Nefarious!

My second speaker at the garden fair was a young guy named Alex Eits.  He thanked us for coming for coming to hear about a type of plant most people disregard - carnivorous plants.  As a kid I had a Venus fly trap and I thought it was an amazing plant until it died.  You can see hundreds of beautiful looking Venus fly traps for sale at the big box stores in the spring. They all look beautiful but they're all going to die. All those plants are planted in dirt.  The soil is going to kill them.  Carnivorous plants adapted to be carnivorous because they were located in nutrient poor places such as bogs or rocks.  The rich soil will kill them with too many nutrients.  Take that Venus fly trap you bought at Home Depot home and pull it out of the soil.Rinse the soil off the roots.  Plant it in perlite and you might have a chance with it.  Venus fly trap plants are native to only a few counties on the border of southern North Carolina and northern South Carolina so they need to winter.  And here our fluent, talented speaker really showed his talents.  He had the words, he had the moves, he had the facial expressions.  Seriously, he could be on stage he was that good.  He turned to his side to show us his profile.  He bowed his head. He clenched his fist in front of his chest.  Like a television evangelist he told us, "You need to BELIEVE in the power of dormancy!"  He was hysterically funny  I laughed out loud. In the fall he advised us to take that Venus fly trap downstairs to a north window of the lower level and let it get cold (down to 50) and dry out some.  The leaves will wither and turn black.  As long as there is some green at the base of the plant it will come back.  This speaker was so good I could listen to him all day.  We learned about pitcher plants and bladderworts and sun dews.  He even went into taxonomy and it wasn't boring. I very much enjoyed my talk on the nefarious ways of carnivorous plants.