnivorous plants love humidity and lots of light. You’ll find pitcher plants don’t need as much humidity as other carnivorous plants so they are an excellent choice for a house plant.

In the wild pitcher plants grow in swamps where little else will grow so they get lots of light. I went to visit a local protected wild patch of carnivorous plants a couple of weeks ago. The dirt they grow in is mostly sand but not all, some regular soil was mixed into it. It was dry at the time I visited but it is normally quite damp there. If you live somewhere very sunny like I do in Houston, you might want to filter the light a bit. Use the color of your plant as a guide. If they start to look pale or bleached, reduce the light. If they are not developing the reds in ones that have red, or if they are dark green, give them more light.

I’ve successfully grown them in sphagnum moss; dirt; and a mix of half dirt half sand. I have smaller pitcher plants growing in terrariums with just sphagnum moss for soil. I have some growing in terrariums with dirt on top of gravel. I also have some planted in pots in a mix of half sand and half soil. All are doing well. Sarracenia typically grow in acidic soil. If you add some peat to your potting mix this will help to acidify your soil. Be very careful when you buy soil for your plant that it is not pre-fertilized.

Your tap water is likely quite basic, full of minerals if hard and not at all what your pitcher plant wants. Use distilled water or better yet, rain water to water them. The chemicals in tap water will likely kill your carnivorous plant.

You never, ever give carnivorous plants fertilizers. They grow in soil so deficient in nutrients most other plants have given up and moved to better places. If you want you can add a few bugs to your terrarium. If they are outside of a terrarium the bugs will find them. Bugs need to be small enough to fall deep into the pitchers. While they do not need bugs, it will help them grow.

They should not ever be given meat, hamburger etc. It is bugs they, need not cows. If they wanted to eat cows they would have evolved to be much larger plants.

If your plants are growing indoors you should add a little bit of rain or distilled water to the pitchers. Just a little, they don’t need much.

Many pitcher plants are not large and make excellent additions to dish gardens. They do flower, flowers are unusual, and grow on long stems and hang down. All the flowers I’ve had so far have been red, green or a combination of those two colors.

In the wild the flowers appear early spring followed by pitchers and the plants go dormant in the cold weather. The flowers need the bugs to pollinate themselves so no point killing them for food until the pollination is accomplished.

In the house I find they bloom early spring and have pitchers year round.

It is not uncommon when the plants are outside to find tiny toads or frogs living in the pitchers.

Less than 3% of the native habitats of carnivorous plants are left. Which means you must be very careful buying them to be sure they are not wild plants that have been harvested. It also means to save them we want lots of people growing them.

See also:
What is that stuff in the pitcher of your pitcher plant?
Slime used to trap insects
Carnivorous plant eats mouse

“The key is in the fuzzy coat of hairs on the roots of plants” says Professor Liam Dolan. “We have identified a growth control mechanism that enables these hairs to find their way and to elongate when their path is clear”.Root hairs explore the soil in much the same way as a person would feel their way in the dark. If they come across an obstacle, they feel their way around until they can continue growing in an opening. In the meantime, the plant is held in place as the hairs grip the soil.

. . .

In nutrient poor soils such as in parts of Australia and sub-Saharan Africa, plants have adapted by producing more root hairs. A better understanding of this adaptation will allow the development of crops able to grow in inhospitable environments.

How roots find a route

You know that carnivorous plants eat bugs. The pitcher part of the plant acts as a stomach. Some scientists in Japan have recently figured out what chemicals they use to do this.

Japanese scientists now report completely deciphering this complex cocktail of digestive and antibacterial enzymes. Their study is scheduled for the February issue of ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research.Unlike other plants that absorb nutrients from the soil, carnivorous plants growing in nutrient-poor soils have special organs to capture insects, digest them and absorb the nitrogen and phosphorous their environment sorely lacks. The identity of all the myriad proteins involved in this evolutionary marvel — some of which could have beneficial applications in medicine and agriculture — has been a mystery until now.

Tatsuro Hamada and Naoya Hatano used cutting-edge proteomic analysis to identify all of the components. They isolated and sequenced the proteins, then compared each with existing proteins to find structural matches.

Hamada and Hatano detected seven proteins that exist mainly in the pitcher fluid of N. alata — three of which can only be found in this species — including useful enzymes that may inhibit bacterial growth and rotting as the plant slowly digests its prey. [ read more Secret of the carnivorous pitcher plant's slurp]

Also reporting on this story in more detail is Nature…

The fluid at the base of the trap had long been thought to contain digestive enzymes. Previous research had confirmed this, but exactly which enzymes were present was anyone’s guess. “Digestion in pitcher plants has been actively studied for more than 150 years and we still don’t know how it works [because] it is such a complex process,” says Chris Frazier at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Now, Naoya Hatano from the Harima Institute in Riken and Tatsuro Hamada from Ishikawa Prefectural University in Japan have identified seven proteins in the carnivorous plant’s fluid. They grew the carnivorous plants in their lab, and collected the fluid from newly opened pitchers to prevent contamination from recently captured insects. Then they used polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis to separate out the proteins, and mass spectrometry to identify what type of enzymes the proteins were likely to be. Because some of the enzymes they found were unfamiliar, they searched protein databases to find enzymes with similar structures and noted that some of them were probably not digestive at all. [ read more Little lab of horrors ]