Sundew Care for Beginners: The Complete Guide to Growing Drosera
If you’ve heard that carnivorous plants are difficult and intimidating, sundew care for beginners is about to change your mind completely. I’ve been a lifelong plant lover and grown all kinds of things over the years, and I can tell you sundews are some of the easiest plants to grow, period. Not just easiest carnivorous plants. Easiest plants in general.
I’ve always been a Nepenthes guy at heart, but the more I grow sundews the more I love them. And once you see how forgiving these plants are, I think you’ll feel the same way.
The good news about sundew care for beginners is the list of things you actually need to know is short. Get a handful of basics right and these plants practically take care of themselves.
The three things sundew care for beginners actually comes down to
There’s a stigma around carnivorous plants that they require expert level knowledge and special equipment. None of that is true for sundews. Here’s everything you need.
Soil
Use a 50/50 mix of peat moss and perlite. Make sure both are free of any fertilizers — that’s the only real rule. You can find both at any big box store like Home Depot or Lowes. A huge brick of peat moss costs just a few dollars and will last you basically forever. Perlite is the same story, a couple bucks gets you a lot.
You can also use long fiber sphagnum moss instead, which is also cheap and easy to find at the same stores if you’d rather go that route.
Water
Use distilled water, rainwater, or reverse osmosis water. The reason matters more than the rule itself. These plants evolved to get their nitrogen from insects, not from the soil, so any minerals or nutrients in tap water will actually harm them over time.
This sounds harder than it is. A basic rain catcher outside the door does the job for free.
Keep your sundews sitting in water at all times, roughly a third of the way up the pot depending on the size, though most species are genuinely not picky about the exact level. You can go a little lower or a little higher and they’ll be fine. That tolerance for a range of conditions is honestly one of the best things about growing sundews. Grab some plastic trays from Target or Walmart, pot your plants, and let them sit in a shallow water level.
Light
Most sundews want a lot of light, roughly 16 hours a day. You can do this with a grow light, on a bright windowsill, or just grow them outside where they tend to thrive without any extra effort at all. I’m currently using a 100 watt Mars Hydro light that ran about $55 on Amazon in a small grow tent, and it gets the job done even though I’m planning to upgrade to something bigger down the road.
That’s genuinely the whole foundation of sundew care for beginners. Soil, water, light. Nothing complicated about it.
Best sundew species for beginners
There are around 200 known sundew species found on every continent except Antarctica, so the options are massive. But a handful stand out as the easiest starting points for anyone new to the hobby.
Drosera capensis (Cape sundew)
This is probably the single easiest sundew to grow, and arguably one of the easiest carnivorous plants period. I started with just two Cape sundews and now I have dozens, plus thousands of seeds scattered through my collection. Cape sundews are what’s called a perfect flower, meaning each flower has both male and female parts and self pollinates. The flowers only stay open for an hour or two, then close, self pollinate, and form seed pods that eventually drop thousands of seeds. If you want a plant that essentially propagates itself, this is it.
Drosera binata
Another sundew that will quickly become a productive weed in the best possible way. There are several forms including multifida extrema, the T-form, Marston’s Dragon, and Evans head among others. Young plants start with simple forked leaves, and as they mature some forms can develop up to 36 points on a single leaf. Binata spreads prolifically from its roots and root cuttings are extremely easy, though the resulting plants will be genetic clones of the parent rather than new genetic combinations. Some forms like the giant dichotoma can eventually reach up to three feet in diameter, so don’t worry if a new plant looks small at first. That takes time.
Drosera spatulata
Often called rosette sundews because of their tiny rosette shaped growth pattern. These produce a ton of flowers and self seed readily, eventually creating a blanket of small rosetted plants if left alone. If you want your sundews to grow a bit faster, feeding them helps, though it’s optional. Once every two weeks to once a month with a small amount of crushed fish flakes or a diluted Maxsea fertilizer works well. Just make sure whatever you use is broken into small enough pieces that it won’t rot on the leaf.
A cool bonus: sundew movement
Venus flytraps aren’t the only carnivorous plants with visible movement. Several sundew species, including Drosera filiformis, will actually wrap their leaves around captured prey. It’s much slower than a flytrap snap, taking a couple of hours rather than happening instantly, but it’s still fascinating to watch. The sticky droplets you see covering the leaves are called mucilage, and they’re designed to look like dew, which is exactly how sundews got their name. Insects land on what looks like a refreshing drop of water, get stuck, and the leaf slowly curls around them to extract nutrients before opening back up again.
