Here's the article... just in case the Vernon newspaper drops the web link one day:
(i love that last line in this story from Bobbi !!
)
Rick keehn shows off a prize set of B-52 Venus Fly Traps at his greenhouse, where he grows carnivorous plants, just north of Lumby. Keehn raises a variety of bug-eating plants, including butterworts (below, left) and sundews (below, right).
tyler olsen/morning star
Just north of Lumby, a narrow dirt lane leads to a two-acre lot occupied by a home, a barn and a small greenhouse, everyday in appearance but harbouring an array of carnivorous plants.
Some use bright, welcoming colours to attract unsuspecting victims to leaves coated with a sticky mucus that doesn’t let go. Others extend long, skinny leaves skyward, where they intercept their catch, rolling the doomed creature up like a mob victim in a roll of carpet. Still others wait as their pray climbs toward their base, where they fall into a pit and drown in enzymes.
The most famous of the bunch, the Venus Fly Trap, attracts its next meal to an open pad, where three hairs sense the presence of live creatures. Two jaws, lined with fierce-looking teeth clamp shut, sometimes so quickly as to produce an audible snapping sound. As the bug struggles, it keeps re-triggering the sensors and the jaws stay firmly shut as digestion begins.
This is the home of Keehns Carnivores, where Rick and Bobbi Keehn raise bug-eating plants for customers around the world.
In Ottawa, visitors to the Royal Ontario Museum’s new exhibit on Charles Darwin will curiously peer at a selection from the Keehns’ greenhouse: pitcher plants, butterworts, Venus Fly Traps and rotundifolia, or sundews, a carnivorous plant Darwin used to show how organisms adapt to their environment.
“They grow in bogs where there’s very little nutrients for the plants and they’ve adapted to find a way to get the nutrients,” explains Rick.
On Wednesday, the Keehns received Canada Food Inspection Agency certification to make sure a shipment of carnivorous plants destined for Germany were good for shipment and devoid of problem gnats. Ironically, the plants tend to eat those same bugs.
In the meantime, Rick was examining traffic on his website, which included the curious note that a web surfer from NASA in Houston had taken a peek.
Life as a carnivorous plant grower – one whose operation obtained farm status last year by quadrupling its sales – is a world removed from Rick’s previous vocation as a planer at a Salmon Arm mill, where he worked for 25 years.
“Things didn’t seem to be going that well in the forest industry so I thought it might be good to try something else,” he says. His new job, he said, “is much more relaxing, even if sometimes it’s 20 hours a day.”
It was a love interest that rejuvenated his interest in killer fauna – which had been sparked years earlier by his now grown children – and eventually drew him to Lumby.
“I had to come up with some kind of idea to make a living so I could marry this wonderful woman,” said Rick, with wife Bobbi at his side. After having previously worked with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans at the coast, Bobbi had moved to a parcel of land just north of Lumby, which she shared with two horses. Rick followed in June 2006, ditching his job, moving to Lumby, marrying Bobbi, and throwing all his efforts into growing carnivorous plants for a living.
While still working at the mill, Rick had learned how to do tissue culture, despite a cloak of secrecy over the process fostered by growers reluctant to give up the secrets to their success. After much searching, Rick had hooked up with Carol Stiff, who sells kits that allow hobbyists to propagate African violets.
“Nobody else would talk about it and, now that I’ve learned it, I’ve learned it’s quite cutthroat.”
Stiff taught Rick the basics and he was off, working on the delicate and precise process long into the night.
“I got the basics, then it was experiment as much as I could,” he said.
Rick’s developing passion for carnivorous plants did not entirely surprise Bobbi.
“Everything’s a little left-of-centre with him,” she says of Rick, who owned pirahnas when the pair met and admits he likes the carnivores because “they eat stuff.”
But his determination made a profound impact on Bobbi.
“I had no idea this guy had this much drive and ambition,” she said. “He deserves to do well with this. He lived on hamburger helper and two hours sleep for two years to learn how to do it.”
And that was just learning tissue culture. Five years ago Rick says he couldn’t work a computer. He has since developed the website for Keehns Carnivores. He’s also dealt with six different government agencies to export plants, set up a sterile lab, built a greenhouse complete with temperature and humidity sensors and developed extensive knowledge of the different varieties of bug-eating plants.
“Four years ago, I didn’t know there was more than a Venus Fly Trap,” he recalls.
The pitcher plants are particularly impressive, with some able to grow three feet tall. Last summer, sitting on the Keehns’ deck, their carnivorous appetite was on full display as they became a popular, and deadly, wasp destination.
“They were buzzing away and buzzing away as they drowned in the tubes,” recalls Rick of the plant which also bears a flower he says is one of the most beautiful he’s ever seen.
Over the summer Rick will feed some of his plants grasshoppers, meal worms, earwigs, centipedes and moths in an effort to grow them as large as possible, although most plants will survive on the peat moss in which they are planted.
The Keehns have only recently restocked the greenhouse with the plants, which had been stored into a small adjoining room over the winter. But already they are busy taking orders, a good omen as, in past years, customers haven’t started calling until late March or April.
Indeed, momentum is building for Keehns Carnivores, helped by the fact that the couple’s operation is only one of two like it in North America. The lack of competitors has surprised Bobbi, if not Rick who cites the difficulty of establishing such an operation.
But with a good infrastructure established, and additions planned, the couple are looking at new markets for their plants.
“This is looking very promising and we’ve hardly even tapped anything in Canada,” said Bobbi.
With a sterile tissue culture lab in her home, a hot house room in her barn and greenhouse in her front yard, getting into the carnivorous plant business has forced Bobbi to shift her grand vision for her property.
“It’s a little different than what I pictured my little farm, with a couple horses and a little garden...to having 80,000 bug eating plants.”
But while she is not as instinctively drawn to the carnivores as her husband, Bobbi, who helps with non-technical duties, is now prodding Rick to teach her the basics of tissue culture.
“You can write this down,” she tells me with a smile, her husband listening, “I’m still doing the grunt work.
“I’m kind of a flower and vegetable person but he’s dragging me along.”