Eh, these are stronger than people give them credit for. If all your care was appropriate except giving it a dormancy, it may very well live for years without one. Then, eventually it will decline, maybe not this year, but eventually. It will need a dormancy to survive long term, but who knows how long it'll do fine without one? Unfortunately, I highly doubt this is the one miracle plant that will revolutionize growing VFTs without that pesky dormancy requirement ever being an issue.

I have read about the venus flytraps on a few sites and as far as I have read, it is possible to get a trap to close, you need some kind of tool that you can slide inside the trap, then hit some of the trigger hairs on it, when tapped in rapid succession, the trigger hairs will close the trap. I do not know what kind of nutrients are digested from insects, although some guy put dead skin cells from a bad case of athlete's foot in the trap. The trap digested the skin chunks into gummy, amorphous blobs that looked like soft scabs except it was an oddball experiment and kind of weird/stupid to me. I was wondering if it is possible to use fertilizers in the trap, then trigger it to close and see what happens although I do think the trap will just die. I have used my orchid fertilizer on the underside of trap leaves, applied by cue-tips but just enough to dampen the under side of the leaves. If any fertilizer gets into the medium, it will kill the plants so always be careful and only fertilize the underside of a couple leaves- not all of them all at once and not more than once a month because that will only sustain them if they are too small or ill equipped to catch their own food. It does work if you keep the feedings light and to a minimum so the plants just get what they need for photosynthesis or to aid sugar production from photosynthesis. I grow my carnivorous plants in the dead sphagnum moss, but I will try to get the live moss to grow as well since that is what carnivorous plants grow in for the most part, and that is the reason why they need to supplement their diet with light fertilizer in the form of small vertebrates and invertebrates. The sphagnum moss tends to pull calcium and magnesium from rain water, which leaves nothing but the excess hydrogen as a byproduct. This creates a very acidic environment where most plants that grow in it cannot get absorb nutrients properly as on the ph scale, soil ph needs to be around 5.8-6.2 to absorb the wide range of micro and macro nutrients. When soil ph falls below 5.5, certain nutrients needed by the plants are not absorbed because they are not readily available in more acidic environments. I hope this helps you as it helped me to understand the plant physiology more.

This was my second winter growing plumeria. The first winter I cut off all of the leaves before bringing them inside and lost several plants due to stem rot. This past winter I kept the leaves on and didn't lose any, but did have a small problem with spider mites. If the soil is wet, then the soil seems to dry out much faster if the plant has leaves.

So I used this forum to identify a seed I got while walking in Dallas as a red yucca. I live in Ohio and a cultivated the seeds this spring and they are doing well. My question is can I keep them inside for the winter for a couple years to get them bigger or should I let them go dormant outside? They are so small I just don't want to loose them. It says the are hearty to zone five and I'm in 6. Do they need a dormant period to servive?