Propagating sundews — almost too easy
If self seeding plants weren’t generous enough, sundews offer several other propagation methods too.
Root cuttings: Take a healthy root, cut it into segments, and plant in fresh media. This is the fastest method for producing larger plants quickly.
Flower stalk cuttings: Cut the flower stalk into roughly one inch segments and place them in a seed tray for high humidity. Close the lid and within two to three weeks you’ll see new plantlets emerging. This method, along with root cuttings, tends to produce larger plants faster than any other propagation approach.
Leaf cuttings: Simply cut a healthy leaf and lay it on a fresh bed of long fiber sphagnum moss, or try the water method by placing the leaf in a sealed container with a small amount of water acting as a humidity dome.
A single cutting using any of these methods can often produce ten or more new plants. I’ve even had random root fragments fall into a tray of other plants and start growing entirely on their own without any intention on my part.
You don’t need a perfect setup to succeed
My own current setup is honestly a little rough around the edges. I’m working with a smaller grow tent while I save up for a larger one, and the lighting isn’t quite as strong as I’d ultimately like. But the plants are still thriving. That’s really the point I want to leave you with.
There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about carnivorous plants being difficult, and sundews in particular get unfairly lumped into that reputation. In my experience these plants are about as close to a weed as you can get in the carnivorous plant world, maybe second only to Utricularia. You genuinely don’t need a perfect setup, expensive equipment, or years of experience to succeed with sundew care for beginners. You just need the basics covered and a little patience.
Quick reference
| Factor | What to use |
|---|---|
| Soil | 50/50 peat moss and perlite, or long fiber sphagnum |
| Water | Distilled, rainwater, or reverse osmosis only |
| Watering method | Tray method, roughly 1/3 up the pot |
| Light | About 16 hours daily — grow light, windowsill, or outdoors |
| Feeding | Optional — crushed fish flakes or diluted Maxsea every 2-4 weeks |
| Best beginner species | Drosera capensis, Drosera binata, Drosera spatulata |
| Propagation | Root cuttings, flower stalk cuttings, leaf cuttings, self-seeding |
What I Use for Sundews
Soil & Watering
- Hoffman Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss — base of my sundew soil mix
- Perlite — mix 50/50 with peat
- Better-Gro Long Fiber Sphagnum Moss — alternative growing media
- Distilled Water Jugs — always use mineral free water
- Plastic Watering Trays — keeps the tray method easy and consistent
Lighting
- Mars Hydro 100 Watt Grow Light — what I currently use in my smaller grow tent
Feeding
- Fish Flakes — crush into small pieces before feeding
- Maxsea Fertilizer — diluted, optional feeding method
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Watch the full video
In this video I walk through my entire sundew collection in the video above, including live examples of Cape sundews, binata, and spatulata, plus a real look at the seed pods and propagation in progress. Seeing how fast these plants spread is honestly the best way to understand just how forgiving they are.
Questions about sundew care for beginners? Drop them in the YouTube comments or come hang out in the Facebook Group. I read everything and I’m always happy to help.
Let’s grow together
Thanks for reading and being part of the Carnivorous Plant Help community. If this guide helped you out I’d love to hear about it — drop a comment on the YouTube video or come say hi on any of the platforms below. This whole thing started because I wanted a judgment free place for growers of all levels to get real answers and that’s exactly what we’re building together.
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Keep learning
- How to Trim Nepenthes: Dead Pitchers, Leaves & Flower Stalks
- Terrestrial Utricularia Care Guide
- Utricularia: The Mighty Miniature Carnivorous Plant!
- Sundew Cuttings: Easy Beginner Guide!
What’s up everybody, I hope you’re doing well, CHM Carnivores here. Hope you’re having a wonderful day and a wonderful week. I thought what better to do on a day with a solar eclipse than to talk about sundews. So today in this video we’re going to cover sundew care for beginners — everything you need to know to grow and take care of these plants successfully. In my opinion, sundews are some of the coolest plants of all time and certainly a contender for the coolest carnivorous plants out there. I’ve always been a Nepenthes lover, but the more I grow these things, the more I love sundews too.
