How to Feed Venus Flytraps - Artificial Method

so how can we feed a venus fly trap well let's find out all right so some of you might be wondering what the heck is this guy talking about don't you just you know put bugs inside of them or place them outside and they catch their own food why would you need to feed a venus fly trap that's a very good question for most of the time you don't need to feed them i stick them outside in the summertime actually they're outside all year round for me so they catch plenty of flies there's even a fly in that one and they do fine they grow but there are some situations where people keep them indoors and they want to kind of experiment with the refrigerator dormancy keeping them inside where there's not too many bugs or what they do is you know maybe in the springtime like here in chicago it's still cold they only start you know having bugs to eat around june july so maybe you want to give them a little boost so we're going to be doing an artificial feeding method in this video we're not using any bugs at all and this is kind of a combination of two methods i've seen but none of them really combined these two methods so i figured i'd do a video on it just to show what i've been doing the past year and this method isn't useful just for venus fly traps i also use this for sundews and butterworts uh so let's talk a little bit about what i do all right so the first method that some people use is they just get shrimp pellets or blood worms because this is invertebrates uh invertebrate proteins and it's very close to the insects that venus fly traps would naturally eat so you basically get one of these you rehydrate it with some distilled water you make a little ball uh you put it in the trap and there is kind of a trick where you have to keep tapping the trap every few minutes until it seals so it thinks there's a living insect in there or what some people do is they get max c fertilizer and i will put a link in the description i don't have a full sized container although at this point in my collection i probably could have one i just had these little sample things that i bought that are almost out but basically you get that max c fertilizer you mix up maybe a fourth of a teaspoon up to half a teaspoon in a gallon of water i personally will go as strong as one teaspoon in a gallon of water and you have this fertilizer solution it's a seaweed fertilizer so it's a little bit more gentle than chemical fertilizers and you can fill up pitcher plants with this or what people do is they get a spray bottle and they spray the foliage kind of like a foliar feed for venus fly traps what i like to do is i like to combine both of these methods and basically i just rehydrate the shrimp pellets with this fertilizer solution so you get a nice dense nutrient-rich ball that you put inside this trap it closes it digests it and it's pretty much the optimal feeding solution that i like to use so that's basically it what i'm going to do now is just kind of zoom in and do a demonstration as to how i personally mix this and feed them so let's go take a look all right so there really isn't much of a magic to this uh what we're gonna do is use the shrimp pellets and basically i just mix it in here and we're gonna i don't know maybe feed a couple of these traps today that's probably too much but what i do is i grind this up kind of like in a coffee grinder and some of these pellets are still kind of hard uh larger pieces but i kind of like to get a powder going and then i just use the fertilizer solution that i made and i kind of just mixed this into kind of a dough consistency so you can get a hydrated ball to put inside of the venus fly trap and this is still a little bit too wet so you can add a little bit more of this powder to this and i'll come back once i have the consistency that i like okay so here we kind of have this paste going with that maxi fertilizer solution and the shrimp pellets so basically you get a little piece kind of whatever will fit inside of the trap you can use your fingers to kind of form that into a ball i usually just kind of put on the tip of this plant label and then what you do is you put it inside of a trap and that's going to stimulate it to shut so now we have that food inside of there but the important thing is we're going to want to tap on that trap to make it think that there's something alive in there now some people say oh yeah you can't uh tap the traps it's going to you know be a waste of energy it's going to kill the venus fly trap if you touch that but that's pretty much just a warning if there's nothing in here and you tap it too much then it's just going to waste the energy and naturally they kind of die off but since there is a meal in here there's no problem tapping this as long as you don't you know rip the trap off but you know just tap it kind of gently it's going to seal it's going to digest and it's going to get nutrients used to grow so of course obviously there is no problem doing this so i just fed it and i'm gonna come back in five minutes tap it again and i'm gonna wait another five minutes and tap it again and then kind of show you once the trap has started to close and seal so let's wait five minutes and i'll come back all right so here we are about 15 to 20 minutes later like i said you put the fish food fertilizer mixture in there and then you tap the trap every five minutes and after about 15 to 20 minutes you're good it's going to digest that and it's going to get nutrients from it so this is what i do occasionally if you have uh your venus fly traps indoors underneath grow lights this is useful or if there's not as many bugs in the springtime it's also useful so that's pretty much it if you have any questions feel free to put them in the comments section down below uh hit the subscribe button to be notified when i make a new video and i'll see you next time you

Channel: TheBonsaiJungle

Views: 11,424

Keywords: Venus flytrap, feeding venus flytrap, venus fly trap, venus fly trap timelapse, venus fly trap care, venus fly trap eats fly, venus flytrap bites finger, venus flytrap eating, venus flytrap eating frog, venus flytrap seeds, venus flytrap hornet, venus fly trap eating a fly, venus flytrap feng suave

Id: S5H-l4zldzA

Length: 6min 21sec (381 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020