Venus Fly Trap Rejecting Food
peps22
14 years ago
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petiolaris
14 years agotommyr_gw Zone 6
14 years agoRelated Discussions
Venus Fly Traps!
Comments (5)Hi Kay Only water you VFT with rain, distilled or RO water. You need very bright lights to keep one inside but this is not the right time of the year to try. Vfts must have a winter dormancy and they should be kept outside now so that they can go dormant. When it looks like the leaves are dead, sprinkle with some kind of fungicide, put pot and all in a ziplock bag and put it in the frige until spring. Check it every week or two for mold and pour any excess water out. It might do ok outside but I don't know where you are. Any live bug small enough to fit in a trap will work for food (except caterpillars)and they don't need many. One bug a month will do. The most important things are water and light. VFTs grow much better outside in full sun. The Carnivorous plant forum on GW has lots of useful information on VFTs and other carnivorous plants. I have a few including 11 VFTs....See MorePots For Venus FlyTraps
Comments (8)As long as there are drain holes, you should be fine with any plastic pots/ What you could do is buy some sealer for the inside of a clay pot. They sell it at Michaels Craft Stores.... probably other places also.. just haven't looked for it. It might just be a spray polyurethane.. but I don;t know. It would help with the evaporation... but couldn't be used for dormancy outside with freezing. Never the less if you plan on burying the pot in the ground to make a minibog, you will have to go with plastic. Also I would think the larger the better for buffering the cold a bit. Go to http://www.sarracenia.com/ They have a ton of info....See MoreWal-mart Venus Fly Trap
Comments (41)The advice of not letting your VFT flower is always suggested because most people are not experienced or are new in growing CP, so these people barely have their VFT thriving. Flowering takes a lot of energy and if your plant is week, it can die. But if you have your plant growing very vigorously, theres no problem. I always let them flower, never had problems. When I was a beginner, of course I lost my pants until I was told to cut them off. Now I have no worries letting them flower. I had one VFT grow a flower stalk this late of the year but once I started to induce dormancy, the stalk aborted and died. That VFT is now dormant. To induce dormancy, just place it in a cool part of your house and give it less light. Now, most summer leaves will die and stop functioning, also your VFT will start to produce some smaller traps with sluggish movement if you trigger them. Those are winter leaves. Once the plant is dormant, cut down on the amount of water, just keeps its media moist to keep the bulb from drying out. I keep my dormant bulbs in a pot and simply place it in the coolest room next to a window. They will receive some sunlight but its not enough photoperiod to break their winter dormancy. I always let my VFT grow on the same media for 2 years before transplanting them on a fresh media. Or you can dig out your bulbs after it has become dormant, cut the old leaves to avoid rot, wrap it with moist LFS moss to keep the bulbs from drying out, place it in a Ziploc bag, and then put it in the fridge (not the icebox!). Always check now and then to make sure you keep the LFS moss moist but not wet and you can check on the condition of your bulb. The bulb should be white and crispy. Come spring you can plant them on fresh media to begin its new growth season. Good luck!...See MoreI need Venus fly trap advice
Comments (18)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....See Morepeps22
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