Repotting A Venus Flytrap + Venus Flytrap Care Tips: Soil Mix, Watering, How Much Sun, Pots & More!

[Music] hey guys welcome to uh carnivorous plants hub uh today i'm going to be repotting a venus flight trap for you uh me and the wife actually went out to uh home depot and we found this guy while we were looking for blinds well my wife was looking for blinds but anytime i'm at home deep or lowe's i'm always looking for any possible carnivorous plants that they have and i was able to score this here venus fly trap this is a typical species as it wasn't marked really necessarily what this is exactly but this one is a little bit larger than some of my other ones so i'm really excited to grow this one but today what we're going to be doing is we're going to be repotting it into this guy and guys real quick before i get too far um i just wanted to thank you for being here my dream is to actually open up a carnivorous planet nursery someday and you being here and watching this video is supporting me and i appreciate that so much uh you can further support me by subscribing to my channel liking this video um anything that you end up purchasing out of my description actually throws me a little bit of a kick back so all that kind of stuff really supports me and helps me in starting my own nursery and in my own community because we don't really have one yet so that's something i really want to do someday and this is all just kind of practice and helping me lead up to that that moment so thank you for being here but let's go ahead and and get to it here we're going to repot this guy but first before we repot it um i wanted to let you know that everything that you need to grow your own venus fly trap is actually in the description um the plant itself um the the the planter potter that you'll need and also the soil mix that you need you can actually buy all this stuff individually uh so you can bring this home and then and then repot i also have a video that goes over all the soil mix that i make so if you want to go to like lowe's home depot and get all of your own ingredients and mix your own soil there's a link up here you can check that out and that will actually show you exactly what i do to make this mix myself so and this here is my distilled water that's going to be one of my tips here in just a second but just make sure that no matter what you do with these plants you're always giving them distilled water only never give them any water that comes from the tap typically tap water has way too many minerals in it and that'll actually burn the roots on these guys so i guess that kind of leads to my first tip which is watering always water with the distilled water these plants actually grow in south carolina uh in the united states they are not tropical plants despite a common belief a lot of people think that these are kind of exotic um tropical plants that grow like in the jungle but that's just not the truth they actually grow in an area that gets very hot in the summer gets a lot of direct sunlight and then gets pretty cold in the winter time so they actually go through kind of a normal uh life cycle of of a perennial type plant so they actually do go into something called dormancy um they'll actually almost look like they completely die most of the traps will fall off and turn black and these will actually save their energy through the winter to make a nice comeback during spring so that's actually really normal for these plants when you grow them outside kind of in their normal natural habitat dormancy is really good for them and it actually helps them live a long time so it's totally okay if they die back during the winter and they're not super as awesome and cool as they are kind of right now um so we're gonna talk about the still water um so one of the coolest things about these plants is obviously they eat flies right um so not gonna lie usually when people get these fly traps you see on youtube videos a lot the first thing that they want to do is they want to just start feeding all the traps flies or bugs or insects or whatever honestly it's not really good for them usually one plant i will eat one bug per week or so per every couple weeks so the way that i've always kind of looked at the way it's been explained to me is the sun is actually what helps your plants grow they actually don't need insects to grow they actually grow in bogs that are super devoid of any nutrients in the soil so they don't get any of their nutrients from the soil and that's why you have to use like a peat moss pearlite mix a soil that doesn't have any minerals or nutrients in it because that'll burn their roots it's the same as using the tap water any of the minerals in the tap water will also burn their roots so you have to use a special soil mix what i use is a peat moss pearlite and a silica sand mix and it helps keep your soil nice and aerated and make sure that there's no minerals or anything in the soil so the the the plant itself is going to get all of its energy and all of its growth from the sun and then the way the bugs work is is there the best way you can consider the bugs is like they're the fertilizer uh so if you think about it if you go and you give a plant too much fertilizer it kills it uh so if you go and give your plant too many bugs or too many flies that fertilizer will eventually be too much for it and it'll kill it as well so my rule of thumb is is if you want to give your flight trap a fly that's fine give it a fly every couple of weeks or so um but for the most part unless you're showing off to your friends or something there's really no reason to feed a fight it's going to get as many