As you can see my setup is a little wonky right now. I have this smaller grow tent and I’m working on getting a larger one, but this will have to do in the meantime. As with everything on this channel, we’re growing together, and we’re doing it on a shoestring budget of about $50 a month, but we’re able to make it work.
So let’s get into sundew care for beginners — a complete guide to everything you need to know to grow these remarkable plants successfully.
As I mentioned, today is a tutorial, a beginner’s guide to growing sundews. I’ll tell you, anyone who hears “carnivorous plants” usually assumes there’s a stigma involved, that they’re difficult to grow. But I will tell you, as somebody who has been a lifelong lover of plants and has grown plants forever, sundews could possibly be some of the easiest plants in general to grow. Not just easiest carnivorous plants. Easiest plants, period.
There are a few things you do need to know in order to succeed with sundew care for beginners, and the list is actually pretty small.
First, you’re going to want to use a media that is 50/50 peat moss and perlite. Make sure both are free of any fertilizers. You can get them at any big box store like Home Depot or Lowes. Peat moss is extremely cheap, you can get an enormous brick of it for just a few dollars and it will last you basically forever. Perlite is the same story, a couple bucks gets you a lot. Very cheap to get started.
With water, it’s important that you use distilled or rainwater. You want to keep nutrients out of the water and soil entirely. These plants have grown and evolved to get their nitrogen from bugs, so you don’t want any of that in the soil or it will cause them harm. That sounds difficult but it’s actually super easy to do. You can get something that catches rainwater outside and just use that.
You want your plants sitting in water, depending on the pot height, about a third of the way up the pot. You can go lower than that or higher than that, most sundews are not picky at all, and that’s one of the cool features about these plants. Most are very tolerant of a wide range of conditions, from very wet to almost dry. The big takeaway is you want to keep the soil moist, and the way you do that is just keeping them in some water. I use trays you can get at Target or Walmart, relatively cheap, and then just pot up your plants and let them hang out in the trays with a little bit of water.
Now let’s talk about light. Most sundews require a lot of light. I’m growing mine in this small grow tent for now using a Mars Hydro 100 watt light that cost about $55 on Amazon. You can certainly grow these outside too, and they do very well outdoors. The requirement is pretty simple, you want to give them about 16 hours of light a day. You can do that with a grow light, on a windowsill in your home, or just grow them outside, they’re not picky about that at all.
Now depending on the sundew, there are a ton of them. Sundews are found on every continent except Antarctica, and there are about 200 different species out there, not counting hybrids. So there are a lot of options. Some are winter growing and go dormant in summer, others are spring and summer growers that go dormant in winter. I’ll go through the easiest ones to care for, and in later videos we’ll talk more about dormancy requirements specifically.
But the biggest thing I wanted to cover for sundew care for beginners is really just light, water, and soil. If that felt too quick or too simplified, it really wasn’t, it’s just genuinely that simple. These plants are very easy to grow. Give them 50/50 peat perlite, or you can even use long fiber sphagnum moss which you can also get at Lowes for very cheap. Use distilled, rain, or reverse osmosis water, and keep them in a tray with water at all times. Some of the easier species can tolerate a little bit of a dry period, but for the most part just make sure they have water and they’ll do great.
Let’s move on and talk through some beginner plants that are great for anyone getting started. Normally when you hear “beginner plant” you think that’s a very limited list and the fun is kind of taken away. That’s not the case with sundews at all. A lot of people think if you want to grow the really fun, cool looking plants you need expert knowledge, but that’s simply not true here.
First up is Drosera capensis, also called the Cape sundew. This is probably one of the easiest plants period to grow, but certainly the easiest sundew to grow. These grow all throughout Africa and there are maybe two or three dozen different varieties of Cape sundew. What’s really cool is you can see they’re covered in flower stalks, and this will very easily become a weed in the best way. I’ve only bought two Cape sundews in my time and now I have dozens, plus way more seeds than I know what to do with. They self seed because they’re what’s called a perfect flower, meaning they have both male and female parts and self pollinate. As the flowers open, and they don’t stay open very long, maybe just an hour or two depending on the species, they close up, self pollinate, and form pods that eventually drop their seeds. What you’re looking at in some of my trays isn’t algae, it’s thousands and thousands of seeds, most of which are Cape sundew. Very easy to grow, and you can get them from a lot of different places like Predatory Plants, California Carnivores, Carnivero, Sarracenia Northwest, and many others.
