Build a Carnivorous Plant Box with a water reservoir

If you’ve kept your carnivorous plants outdoors in a tray of water, you’ve probably ended up with a lot of wriggly squiggly mosquito larvae writhing around in the tray. Not only are they unsightly, the last thing you need in your yard is a nursery for a horde of tiny flying vampires.

The solution is to put the water reservoir inside the planter. I’ll show you how to do it with a window box, some gravel, weed fabric, and polycarbonate tube.

The plants we’re using are a group of Sarracenia x Scarlet Belle that we used in our plant light shootout. They are just coming out of dormancy, so we’ll have to cut all of last year’s pitchers off to make room for the new ones. You can see they already have a few new pitchers. These plants were purchased from Kenny Coogan on eBay: https://ebay.us/A7fqAM

We start with a simple window box that has no drainage holes.

Next, we add a layer of gravel about an inch deep, to give the water a place to go.

Then we cut a piece of weed fabric to go on top of the gravel to keep the soil out of our water reservoir. We cut the ends of the fabric to overlap and create a box shape that will fit tightly to the sides and end of the window box, to keep the soil out of the water reservoir.

Using the tubing, we traced a circle on the weed fabric and cut it out for the tube to get down into the gravel layer.

The tubing we’re using is 2″ outside diameter clear polycarbonate. This will make it easy to pour the water in. Since the water doesn’t have to travel through the soil to reach the gravel, it will flow quickly out of the tube and across the bottom of the window box.

Once the tubing is in and all pushed all the way down to the bottom of the gravel, we put the plants in place, and filled around them with our carnivorous plant mixture which is peat, pearlite, and sand.

The final result is an easy to care for planter for your carnivorous plants to spend the summer outdoors. The tubing not only allows an easy way to keep water in the planter, just by looking down into it you can determine if more water is needed. You want to keep the water so most of the gravel in tube is submerged.

Since we were on a roll, we made another window box for our Sarracenia minor and a mixed species display planter with a Sarracenia alata x minor, three Venus flytraps, two Sarracenia purpurea, and a bunch of sundews.

Links to products we used:

Castroviejo tools: https://ebay.us/mPfVch
Plastic window boxes: https://amzn.to/3mkCYE2
Sta-Green landscaping fabric: https://amzn.to/3zWatSd
Polycarbonate tube: https://amzn.to/2YgIyio

Note: we may receive a commission if you use the links above.