Venus Flytrap growing

If you have followed our “Plant sex: Growing more flytraps” then you will hopefully have a series of tiny Venus flytrap plantlets growing. These seedlings will take two to three years to grow to a resonable size. In the mean time, your plantlets will not be large enough to catch regular house flies, however luckily they will still be able to catch much smaller bugs to provide them with the nutrience they desire until they can start catching those big blow flys we all love to hate. Conveniently, even if your plantlets do not catch any bugs at all, they should still survive okay and eventualy grow into the huge fly chomping machines we all know and love.

The advice for maintaining your seedlings is essentially the same as for a full-grown plant. Don’t fertilize it, give it plenty of light and make sure it gets plenty of good, clean water.

In our previous article “How to tell when your Venus flytrap has died” we explained how to determine if your Venus flytrap is dead. Of course many of you may have arrived here too late and have already been poking around in the soil, checking your plants root system etc. trying to determine if it is dead, dying or just dormant. For the health of your plant and to save you having to buy another one, please do not go poking around in the soil unless you are doing it for a various specific purpose (ie: repotting after you have read up on how and why to repot your plant). By poking around in the soil, your plant which may have only been a little unhealthy, or even just dormant may quickly die due to the stress that moving it around in the soil can cause. It takes very little to stress a Venus flytrap and poking around in the soil is a sure fire way to finish it off for good.