Most tap water supplies in first world nations is treated with chlorine and/or fluoride and often contain large amounts of calcium and magnesium. These chemicals are toxic to Venus flytraps, in fact they’re probably not much good for plants in general, but Venus flytraps are particularly sensitive to chemicals in their water supply and it’s use can slow down the growth of your flytrap and sometimes even kill it.
If your plant is kept outside and there’s plenty of rain water available then you wont have any problems. But if you are in a dry spell or your plant is kept inside, then it’s a good idea not to use tap water for your plant.
Other options instead of using tap water are:
- distilled water
- rain water – collecting from your roof is usually quite easy
- bottled filtered drinking water – expensive!
- filtered tap water – make sure it’s a good filter though
Filtered water normally contains some chemical residues, but not enough to cause grief for your Venus flytrap. Spring water often contains significant other minerals so isn’t recommended, but is still a better option than using tap water.
This is a follow up to my previous post on not using tap water.
It seems that some morons out there have been thinking up some truly stupid ways to purify water. Including the following:
- Urinate on your plant
Oh for the love god no! Urine is often described as ‘clean’ due it not containing dangerous bacteria. However, it is still packed full of all sorts of metal salts which will likely kill your plant extremely quickly. Plus it’s disgusting, so don’t do it. If you have ever recommended this technique to anyone, then please slap yourself across the face now as punishment!
- Leaving water to stand over night
This may get rid of a tiny amount of surface chlorine gas, but 99% will remain and at worst some water will evaporate and you will concentrate the remaining inorganic contaminants. So basically you will likely make your water a pinch more toxic by doing this!
- Boil your water
Jeepers! This is even worse. Yes you will remove a simdgen of chlorine, but you are still concentrating all the inorganic contaminants which will kill your plant, so don’t do it.
- Use a coffee or paper funnel type filter
Argh! Well at least this one doesn’t make things worse, but it certainly doesn’t help. You are just wasting your time. These are sieve type filters which can not filter out chemicals. The chemicals are too small to be blocked by a simple sieve system.
- Collecting water from your fridge
Well this is a little weird, but may actually work. The water your fridge creates is condensed from the air, so technically should be void of almost all inorganic contaminants. This sound difficult though and I can’t imagine the average fridge would create a huge amount of water anyway.
Another good way to purify water which I didn’t mention in my previous post, is to use a reverse osmosis unit.