venus fly trap advice?

downonthefarm

picked up a few of these at homebase today,just wondering will the grow any bigger and do they require a special kind of soil to be happy in?

Oldtree

I've had these and others like them for a few years. Rain water only and water from the bottom. Put a tray under the pot to ensure they can get water all the time and are kept moist. Peaty mix should be fine. feed dead insects you find in the home.
I have mine in a sunny westerly facing window sill in clay pots

yellowlabrador

don't set the traps off to see them work, they end up dying off if set off too often, don't let it flower, the plant often dies after flowering. Never give it a fertiliser, they grow in very poor soils.

kylith

You can find a recipe for carnivorous plant compost online, it needs to be quite poor. Some species have bigger traps than others so it's hard to say if yours will get bigger. Be careful feeding insects, I don't know how it'd do if exposed to insecticide, mine does fine catching its own fruit flies.

downonthefarm

thank you guys for the replies they are most helpful

Oldtree

as the plants are indoors they cannot catch as many insects as they would normally do, therefore feeding them is necessary, as with all other indoor plants imo. I don't use insecticides. The insects I feed them are usually ones that have died and are lying on the windowsill in different rooms. I also have sundews and gourds.

kylith

Oldtree wrote: »

as the plants are indoors they cannot catch as many insects as they would normally do, therefore feeding them is necessary, as with all other indoor plants imo. I don't use insecticides. The insects I feed them are usually ones that have died and are lying on the windowsill in different rooms. I also have sundews and gourds.

Depends on where you have them, but I agree that if there isn't a decent supply of insects you'll need to supplement their diet. Luckily (unluckily) my house seems plagued with flies this summer.

Tree

They do not need to be fed, if they catch live flies/bugs grand, but you don't need to supplement it. Besides which, a dead insect doesnt struggle (and therefore activate the leaf hairs that cause it to close/digest). If it happens to catch something too big (like a wasp), you'll have to cut the head off so the bug doesn't rot in the leaf before the plant can digest it.

Feed it with calcium free water, so rain or distilled water. We feed ours with water from the britta filter which seems to work just fine. It stands in a saucer with a constant 1cm of water in it.

Our fly trap is doing great after 2.5 years, happy pink mouths and there's at least two plants in the pot by now (I'll have ot pot it on next spring). We let it flower one year (and the flowers are so very beautiful), but this year we cut the flower stalk early on. It was slower growing with the flowers and faster without.

Oldtree

They catch the odd one but not many here, as I look to see how they are doing, so I supplement their feed. I have a small plastic stick that I stimulate the leaf hairs so the trap closes on the dead insect, and continue to gently tap the outside for a bit after feeding. been doing this for a decade.

Velvet shank

I leave them outside in summer (and also in a glasshouse with open door/window) where they can catch plenty of flies. I also leave them in unheated conditions in winter and reduce watering to a minimum (enough to ensure they don't dry out), as winter dormancy is apparently desirable.

fryup

Velvet shank wrote: »

I also leave them in unheated conditions in winter and reduce watering to a minimum (enough to ensure they don't dry out), as winter dormancy is apparently desirable.

i left mine it in a plastic bag in the garden shed...will that be ok?

Tree

Tree wrote: »

They do not need to be fed, if they catch live flies/bugs grand, but you don't need to supplement it. Besides which, a dead insect doesnt struggle (and therefore activate the leaf hairs that cause it to close/digest). If it happens to catch something too big (like a wasp), you'll have to cut the head off so the bug doesn't rot in the leaf before the plant can digest it.

Feed it with calcium free water, so rain or distilled water. We feed ours with water from the britta filter which seems to work just fine. It stands in a saucer with a constant 1cm of water in it.

Our fly trap is doing great after 2.5 years, happy pink mouths and there's at least two plants in the pot by now (I'll have ot pot it on next spring). We let it flower one year (and the flowers are so very beautiful), but this year we cut the flower stalk early on. It was slower growing with the flowers and faster without.

I'm sorry to say that fly trap in question succumbed to the hardwater of Limerick, so their replacement is only getting fed the finest rainwaters. Even filtered there was far too much calcium left in the water.