FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Guys, I'm a complete noob. I've come into possession of some venus fly trap seeds, and I'd very much like to not kill them. One thing that everyone seems to agree on is that venus fly traps want water with as little mineral content as possible. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how to acquire this. Whenever I've found distilled water in stores, it always seems to have a bunch of minerals re-added afterwards. Are there specific brands or store chains that will sell me the appropriately de-mineralized water? Do I need to buy a big fancy expensive distillery setup and make my own? In short, how does this *work*?

First of all, Welcome to the Forum!

Many growers use rain water and collect it from their roofs.

I buy it as Steam Distilled Water in a large grocery store chain, Pick & Save, owned by Roundy's
It is usually not used as drinking water. It is commonly used for ironing, baby formula, automotive batteries and other purposes.

Some people install a special filter system called a Reverse Osmosis Filter that gets your tap water adequately pure.

Where are you located?
I'm near Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the USA.

Good growing,
Mike

As Mike said. I use rainwater when I can. When I'm out I go to the store and get some distilled water for like .89 cents a gallon.

Hi Mike! Thanks for your quick and informative reply!

I'm located near Vancouver BC, in Canada. We get plenty of rain here, but I live in an appartment building so I don't really have an easy way to collect it. (Relatedly, I'm also a bit concerned about getting my plants adequate light since all my windows are north-facing and it's overcast here for the great majority of the year. I may need to invest in some indoor lighting at some point...)

I'll try looking in the ironing, baby, and car battery sections of some similar stores and see what I can come up with. Hopefully my mistake was just in limiting my search to the drinking water section.

Thanks again!
- Melissa

My food store has an aisle section for Gallon (and larger) sized bottles of water. It's separate from the smaller bottles sold for drinking.

There is also a special Reverse Osmosis filter machine there that will refill customer-supplied bottles of water. (I've not tried that one yet but I plan to.)

One almost indispensable for CP growers is a TDS Meter. It measures Total Dissolved Solids in your water. You can get one for about $10.00 or less through Amazon.

It is possible that your local tap water is pure enough.
CP need a TDS less than 50 to thrive.
I was just GOOGLING Vancouver BC Tap Water TDS and some of the results I saw suggest that your local tap water has a TDS well below 25.

Run a GOOGLE search and see what your local municipality TDS is.
If it is below 50, you don't have to look for distilled water, just use tap.

Good growing,
Mike

A bit of googling suggests that my city does, indeed, consistently have very low TDS, though no one seems able to agree on the exact number. That's quite promising, but I know the plumbing in my building is pretty ancient, so I won't rely on tap water until I can get a TDS meter.

I checked out Canadian Tire (a large store with sections for both car batteries *and* for ironing stuff), and while they didn't carry distilled water, they did sell gallons of deionized water "with a bittering agent" that didn't bother to give a number for its TDS, so I figured that was probably out.

Fortunately, I stumbled on to some nice fancy water intended for human consumption that was labelled as having <40ppm, so that'll have to do until I can find real distilled water somewhere and/or verify the TDS in my tap water.

Thanks for being helpful!

I gues deionized water having a bittering agent is a canada only regulation
(to make it..taste bad so kids/animals don't drink it)

"The bittering agent is in the water so that it becomes unfit for human consumption. The addition of a bittering agent may be a Canadian health department requirement, have not seen it south of the border. Deionized water is devoid of any minerals or free ions except H2 and O2. It will react with almost anything and pull minerals out of it. The bittering agent adds sufficient ions to prevent this so what you have is a passivated deionized water."

edit to add, looks like you have these in Vancouver, and they show it on their website at least:

https://www.loblaws.ca/Food/Drinks/Wate ... 1006009000

(deionized and distilled water)

I'm in northern IL, and I usually just get the distilled water from walgreens. Which I just noticed has a best by date set for 2019. Just look for "NICE! distilled water" to check for additives, look at the nutrients. Pretty cheap too.

I either get water from the store or from rain or from taro leaves that have collected said rain. They all work fine for me. It's dry season where I live so I'm using store-bought water. Only a few cents per bottle.

Hi all, for years i have used a portable room dehumidifier to produce water for all my CP's. In the summer months, it will produce about 4 gallons per day! They cost a few bucks to purchase, but put an end to buying water, or collecting rain water.