The Venus Fly Trap Terrarium

for the past two years that I've been consistently active on YouTube a lot of you have asked me to do is set up for carnivorous plants with a lot of those who costs being for venus flytraps I kept saying in comments that I would eventually do something with them and the time has finally come the reason that I put this off for so long is that there are some logistical issues with keeping venus flytraps in a terrarium as a result this is an experimental build that may or may not be successful I will talk more about that as we work through the build but I think we may be able to pull something off anyways let's get into the build I've been in and out of Walmart several times in the past few weeks they've had venus flytraps in the gardens section but no one was buying them naturally I felt sorry for the plants because no one wanted them and I decided that it was finally time to do this build so I bought three of them at five dollars apiece and hopes to make a cool terrarium as I said earlier there are some issues as keeping fly traps in a terrarium this is largely because these plants have specialized care requirements since they are temperate plant they need a cool dormant period to survive long term this is by far the thing that has been most concerned but it may be less of an issue than I originally thought keep this in mind because we'll revisit it near the end of the video another specialized aspect about caring for fly traps are their substrate requirements unlike most plants that obtain nutrients through the soil fly traps like other carnivorous plants receive their nutrients from eating insects therefore any nutrients present within the substrate will actually be harmful to the plant so we're going to have to mix up a custom substrate blend much like the substrate that we typically use for terrariums we want this substrate to drain well resist compaction and stay moist without becoming soggy to achieve this we're going to use three components including dried sphagnum Moss peat moss in quartz and when choosing these components it's extremely to find ones that aren't enriched with nutrients the reason being that we want this substrate to be as absent of nutrients as possible now then we'll get roughly one part of peat moss two parts of dried sphagnum moss and one part of quartz sand and mix them together after everything is thoroughly mixed together you should end up with something that looks like this there are other substrate mixes that could work but this one seemed like it would work well for a terrarium and will fulfill the plants needs of course we're also going to need a suitable container I already had this awesome jar on my stockpile and although I was saving it for something else I knew it would be perfect for this build plus that gives me the excuse to buy another one later on when choosing a container for this build you're gonna want something that's decently sized because these plants can get somewhat large now we're ready to build the terrarium first let's start out with the false bottom we'll make this just like we would for other terrariums using gravel and carbon fiber glass window screen mesh here I just have a bit of black gravel and some spare window screen from previous builds when cutting this out I find it easiest to use an object that's slightly larger than the diameter of the container as a guide in this case a bucket so in combination with an exacto knife I use this bucket as a guide and cut out the mesh with the mesh cutout we can dump the gravel into the jar which I did using a folded piece of paper I recommend going more generous on this layer for flytraps than we would for other plans just like in other terrariums this layer will help keep standing water separate from the plants roots among other things after getting a good layer of gravel down in the jar the window screen was then put in place now we'll move on to the substrate layer to add this component I use the piece of paper again as I dumped it into the container I also evened it out with a fan brush before we move on maybe wondering why I didn't add a charcoal layer well I suspect that charcoal will add on 1/2 nutrients into the terrarium and as I expressed earlier that's not something that the fly shops will take kindly to after getting a nice layer of substrate in the container we could then unpause the flytraps in doing so you want to be as gentle as possible to avoid over stressing the plant as such I'm leaving some of the existing substrate around the base of the plant from here I planted one of the fly chaps in the back of the container using various tools I only started with one so that I could get a feel for how I wanted to hardscape everything from that afterward I got some black lava rock and hardscaped a portion of the terrarium I didn't really have a set idea and mind for this sorry just let the scape take shape on its own [Music] after escaping for a bit I placed an additional Fly Trap then I continued to escape the terrarium eventually I got to the point where I could start adding some moss and liverwort like the fly traps these are temperate mosses so they shouldn't have any issue going through a dormant period however my only concern with adding these mosses is that they may contaminate the setup with unwanted nutrients but I guess we'll see what happens using my tweezers I went through the terrarium and placed patches of moss in a way that I found aesthetically pleasing during this process I also added some more lava rocks and a third Venus flytrap eventually I ended up with the final design seen here that said we're going to have to add some water before we can call it quits in doing so you'll have to use distilled water reverse osmosis water or rain water pretty much any other type of water is going to have minerals in it which unfortunately would kill your flytrap I picked up a gallon of distilled water at Walmart for around $1 so it's not hard to come by if you plan this out ahead of time you could just as easily get some rain water totally free finally when watering your terrarium you want to add enough to moisten the substrate but not so much that you create a soggy environment also since this is an open container I'm gonna have to periodically add more water [Music] overall I like how this terrarium turned out and I'm hoping that we can get it to last long-term as I said Venus flytraps are a temperate plant which require dormancy period if you want your plant to last more than a few years there's absolutely no way around it during this period of time the temperature will more or less cause the plant to go to sleep where will reawaken in the spring to replicate this natural cycle I'll most likely put my terrarium in the garage just in front of the window I'll keep my terrarium there for around three or four months before bringing it back inside to be more specific I'll put it out there in November and return it to the terrarium shelf in late March during this period I'm not gonna do any updates or anything I'll simply document the process and then release a single video when a time comes again this is an experimental build and I'm not sure if it will even work I think it very well could but we're gonna have to be patient and wait and see what happens and that about wraps it up I know that a lot of you also wanted to see a tropical carnivorous plant terrarium but we'll save that for another video I just wanted to start here since a lot of you were requesting this video anyways thanks for tuning in if you liked the video and haven't done so already take a second give me a thumbs up I'd greatly appreciate it also if you want to see what becomes of this terrarium and you're not yet subscribed be sure to do so and hit the notification bell so you don't miss any of my uploads finally if you want to learn more about less experimental terrariums go check out the video description for some cool videos by yours truly thanks again for stopping by and I'll see you next time peace

Channel: SerpaDesign

Views: 2,195,043

Rating: 4.9156656 out of 5

Keywords: fly trap, flytrap, venus flytrap, venus fly trap, carnivorous plant, carnivorous plant terrarium, terrarium, bottle garden, fly trap terrarium, diy, do it yourself, experiment

Id: mC4earMBHIo

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 27 2018