FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Yes, you've heard that right folks. I'm going to be attempting to grow this plant outdoors in central Florida. Currently, I have it on an outdoor windowsill that receives a few hours of direct sun a day, and bright, indirect light the rest of the day. I have it sitting in a tray of water that goes up to the rim of the pot. I also pour cooled water on the medium a few times to keep the roots cool.

So I have a few questions..
How moist should I keep the medium? how high up the pot should the water level be? And how much sun should I give it? I want to try to avoid giving it full sun for more than three hours a day because of the intense Florida heat. It also gets shaded a bit during the hottest parts of the day, thanks to the succulents I have growing near it.

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Good luck to you!

Thanks!

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How many do you have? Just one?

Just one. Got it off on ebay

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That one plant boi wrote: So I have a few questions..
How moist should I keep the medium? how high up the pot should the water level be? And how much sun should I give it? I want to try to avoid giving it full sun for more than three hours a day because of the intense Florida heat. It also gets shaded a bit during the hottest parts of the day, thanks to the succulents I have growing near it.
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Your plant is most likely doomed but as an interesting "what if' exercise here goes: Quite moist. Darlings have shallow roots so you want to go a good few inches deep with the water in the tray. Dappled shade all day in Florida should be fine. You want a light colored pot since a dark one will heat up in any sun it does get. You might even consider a terracotta pot. You want a no peat and extremely well drained media think 40/60 or even 30/70 sphag/perlite or even go with one of those low to no organic Nep medias. Just my 2 cents. Good luck!

I pretty much second what Huntsmanshorn said. But i sure do wish you the best. I live in central Louisiana, and i got several nice plants and some stolon root from Phil Golding a few years ago. They all did well....for a while. The smaller plants and stolon root seemed to actually be tougher with regards to heat tolerance than the larger ones. But, sadly, after a couple of seasons, everything eventually croaked! I do want to mention that i didn't use any kind of recirculating pump, or ice, or anything like that. Just an open, airy medium with a lot of perlite, and cool water at least once a day. As many have said, i think the deal breaker for growing Darlingtonia in Southern states is the lack of temperature drop at night. If not for that, they might make it. Once again, best of luck, and keep us updated!!

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Huntsmanshorn wrote:

That one plant boi wrote: So I have a few questions..
How moist should I keep the medium? how high up the pot should the water level be? And how much sun should I give it? I want to try to avoid giving it full sun for more than three hours a day because of the intense Florida heat. It also gets shaded a bit during the hottest parts of the day, thanks to the succulents I have growing near it.
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Your plant is most likely doomed but as an interesting "what if' exercise here goes: Quite moist. Darlings have shallow roots so you want to go a good few inches deep with the water in the tray. Dappled shade all day in Florida should be fine. You want a light colored pot since a dark one will heat up in any sun it does get. You might even consider a terracotta pot. You want a no peat and extremely well drained media think 40/60 or even 30/70 sphag/perlite or even go with one of those low to no organic Nep medias. Just my 2 cents. Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback! Do you think I could successfully keep it indoors under t5's for now until I could repot it and such?

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[/quote]Thanks for the feedback! Do you think I could successfully keep it indoors under t5's for now until I could repot it and such?
[/quote]

Depends on the indoor temps. I grew a bunch of little seedlings for about a year and a half inside under t5s at about 72F 24/7 so if you can hit those temps or lower... yea, possibly.

Huntsmanshorn wrote:

Thanks for the feedback! Do you think I could successfully keep it indoors under t5's for now until I could repot it and such?
[/quote]

Depends on the indoor temps. I grew a bunch of little seedlings for about a year and a half inside under t5s at about 72F 24/7 so if you can hit those temps or lower... yea, possibly.[/quote]Gotcha. One more thing... How would I go about giving it a dormancy period? Could I put it in the refrigerator for a few months? And what about decreasing the light levels?

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I have a DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor deep inside my cobra lily pot. Once it gets direct sun, the temperature goes up by about 5 to 10 C over the temperature you'd see on the weather forecast (some times more). I read that cobra lily's are fine under 30 C, but mine has gone to 35 quite frequently over the past month, and it reached 40 once. I get decent night time temperature drops so I'm not suggesting your lily will be fine if it reaches these temperatures (I'm not even suggesting mine is fine... I've only had it for a month), but adding a temperature sensor could be a nice way of determining which interventions work best at keeping it as cool as possible. I used arduino/losant to DIY my setup (happy to share more info if needed) and am unsure if there are any plug-and-play waterproof temp sensors with logging available.

On another note, I read somewhere (I can't remember where) that some people thought that cobra lilies die from fungus and not from high temperatures. They claimed the fungus would tend to proliferate in high heat / high humidity environments, which is why growing them on the east coast is so difficult (wheras west coast heat isn't humid). I have no idea if this is true, but in theory, you could use Azoxystrobin to counteract these effects (see steroids-for-fly-traps-t39124.html).

That one plant boi wrote:Gotcha. One more thing... How would I go about giving it a dormancy period? Could I put it in the refrigerator for a few months? And what about decreasing the light levels?

Let it head into whatever level of dormancy it can by leaving it outside until December and sometime around the shortest day of the year pack it up and in the fridge it goes. Give it 10 weeks and then back outside where it will (hopefully) still be somewhat cool. That's the best I can tell you, unless you want to go with the whole mechanical rout, but IMHO, that is way too much work, and not really any fun at all.

mcgrumpers wrote: On another note, I read somewhere (I can't remember where) that some people thought that cobra lilies die from fungus and not from high temperatures. They claimed the fungus would tend to proliferate in high heat / high humidity environments, which is why growing them on the east coast is so difficult (wheras west coast heat isn't humid). I have no idea if this is true, but in theory, you could use Azoxystrobin to counteract these effects (see steroids-for-fly-traps-t39124.html).

I actually tried this several months ago with all my outside plants and I can report with absolute certainty that I have no idea if it helped any at all. Did my Darlings survive the high 80s low 90s heat we had? Yes they did. Would they have anyway? Most probably. After all they did last year. But did they do better than they would have if I hadn't treated them? Beats me. So there you go, a definitive maybe. I can say this much for sure, it didn't hurt them any.

Huntsmanshorn wrote:

mcgrumpers wrote: On another note, I read somewhere (I can't remember where) that some people thought that cobra lilies die from fungus and not from high temperatures. They claimed the fungus would tend to proliferate in high heat / high humidity environments, which is why growing them on the east coast is so difficult (wheras west coast heat isn't humid). I have no idea if this is true, but in theory, you could use Azoxystrobin to counteract these effects (see steroids-for-fly-traps-t39124.html).

I actually tried this several months ago with all my outside plants and I can report with absolute certainty that I have no idea if it helped any at all. Did my Darlings survive the high 80s low 90s heat we had? Yes they did. Would they have anyway? Most probably. After all they did last year. But did they do better than they would have if I hadn't treated them? Beats me. So there you go, a definitive maybe. I can say this much for sure, it didn't hurt them any.

Cool! That it doesn't hurt them is a good start! Running an AB test on the east coast (or somewhere where cobra's are typically unlikely to survive) may yield more conclusive data, but that sounds like a lot of work.

I grew a Darlingtonia Californica from seed kinda by accident... Or beginners dumb luck. It grew for 2 years in my kitchen window and I killed it this Summer by experimenting with it in way too much heat for it. It had even progressed to the adult pitchers
But you have inspired me to get another one a little bigger and keep it in my window. I will give it to myself for my birthday.