How do I get my Venus fly trap to eat? 🪴

[Chloefairydust]

Random question … How do you look after a Venus fly trap plant?

I can’t seem to get mine to eat. I read they can eat fish food, so I tried feeding mine a fish flake and it closed the trap around the food however the next day the traps open again and it hasn’t eaten the food. Does it not like the food?? What should I feed it? And how often?

Any advice appreciated 🙂

Just read on the internet they should only eat one bug at a time , it’s got a few traps open, if I put it outside and it traps more than one fly will this harm it?

The food has to be moving or the trap will reopen. If you feed them dead insects then you can simulate the movement by lightly massaging the outside of the closed trap for a little while. You should see the trap close tightly in response.

Whatever you do, don't leave it in an empty house all day. Or night.

Don’t think fish tank water would be ok either. It’s the minerals they don’t like, not the chlorine.

Mine sometimes catch more than one fly and its fine. I only fed it when I first had it, didn’t need to over the summer.

Don’t do the banana skin thing someone said. They rarely catch fruit flies. That’s what sundew plants are for. Venus fly trap is for bigger flies than that.

I had one, a

I had one, along with a book called " how not to kill your Venus flytrap". I fed it distilled water, reconstituted dried mealworms to feed it, bloody thing died.
To prove to my daughter I can keep one alive ( she'd bought it for me as a present) I got another one and didn't tell her.
This time, a policy of positive neglect was tried. I put him outside every day on the wall, tell him to catch his own food and let him get on with it. I water him with rainwater that's collected in a manky bucket in the garden. ( He's called Wilson, btw). He's doing fabulously!
The traps only catch insects about 2 or 3 times then they go black and die so I pick those off. They really die back over the winter but I still put him out most days. My daughter saw him in April ish time and said he looked dead, sent her a pic the other day that proved the lie of that one. I'll see if I can find it.

He's about 2 1/2 years old I think, she got him for my birthday and it was before lockdown.

Oh wow, he’s so red inside! Mine isn’t like that. She got flower stalks which I know you’re supposed to cut off. But I couldn’t bear to do that. Mine has got a a lot more of the traps since I bought it but yours looks very healthy. I think she needs reporting.

I cut the flower stalks off, tho there's not been any lately. I will re pot him next year, but I've been working on the "if it's not broke, don't fix it" policy. Mind you, when he first arrived, dh got him out the packaging and managed to pull the whole plant out from the soil, poor little bugger! Still, it set the scene for future care so fingers crossed.

Send it to live with me we have a plague of fruit flies and the fkrs are driving me mad.

They don’t need to ‘eat’ the flies or anything else if you have them in standard potting compost. They break down the flies to compensate for the poor soil they evolved in. They get their energy/release it with photosynthesis and respiration like other plants and largely get their nutrients from their root system.

@SquirrelSoShiny what you need are a few sundew plants. They’re sticky. They work about a million times better than the sticky yellow traps, vinegar, whatever else you’ve tried.

You can buy sundew plants on eBay and they come in the post. They also need distilled water. So rain water or tumble drier water is fine. We used to have hundreds of the flies but the sundew plants got rid of them all. Venus fly traps don’t work for the tiny flies coz they don’t trigger the hairs. But you won’t believe how many the sundew plants catch to start with. It’s proper gross.

Good tip @BrilliantGreenFlamingo 😈

rubs hands together with murderous glee

Honestly sundew have changed my life. For me, it was fungus gnats everywhere. I’d tried nematodes, gravel on the soil, bacteria stuff, vinegar traps, sticky things, not water too much. Everything for years and nothing made a dent in the flies. But within a month of getting sundews they were gone. Even within a week they were massively reduced.

It has also helped with fruit flies which are very similar to fungus gnats. Over the summer, I’d put the sundew next to the fruit bowls sometimes which meant I didn’t have to use ugly nets over the fruit bowls.

I have four of the plants and I moved them round the house depending where the flies were. But I don’t need to do that anymore coz they’re all gone.

This is Venus (original name huh?😂). The bits that are black are the traps where she’s caught a fly - they seem to rot as it digests…is that not normal? I’ve just been giving her tap water and it hasn’t killed her yet? Ooo - I’m now panicking I’ve failed to meet her needs😬🤣

I love it @Curlygirl06 (how's your tortoise doing?)

I got a venus flytrap at Christmas and she's flourishing. We seemed to to have quite a house-fly-y summer so she had a good feast around then. I sometimes put her in the garden for a few hours if nothing's been buzzing around the house. She seems happy with a sunny kitchen window sill.

She loves butt water (from the water butt) I keep a bottle of it in the kitchen to keep her regularly topped up.

@BogRollBOGOF hi there, still anti dementing? Yep, tortoise is doing well, really growing now- she's 2 in a couple of weeks. She started at 30 grams, she's over 400 now! Hang on I'll send a pic. 50p for scale, she was having a snooze so you can't see her head.

Better pic, though she doesn't like her picture being taken and wee'd on the settee!

I breed them (can you tell by my username? 😆)

They are easy as long as you follow the rules:

• Don't feed them. Let then catch their own flies. If they don’t catch any, that’s fine.
• Each leaf can only close twice before it goes black and dies, so never artificially close the traps.
• Stand them in rainwater
• Snip off black leaves and remove any flower buds.
• Move them to a cold, bright place for the winter so they can go properly dormant. An unheated greenhouse is ideal, or a windowsill in an unheated room. But don’t forget to keep them standing in rainwater!
• They will die down like any other deciduous plant, and then come back in the spring.
• Repot in the spring. Tip the plant out of the pot, divide it into individual plantlets, and pot each one into it’s own pot. Easy. (Carnivorous plant compost easily available online - I use Hampshire Carniverous Plants but there are many suppliers).

This is exactly how mine looks lol the traps are green not red, are the red ones a different breed?

btw just looked up sundew plants, they look fascinating too, might have to get one. Next I will be wanting advice on feeding a sundew plant 😁

Also I didn’t know fly traps flower… out of curiosity why do you have to cut the flowers off?

Do you have to divide them every spring? 😮

Goodness, you must have loads! I’m not sure I want my house to look like it’s been invaded by Venus fly traps, I’m happy with just one… I guess I could start giving them to people for birthday gifts? 😂

Thank you for all the advice though, hopefully I won’t kill my fly trap now lol… It oddly feels more like a pet than a plant… I might have to think of a name for him, haha

You don’t have to divide them, but they do benefit from it. They can get congested and unhappy otherwise.

There are red varieties, but even the bog standard ones will develop a red tinge if they get plenty of sunlight.

The flowers should be removed as it costs the plant a lot of energy to make them, energy that is better off going in to making new leaves.

I've been watching this thread with interest and so happy to see pictures of them! I must admit that I was slightly gutted they didn't look like the cartoon ones haha!!

How does one get involved with them?! I want one!, no scrap that, I NEED one....

They are truly fascinating plants… Here’s mine, I tried catching a live bug outside for it but the bug was too fast for me and disappeared into the grass🤣 … It’s also been really cold here today so didn’t want my plant to get cold haha… I tried again feeding with a tiny fish food flake, I watched a YouTube vid on how to massage the trap to trick it into thinking it has live food, I used a cocktail stick to gently poke the food into the trap and then tickled the hairs with the cocktail stick till the trap closed and then massaged the outside of the trap. It seems to have worked. You can see the food inside the trap when the plant is in the right angle against the light… here’s my Venus fly trap. Can you see the food? 😁