A little green monster in the house! (Venus Fly Trap)

Member Name: janharper

Product:	Venus Fly Trap
Date:	29/07/01 (5086 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: fascinating to grow

Disadvantages: temperamental

If you are thinking of buying a Venus Fly Trap beware! You have to be prepared to lavish attention on it. If you don't give it exactly what it needs it will die. It won't adapt, or make do in the way some plants do.

Treat it like any other ordinary houseplant and you will certainly murder it!

Venus Fly Traps are a whole species of carnivorous plants. They come in many varieties. These plants are adapted to live where they can't get nutrients in the normal way from the soil. There are actually over 600 different kinds of meat eating plants and many of them can be grown as houseplants.

So, how do you grow them? Well, it varies. Venus Fly Traps grow naturally in humid, wet, sunny and warm conditions and this is ideally what they need. (The bathroom springs to mind here and I did actually keep one alive for 18 months on the bathroom window sill.)

The best way I found to create this mini environment is to plant your young VFT in a terrarium or bottle. (Cut the bottom off the bottle and you have the perfect solution. Or do you? Your plant demands freely circulating air so you might need to cut the top off the bottle too so that you've got a glass cylinder.

If you plant comes in a tiny pot you might decide to leave it there for a while. Don't over water it or it will die because it can't get oxygen to its roots.

When should you transplant you new plant into a bigger pot. The short answer is that you are probably better not doing so. This plant has a very small root system so it only needs a tiny pot. If you try to repot one of these you will probably kill your plant. If however, you have one that is getting big and looks healthy after a year or so you might want to risk it. The whole plant isn't likely to grow more than 13cms (5 inches)across anyway.

Don't torment you little monster plant by poking the traps to make it shut. Each trap can only open and close about 6 times and t
he plant has to make new traps after this. If its putting energy into this it hasn't got energy to stay healthy, unless you are lucky.

If you want to feed your VFT you will need to catch some flies and other insects. If you give it a bit of ordinary meat it will die. People often claim that you can feed these plants on minced beef or a bit of left over meat, but you can't. The meat will rot and kill the plant. The 'meal' you feed your plant shouldn't be bigger that about one third of the leaf trap or it will rot and kill the plant.

Your plant will eat flies, slugs and even spiders. Don't feed it anything that will eat the plant though (caterpillars for example.)

Growing these plants is very much a matter of trial and error and you will need to try out different environments and potting composts until you get exactly the right one for your particular plant. If your plant lives for 2 years and reaches around 13cms in width then you can consider yourself successful.

This is a fascinating subject and propogating and growing VFT's is an art in itself. If you are interested in this subject there is lots of help available on the web.



www2.labs.agilent.com/bot/cp_home/

Lots of botanical information collected together in this comprehensive database of Carnivorous plants. Quite technical but still interesting.


www.sarracenia.com/faq.html

Lots of information on carnivorous plants and a whole FAQ section on Venus Fly Traps and how to grow them. Everthing you need to know from buying a plant to repotting and feeding it insects.

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