No, this isn't about Robert Plant. Fuck off! This thread is about growing stuff, not necessarily weed either. Or studying plants. Botany's pretty rad also! The place I lived at before didn't really get any sun, so I couldn't grow any plants that I wanted to grow (I don't want to grow mildew). However we now live in an apartment with large western windows and that includes a garden window like this:
only without the stupid looking bouquet sitting there.
We have a norfolk pine (not really a true pine but they look cool)
A holiday cactus
And then some carnivorous plants which is a somewhat recent hobby of mine.
Carnivorous plants aren't all under one family, they actually comprise a broad range of plants not closely related to each other that simply have in common that they can trap and digest animals (usually insects) for their nitrates and phosphates because they tend to live in environments that are poor in these nutrients for various reasons (for example bogs).
No, I don't have any flytraps. It's actually difficult to grow healthy flytraps indoors without a terrarium, a step I'm not interested in pursuing at this point. Flytraps are actually much easier to grow outdoors, even in climates that get below freezing in the winter and get snow.
So what am I growing so far? Well so far I have a two sundews (genus Drosera). A spoon leaf sundew (D. spatulata)
And I just acquired a lance leaf sundew as well (D. adelae)
Sundews trap their prey with the globules of sticky "sundew" that give them their name. Once a bug is caught in the sticky goo, the leaf then responds by wrapping itself around the victim and secreting enzymes that break down their insides and leave an empty husk behind.
I also have a couple of pitcher plants, specifically Nepenthes which are tropical pitcher plants (as opposed to Sarracenia which are native to North America and not closely related to Nepenthes. The Nepenthes species I'm growing are highland Nepenthes, which means they're adapted to highland tropical conditions so they can handle cool (but not freezing) temperatures and don't actually need true tropical conditions. This makes them reasonably easy to grow indoors as long as you can provide them with the right amount of light.
The first Nepenthes I got is a N. mikei. It's still very young and hasn't produced any mature pitchers yet, but with the days getting longer I'm confident I'll be seeing its first functional pitchers in a few weeks. This is what it'll look like when it's mature (they're relatively small as Nepenthes go).
The other one which I just got today is N. truncata and can get quite a bit larger (it's also quite small right now though). Eventually I'll need to repot it into a hanging pot because they can get quite large!
I find carnivorous plants interesting and I enjoy the exotic appearance of tropical pitcher plants.