Venus Flytrap growing

So your plant isn’ catching enough flies? Or perhaps you are never around when it does. At any rate, at some point you may wish to catch flies to feed directly to your plant.

Fly Spray?

The simplest way to catch flies is to spray some fly spray around, this works great and any flies in a locked room will usually die within 10 mins or so with some regular household variety fly spray from your local super market. However … remember that the fly must move inside the trap or your plant will just spit it back out again. So you’ll either need to wriggle the plant around manually which risks damaging your plant (not recommended) or find a better fly catching method.

There is another problem associated with fly spray. Venus flytraps are very sensitive to chemicals and do not grow well when it exposed to them. However as long as you aren’t spraying your plants directly they should be able to handle it (in theory - don’t shoot me if your plant dies because of this!). The amount of fly spray needed to kill a fly is negligible, it is more likely to do you harm than your plant and they are designed to kill insects and pretty much nothing else. You are also making your plant a lot less likely to kill flies by itself if you get fly spray near it. Of course this doesn’t matter if you aren’t spraying anywhere near where your plant lives and you intend to hand feed it for the rest of it’s life.

Swatter

If you are going to stun the little buggers then you’d better make sure you don’t hit them too hard. Swatting is a risky practice and you’re liable to kill them before they even reach your plant.

Jar Trapping

There’s two approaches to ‘jar trapping’. You can either run around like an idiot winging your arms wildly trying to capture them, or you can stick a bit of rotting meat inside and leave it outside till they come to visit. Either way, all you need to do is stick the lid on and whammo you have a nice fly ready for feeding to your plant ‘Jar trapping’ is certainly the most recommended method of capturing flies as it doesn’t damage them during the process.

Cultivation

The cultivation of flies will be part of seperate post coming soon to flytrapgrowing.info.