Circa three dozen carnivorous plants show a sufficient frost hardiness for an all-year culture outdoors. On the next sites I show you the construction of suitable biotops. Fens are also in Germany the biotop of butterworts. The hardy butterworts prefer all a rather alkaline soil and are thereby in a fen bed well preserved. In contrast, the remaining hardy carnivorous plant species belong in a raised bog bed with a pH-value < 4.

However, for a culture over years is not necessarily required the construction of a several square metres large bog bed. Also in a mortar bucket, in an old bathtub or the like is a stable biotop over years establishable. On the corresponding site you find also a table with species, which are suitable for an all-year cultivation outdoors.

In addition, these biotops are in summer also the ideal place for many non-hardy carnivorous plants. Simply plant them in clay pots and sink the pots as deep as their rim into the peat. The plant is provided sufficiently with moisture through the water-permeable clay wall.

If you deign your carnivorous plants a outdoor cultivation, you are rewarded with perfect coloured and vital plants, which flower abundantly. But in the case of an outdoor cultivation you should watch out for the following risks:

1. Snails: Unfortunately they are often attracted by moist biotops and conceal themself in the sphagnum moss. Sometimes it is enough to collect them at damp weather in the dusk. Occasionally the use of beer traps can becoming necessary.

2. Birds: Spring is the critical time. Then a bog bed is a real eldorado as nesting material storage for birds. Because of the bird’s collecting passion are unfortunately most notably small Droseras together with sphagnum moss rooted out from the peat and dry out. I protect delicate small plants in spring with a small basket made of mesh wire.

3. Peat moss: Yes, you have read right! The elsewhere congenial sphagnum moss can sometimes sprawl under congenial conditions (in the case that you done all right at construction). Rosettes-forming Droseras are overgrown and die because of light deficiency. But also larger plants are endangered. Unfortunately I have already lost two Heliamphora- and one Darlingtonia-plant due to sphagnum moss. In summer the plants prospered within the sphagnum-pad due to the cooling effect by water evaporation magnificently. In autumn the sphagnum moss redoes a strong burst of growth and sprawls almost the plants, so that these can rot at the growth base during the dank autumn weather. Here aids only an occasional cut with the scissors. Other fanciers of carnivorous plants are glad about a package of sphagnum moss heads.