Sphagnum is super useful and very easy to grow.  It has mold inhibiting qualities that we desire for a variety of botanical uses, it can help regulate moisture, and it looks awesome!  Sphagnum varieties range from bright green to deep purplish red.




 It requires high humidity and very little organic material.  In nature it is usually found layered like a cake live moss/dead moss/organic material.  This is what I have tried to replicate in my bog box; I dug out a hole for this picture to visualize the layers.



This box started with three quarters of an inch of Canadian peat on the bottom layer, a layer of wet baled long fiber sphagnum moss that I purchased in a bag from lowes, and about a cup of live sphagnum purchased on the internet.  Here's what it looked like the night I put it together:


here it is 6 months later:


It has completely taken over the box.  In fact I have trimmed it several times and thrown the trimmings into another box that I just keep a layer of peat in.  This box sits on the far side of my grow room and contains all of my moisture-needing clones, cuttings, moist experiments, etc.


Just the trimmings from the other box have spread to nearly dominate this box as well.  Look, it is even taking root in this rose cup that has never touched sphagnum just from airborne spores:


It can also be grown from brown dry sphagnum.  These cups were filled with the stuff from Lowe's ground up in the food processor then mixed with perlite.  These are carnivorous seeds from last summer that are still yet to sprout (and likely never will.)  They are covered with sphagnum sprouts on all sides.


To maintain humidity levels I use plastic domes with hydrometers inside.  The lights are standard 4' shop light with 1 cool white 1 warm clf bulb in each hood.  4 hoods in total.  


In short, growing your own sphagnum is really easy, extremely inexpensive, and very rewarding.  

Check out these Black Madeira 1-node rock wool cubes benefiting from the mold inhibitors of local sphagnum:

yupe. being reading up on this too. will be making bog box soon. just need to go and pick up bale of peat moss something this week. i have handful of live s.moss in ziplock bag just waiting. then it's sundew time :)

Nice.  Keep space between the sundews and the moss because if they touch for more than a day or so the sundew will start to wither.  

Great info Greg.  Thanks

OK Greg

    Your assignment is to put together a step-by- step Power Point on how to build and maintain a carnivorous plant sphagnum moss box.

Suzi soon will have some things to say about raising moss in her fig bench taken last week from a frozen bog!

I just buy

$3.48 for dry orchid/spag moss
$1.00 ziplock bag
or $1.00 container 

To ME....this works as well and it is all under $5.00. Looks great. But whatever it takes to root is the driving force.

-I do like the sundews. I may hang them up like ornaments around my 15yr old Peach Tree, and the rest of my fruiting trees (including figs).

Jennifer

Nice & interesting. Something else to try and learn. Thanks for the post.

Dale - lol.  Step 1: make bog box of sphagnum.  Step 2: get carnivorous plants.  Step 3: put carnivorous plants in box bog of sphagnum.  Step 4: ???  Step 5: profit!

Bob - you are supposed to grow sundew around sphagnum just don't let them *touch*.  Keep a few inches on all sides of the sundew and trim the sphagnum back when it gets too close.  In the wild obviously there would be no maintenance and they would inevitably touch at several points.  Those points will dry up and the rest of the plant will proceed fine.  But in indoor cultivation since we can control that our sundews will grow much more vigorously.  To highlight the problem of sundews reaching sphagnum, let's look at how drosera creates food.

In a properly moist environment the sundew will secret a dense sweet resin from the tips on its leaves which will swell into a bulb held in by the high viscosity/surface tension of the liquid.  Bugs get attracted to it then stuck like glue.  As the struggle the mechanical element of the leaves are triggered to wrap up allowing the maximum amount of the bug to be in contact with the resin bulbs--this mechanism is very similar to the venus flytrap.  The resin then covers the insect and breaks down it's internal goodies into a sort of nutritional 'soup', which then is reabsorbed by the plant.  After this liquid is absorbed that leaf will be completely dry and will have no resin bulbs for a few days.  The leftover parts of the insect that were nondigestable will then cover with a thin white mold and fall off to go about their decomposing business.  

When sphagnum touches the leaves the plant tries to go through this same process.  Except the sphagnum can easily retain all of the glue it is touching and it will never run out of liquid to drain back to the plant (because it has such incredible water retention properties.)  In my bog box I have seed this happen several times.  When I don't trim back the sphagnum I often find the outermost leaves of the sundew withered up against them.  I'm not sure if it just drains them or if something nondigestable happens or other, just that it turns out bad for the sundew when they touch.  

Interesting side tidbit on sundews:  Charles Darwin once wrote to his botanist friend Asa Gray that he cared more about the Sundews than the origins of all other life on Earth combined!

Nice write-up on sundews, thanks

You inspired me to take a try on two plants, just bought: Drosera Spathulata

Awesome!  Make sure you check your mailbox every day!  Here in NJ it was 12 degrees this morning.  I had ordered a P. florian last week and didn't check my mailbox only yesterday.  Of course that's the day it arrived.  This morning I found a frozen block of sphagnum in the mail.  Ugh.  :-(

We thawed it out and potted it up in the bog box, but I have very low expectations.  I mean it was a *SOLID* block of ice.  :-(

I'm holding off ordering CP until weather improves. I was afraid that my ceph will meet the same fate as your ping, but it got through.

yes, the temps are rise into the 40s next week so timing is everything