Supposed to get to 31 for a few hours... might wanna bring your plants in... just sayin..

Already did, sport

I have a literal tropical garden of Eden so all the moving was a chore…multiple citrus, guava and avocados all flowering. Then hay had to be put down on the food garden and flower beds. I'm tired.

I'm rolling the dice that it's not going to be cold enough long enough.

studioone said:

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FlyRod said:

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I have a literal tropical garden of Eden so all the moving was a chore…multiple citrus, guava and avocados all flowering. Then hay had to be put down on the food garden and flower beds. I'm tired.

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Got you beat... I've got about 8000 carnivorous plants.. most of which would die...

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Thoughts and prayers man.

Yea, just planted small pepper plants. Covered what I could. Oh well.

Put big cups over all my small tomatoes. Minor ice on the leaves. Some look fine and a few might get stunted.

I woke up pretty early and it was about 35-36...I wonder if it actually got below freezing. Few plants I left unprotected looked ok when I left for work.

studioone said:

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FlyRod said:

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I have a literal tropical garden of Eden so all the moving was a chore…multiple citrus, guava and avocados all flowering. Then hay had to be put down on the food garden and flower beds. I'm tired.

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Got you beat... I've got about 8000 carnivorous plants.. most of which would die...

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Having been in a greenhouse that grows a significant fraction of the world's carnivorous plants, I'm curious how you take care of them?

Venus fly trap, for example, have ultra high humidity, fogging systems, use flood tables with deionized water and very precise fertilizer applications to prevent salt burn, advanced temperature control systems. The most expensive greenhouse setup I've been in, besides maybe fully automated Dutch growing operations.

How do you care for these at home?

Reached a low of 29 in Steep Hollow.

I put a tarp over 24 woven containers and about 11pm threw some of those big iron oxide hand warmer pouches around. I lost a few smaller plants that were at the edge of the tarp but have replacements. The rest were untouched.

Esteban du Plantier said:

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studioone said:

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FlyRod said:

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I have a literal tropical garden of Eden so all the moving was a chore…multiple citrus, guava and avocados all flowering. Then hay had to be put down on the food garden and flower beds. I'm tired.

---

Got you beat... I've got about 8000 carnivorous plants.. most of which would die...

---

Having been in a greenhouse that grows a significant fraction of the world's carnivorous plants, I'm curious how you take care of them?

Venus fly trap, for example, have ultra high humidity, fogging systems, use flood tables with deionized water and very precise fertilizer applications to prevent salt burn, advanced temperature control systems. The most expensive greenhouse setup I've been in, besides maybe fully automated Dutch growing operations.

How do you care for these at home?

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Not sure where you got that info on flytraps, but its mostly incorrect... at least not here in texas... maybe in the Netherlands it might be necessary for all that, but not here...

Flytraps are native to North Carolina. So their tolerance to United States weather is probably why they thrive here and people in the Netherlands have to baby them. The temperatures are not very relevant, because they THRIVE in texas sun. When it gets below 40, they curl up and shrink and hibernate,..... in the summer they just sit there and grow.... admittedly we do put 75% shade cloth on top of our plants and on the sides facing the afternoon sun because the summer heat will just burn everything to a cinder...not really, but it does kill off the traps of the plants untill it cools down...

Currently tonight the humidity is 61%.. Venus flytraps thrive best with 50%70% humidity, but are highly adaptable, often growing well at 30%40% if kept consistently moist. We keep all our plants in 10x20 trays (bout 250 of them) and keep them full of water almost all the time.. When we sell them, we tell people to take a peanut butter jar lid and fill it with rainwater or RODI water and let the plant sit in it while sitting on a window sill...

BCS water is lethal to carnivorous plants. I used to have a 300 gallon saltwater reef tank in my photo studio... I use the RODI system to make water for the plants.. We go through about 50 gallons of water, per day... BCS has about 400-800 Parts per million of salt, chlorine, and other assorted goo, and my filter system, as of yesterday, was giving us about 3 PPM. I check the output weekly.

The soil they sit in, excluding my nepenthes pitcher plants and pinguiculas, use equal parts peat and perlite. They CANNOT have any type of fertilizer in their soil. It's lethal... ANyhting they tell you is good for your tomatoes is lethal to my plants, so NO miracle grow.. So the absolute most non nutrient soil you can get is what they thrive in. However, I CAN and do take my TDS Meter (total dissolved solids, lowes $20) and get a bucket full of water, and sprinkle orchid fertilizer in it untill I get 200ppm... I do use that as a foliar spray along with fungicides, about once a month.. Most of my plants love to sit in swamps, but occasionally I DO occasionally get fungus infestations due to the brackish water we keep them in (yes, we use lots of mosquito dunks and foggers...)

Flytraps do NOT need fertilizer... nor does any carnivorous plant... I just spray to make them grow faster cause I sell hundreds of them every month... I also do most of our own propagation... my garage is full of test tubes full of baby plants and we have a farm in Millican that has grow tents full of the tropical stuff that cant stand our winters and need uber high humidity... I even am putting together a tissue culture lab in the farmhouse.

Flytraps do not require feeding flies... 97% -ish of their food comes from SUNLIGHT... thats why they're green... They're photosynthetic... They literally live off light. They DO need about 3%ish of nitrogen thats missing from their soil, so thats where a dead bug or foliar spray comes in... I tell people to keep them inside if they want, on a sunlit window sill, but a few days a week or so I tell them to take them outside and leave them and let them catch their own versions of flintstone chewables... Cause bugs are just a nutritional supplement, not their main source of food.

If you ever wanna visit to see our little ol' nursery, just shoot me an email. Darrin at Avalonweddingsbcs dot com. Someday I'll have a website... im just not a computer person..

You can also go to our fb or ig page... Dart stands for Darrin And Rebeccas Twins.

#dartnivorous

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