Surprised you find ladybugs are pasts since ladybugs are carnivorous & eat aphids & gnats. Anyways VFT grown from seedlings will only eat gnat or bug size gnats for a couple of years. On the third year they will be big enough to catch fruit flies but not ladybugs or houseflies. It will take up to 4 years for your plant to develop a decent size (1/2 an inch) trap able to capture a small fly. And one more thing, unless you buy a sundew or butterwort, carnivorous plants don't make good past control. They will capture enough to meet their needs. Good luck!

Hi - You came to the right place! 1. Your plant may not go dormant this winter. Don't worry about it. 2. Keep it very wet and use distilled water or rain water only. Do not use spring or tap water. The plants can't handle the minerals. 3. Very bright light is optimal. Just make sure it isn't going to get real hot where you put it. 4. Do not put it in a terrarium, make sure it has air flow around it. 5. You don't need to feed it. They can survive a long time without bugs and it is probably stressed right now and the trap would just die anyway. It will catch bugs on its own in the Spring. These plants grow in bogs, which means they stay very wet, have plenty of fresh air and full sun (trees can't grow in bogs). Since you're in Colorado, a south facing window would work fine... lots of sun! Have fun!

It will need to go dormant in the fall. It needs to be outside, these are not indoor plants. When night temps get into the low 40's place it in a baggie and put in your refridge until mid February. Tom

I got my Venus flytraps in and they were potted in perlite and sand and some vermiculite and other junk- probably sphagnum peat moss. I pulled media away from the roots and found that every plant had some really bad roots in that mix, so I put them all in the re-wetted sphagnum moss I used to grow my orchids in and all the venus flytraps are growing new roots and they look SO much better. The roots were all black and rotted looking, but each flytrap had a new root or 2 that were coming out when I saw the corms after rinsing them off. I figured the sphagnum moss would keep the roots moist but give good air flow and it seems to be the best thing for them so far as each plant has grown very well despite getting sunburned badly. I guess I lucked out since it was so close to dormancy the plants recovered leaves quickly and new traps also. Even the tiny VFT 'pink ' is starting to grow new trap leaves but all of them are going dormant and I can tell as the leaves take minutes to close instead of seconds now. The traps are large, but the leaves are small and very full and the color on most is still green as we have had snow here now for the past 3 days and all the new growth has missed the full sun since I was afraid to burn them again. I recommend potting in the re-wetted sphagnum moss or long fiber sphagnum moss that lowes or home depot sell- just make sure it is all fertilizer free with no additives as that can kill carnivorous plants. Also, I use rain water to water my carnivorous plants and they do better from rain water than distilled. You can re-wet the dried out sphagnum moss by soaking strands in a bin or bucket of rain water then layering them on top of each other in the pot. Once you have wet moss about half way up the pot, I put the corm or bulb in the middle with roots draped in a circle to keep from damaging them and then trying to stick the new roots right into the wet moss so they grow better. I drape more moss around the sides of the bulb in a circular motion so it is nested in the middle of the pot and so far, that has worked well for me. Last thing- you can sometimes get sphagnum moss to start growing if you let the pot sit in rain water when the plant is actively growing- they normally grow nested in a nice sphagnum moss bog which will keep the environment more close to what they are used to. I have new sphagnum moss growing in the wet dead stuff in the pots and I hope it grows big enough to keep the cp's roots moist and help them grow vigorously.