Interested in Venus Flytrap or tempt me with any other carnivorous plant. I remember in grade school we also learned about a pitcher plant that would lure & eat insects. Pls look at my trade list or can also offer postage, random office supplies, possibly yarn, or lots of seeds. Thanks

Sounds like to me that you lucked out big-time! If the whole plant is turning red, that means that it's probably a mutant form of Flytrap called Akai-Ryu, which is Japanese for Red Dragon. You should be just fine as long as your plants have adapted to their new invironment, which it sounds like they have. In the Red Dragons, the leaves turning red means that they're getting enough sunlight, which translates into a healthy, happy flytap! Full sun is recommended. Keep on doing what you're doing! Here is a link that might be useful: Backyard Bogs The Natural Alternative

Hi Ok Ill tell you this so its easy to understand why. Carnivorous Plants evolved in very low nutrient soil, thus they developed so that they could catch prey and disolve them. Now lets take the VFT for example, it snaps shut trapping its prey, it then dissolves the insect into a "soup". Now think about this, how is this "soup" absorbed? Through the leaves afcause. If you put your plant in normal potting soil it will die, because the potting soil has lots of nutrients, same as giving it hard tap water that contains lots of minerals, the plant cannot accept this due to its evolution. No now that we know the ROOTS cannot tolerate nutirents but the LEAVES can we can move on. Some fertilizers where developed to be used for "foliar feeding" of "leaf feeding", because these plants can absord nutrients via the leaves we can use some of these that have been tested and found to be ok. Of these, foliar feeds such as "MIRACID" and "EPIPHYTES DELIGHT" work fine, BUT!, remember to HALVE the dose for the plants. Since you are a newbie, remeber not to give your plant TAP WATER, only rain water, distilled water or reverse osmosis water (water that is pure without minerals) Soils used should be Sphagnum Peat mixed with something like Perlite (sphagnum peat is not nutrient heavy and is acidic, perlite is for drainage) Next, dont ever feed your plant meats, ONLY INSECTS, WORMS and so forth, they CANNOT dissolve the proteins and fats in meats, this will kill them. Next, your VFT's traps can only close shut a maximum of 2-3 times before it will go black and die. The black trap should be cut off at the base of the leaf, new ones will grow, thus DONT overfeed them. If you do, you will end up with a trapless plant which looks really bad. The recommended feeding is to feed one open trap(prey should be nomore than 1/3rd the size of the trap, big prey can kill the trap because of the energy needed to digest it) once the trap has digested the prey and opened back up, then you ca feed another one. If you dont want to loose traps from feeding them insects, you can only foliar feed, or you can do both, just dont go overboard, you can overfeed your plants. Next, VFT's and alot of CP's from the USA go into hibernation like animals, this rest period is reffered to as dormency, it generally occurs from Halloween and ends at the latest by Valentines Day. Your plants will need this rest period, the dormency occurs from the shortened sun periods in winter and from temperatures from 40-50 F. At this time the plants MUST NOT be fed, they should get less water (just enough to keep moist), around about February it should be safe to come out of dormency. At this time you can repot your plant as a new peat mix envigorates the plants growth, you can now put your plant but in the light and continue water as per normal. Cut off any dead leaves, the plant will now start its new growth. Hope this helps Sheldon

Thanks for the tips. I actually put in a pot with my other venus flytrap, that I bought the other day, & it is doing well in the peat moss, I believe it`s called. Thanks for the help, it seems to be doing well, but I will know better in a week or so i`m assuming. One more question actually. I have 3 traps on the plant with a red hue in the mouth,is this caused by being in direct sunlight...? I would like to know how to get the rest of the traps looking the same.However, my flytrap`s have both green & red hue mouth one`s.