Next is Drosera binata, another super easy plant that will quickly become a weed. There are several different forms, multifida extrema, the T-form, Marston’s Dragon, Evans head, and many more. The biggest takeaway is binata is a great plant for beginners. When young they get these forked leaves almost universally, and as they mature they start to branch off, with some forms developing up to 36 points on a single leaf. These don’t really self seed the way capensis does, for the most part only the smaller forms self seed reliably, but they spread prolifically from their roots. Root cuttings are extremely easy. You simply take the plant, cut off some roots, plant them in the media, and you get more plants. They’ll be genetic clones rather than new genetic combinations, but you’ll get a lot of plants. They do flower, and sometimes produce fertile seed, though usually they don’t. Some forms like the giant dichotoma can eventually get up to three feet in diameter, so don’t worry if a young plant looks small, that takes time.
Next up is Drosera spatulata, often called rosette sundews because of their tiny rosette shape. These produce a ton of flowers, self seed readily, and will eventually create a blanket of these little rosetted plants. The biggest thing to remember with species that flower a lot is you want to keep feeding them if you want faster growth. You can feed as often as once every two weeks or as little as once a month, they don’t strictly require it but it speeds things along. You can use a Maxsea fertilizer or fish flakes. I use fish flakes myself, and you want to crush them up as small as possible because larger pieces will rot on the leaf. Just sprinkle them onto the leaves.
What’s really cool about both capensis and the filiformis types is that they’ll actually wrap around their prey. Venus flytraps aren’t the only carnivorous plant with movement, several sundews do this too. It’s much slower than a Venus flytrap, so you don’t get that instant snap, it can take a couple of hours, but they will close around their prey. That’s super cool to see. The droplets you see on the leaves are called mucilage, and they’re designed to look like dew, hence the name sundew. It tricks bugs into landing on them, and once they’re stuck, the leaf rolls around the insect to extract the nutrients before opening back up again.
Let’s wrap up with propagation. If growing sundews and collecting self-seeding plants wasn’t easy enough, there are even more options. You can do root cuttings, which I mentioned earlier, and you can also do leaf cuttings and flower stem cuttings. I have a binata flower stem cutting here, brand new so there’s no growth on it yet, but what you do is take the flower stalk, cut it into roughly one inch segments, and place it in a seed tray for high humidity. Close it up, and in as little as two to three weeks you’ll get little plantlets growing. Flower stalk cuttings and root cuttings tend to produce larger plants faster than other methods.
You can also do leaf cuttings, simply cutting the leaves off and placing them on a bed of long fiber sphagnum moss, or using the water method by placing the leaf in a sealed container with a little water acting as a humidity dome. A single cutting from any of these methods can yield up to ten or more plants.
I’ll show you something neat, if I can get it in focus, see these tiny little things here? Those are baby plants that happened to fall in there on their own. What happened was when I bought one of the binatas, a root fell off, and now it’s growing little babies from that root completely on its own. Extremely easy to grow these plants.
The biggest takeaway I want to leave you with is that this isn’t necessarily the perfect setup. If I had it ideal, I’d have stronger lighting in there, and I do plan on adding more light in the future. But I wanted to make this point, you don’t need a perfect setup to succeed with sundew care for beginners. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about carnivorous plants in general, and sundews specifically, being difficult to grow. From my own experience, these plants are about the closest thing to a weed you can get in the carnivorous plant world, maybe second only to Utricularia. Extremely easy to grow.
I’m going to continue making videos on these plants along with other carnivorous plants for you to enjoy, and hopefully learn alongside me. I’m planning to grow some of these outdoors as well, so we’ll revisit that down the road too.
Overall I hope you’ve enjoyed this video and that it’s given you some knowledge about these wonderful plants. If you have any questions whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to reach out, I’m always here as a resource to help. We’re going to grow these plants together, along with our Nepenthes and other carnivorous plants, and learn along the way. As always, have a wonderful day and a wonderful week. I’ll see you soon.
