FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

It doesn't look like ceramic...more like terra cotta, and those are the pots that you should watch out for. They can leach minerals into the soil, and that's no good for your VFTs.
Glazed ceramics or even terracotta glazed on the inside should be fine though. Good luck!
Roey- eamsch uses pure rain and distilled water both which contain none or infinitesimal amounts of dissolved minerals, so that much white solid build-up wouldn't be possible.
Was the pot always like that or was the build-up relatively new?

The thing is, this same thing happened to my non-carnivorous plants. I heard that ceramic was bad too, unless it was glazed. I'm 60% sure it's an effect of water on the pot.

i got the pot and the plants maybe 2 months ago. it started building up 2-3 weeks later

Don't worry too much, eamsch. The residue on the outside of earthenware (red clay) pots always looks worse than it is. It might be nothing more than the minerals absorbed into the pores of the pot during a quenching (cooling down) in a water dip or water spray after firing (after being in the kiln), or perhaps more likely, from being washed with regular tap water before being sold or before use.

Just wipe the residue off with a sponge (moistened with distilled water, not tap water) periodically, and in time it will probably decrease as more and more of the soluble material is taken to the outside surface of the pot where it appears as the water it was dissolved in evaporates. You can also immerse the pot up to near the rim in a bowl or bucket of distilled or rain water for an hour or two after wiping as much residue off as you can, and that will help leach out any remaining soluble mineral salts.

If you are using a good carnivorous plant growing medium, and distilled or rain water, then there is nothing to worry about unless your pots are not real earthenware pots, but are instead a terracotta colored man-made ceramic compound with lots of calcium carbonate or other non-clay materials in it. Clay itself is inert and will not harm carnivorous plants. Your pots (in the photos) look like real earthenware pots to me, although a close up photo of the sides of the pots in good light would help to confirm that fact.

In the future when you use earthenware pots, you might soak them in a bucket filled with rain water for a while, so that most of the minerals that are in the pores of the clay (but which are not in the clay itself) can dissolve into the rain water before you use the pot for plants. That way there would probably be much less residue.

Remember, the light-colored residue comes from exposure to dissolved material in water, NOT from the clay itself. The clay is harmless to carnivorous plants, as it contains only silica, alumina (aluminum oxides) and a little bit of iron oxide (which gives it the red color).

Told you!
Thanks, Steve.
See? No one believed me.