Stumble It!Carnivores hate soap nuts
I have sundew, fly trap and pitcher plants. As carnivorous plants they have some quite specific requirements. They need to be constantly moist but with rain water as tap water is toxic to them. They need reasonable sun, some like full sun some prefer shade.
That’s my pot of sundew, flowering, which is unusual apparently.
So what have carnivorous plants got to do with soap nuts? The varieties I have don’t tolerate frost so they have to come inside over the winter and then they go out in late spring. While they were inside they picked up some greenfly. How daft is that? A carnivorous, fly eating plant being attacked by greenfly?
I used soap nut solution on them, it’s worked fantastically well on my roses and other green fly infested plants in the garden so I used it and I really didn’t think about it much.
They wilted, they were very sick. Then I researched carnivores a bit more and discovered that they don’t tolerate detergent. Ooops. I rinsed it all off in fresh rainwater, of which I have plenty this year….
They recovered beautifully but the lesson is - Do Not spray carnivorous plants with anti-greenfly, diluted soap nut solution.
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August 31st, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Oops! great post, very interesting and you certainly enlightened me. Glad your plant is surviving and healing now.
Maybe we should get a fly trap - can you keep them indoors during the summer? We get quite a lot of flies because of living near fields of horses and lots of chickens running around. Do you think it would help to actually get rid of flies that come in the house, or are they more of an interesting talking point?
August 31st, 2008 at 5:00 pm
PlantS - Three varieties and there are at least 4 sundews in that pot now, it keeps having babies! The sundews suffered most because they have beads of sticky stuff on and the detergent action of the soap nut solution interferes with that as well as being in tap water - which I also didn’t consider.
None of mine are big enough to be able to catch anything much bigger than midges really, fruit flies maybe, but not a big blue bottle or horse flies. They could be indoors I suppose, as long as they get enough light - you could try it and see? There are fly trap varieties that get bigger I think.