flies as it needs to survive without your help um i've got a fly trap outside right now that has about there's three different flytrap plants and between all three of them there's about six flies that are in the traps right now and i haven't done any of that myself that's all of them so they'll catch what they need um and try not to over feed them because it's really easy to do um so real quick on pots make sure you're using a plastic pot uh plastic or resin one of the problems with like a clay pot or terracotta pots is what they'll do is they'll actually leach minerals into the soil um and the problem with that is again if you have too many minerals or whatever in the soil they will actually burn the roots so we don't want that so plastic or resin is your best bet or if it's going to be a clay pot you want to make sure that it's fully glazed and then that way that glaze will make sure that none of that leaching from the minerals from the terracotta or clay pot actually goes into this into the soil and harms your plant um let's see if there's anything else that i wanted to go over here yeah i think that's just about it in terms of tips for making sure that they grow correctly if you guys have any questions about how these things need to be treated i have a website carnivorous plants hub where it's just full of tips it has a care guide specifically for venus fly traps literally has everything you need in it to make sure that your venus flight trap grows big and strong also throw a comment uh on the comments here and i'm happy to answer any questions you might have about uh your venus flight trap or what's going on with it and maybe something that we can do to help make it grow better or what you need to do to make sure you accommodate it a lot of people like to try to grow these under lights and inside i kind of recommend not doing that they're not a great inside plant i know some people have been able to keep them alive for a few years but it seems like in the long run they always kind of die under grow lights and they need that actual real direct sunlight so the more sun that you can give your plant the better i do know some people have had success maybe taking it outside for a few hours getting in some of the direct sunlight and then also giving it the the heat lamp um you know throughout the day so maybe a mix of both that can work but you do want to make sure and try to adhere to giving it some kind of a dormancy period uh during the winter time but anyway so that's that's kind of all my care tips if i missed anything uh throw some stuff in the comments uh if you got some other good care tips and suggestions definitely throw it in there share for everyone to check out uh what we're gonna do now is we're actually going ahead and pull this guy out and we're gonna put him in there with this uh so what i'm gonna do is i'm actually gonna throw my camera on the tripod and then uh so i can have my hands free while we do this so you guys can kind of watch the process let's do it [Music] okay guys uh now that i've got the camera on the tripod let's go ahead and um start off by getting our um substrate put into my plastic pot here uh one tip i did leave out i forgot to mention is make sure you have holes in the bottom um one thing that's really important for these plants to do well is that there's good aeration and that there's good water flow through here um they are susceptible to root rot which is the roots getting too much water and then also crown rot so if that water doesn't aerate through the soil um they can the crown of the plant which is the top of the rhizome can actually get rot as well and you don't want that so the nice thing about this soil mix that i make is that it's really area the silica sand in there and the pearlite really give it an easy way for the water to go through it but at the same time the the perlite soaks up that water and holds it so the water goes through well but this soil also retains the water really well and also peat moss is a really good water retainer so the whole the whole mix is really designed specifically for making sure that this plant gets the the best water flow possible um and then i i just bought this here this plant this planter usually i buy a planter it comes with a tray this one didn't have a tray so i just kind of bought this little plastic tray just as a something so the water doesn't go everywhere when it leaks out the bottom some people like to fill their tray full of water for their venus fly traps but i've i've had them succumb to root rot because they were sitting in too much water with this planter it would probably be fine because this is a bigger one but i've seen ones that are smaller that sit in these trays where the roots are constantly exposed to that water and they can get rough so i don't i don't like to keep water in this tray but i do like to make sure that the substrate is always moist you don't want it to be soaking wet you want it to be wet to the touch but you don't want it to be like muddy you want to make sure that that they're staying a little moist but not dry if it's completely dry it needs to be water it should never be completely dry but it also should never be completely wet like muddy so let's go let's do this um let's go ahead and start so the reason i have this glass of water here you're probably kind of wondering is the glass of water i'm going to actually dip the roots from this plant into the water and that'll actually get off all of this old substrate that they have here i don't know what's in this i don't know where this came from so i'm going to be just getting rid of all of this and i'm going to try to get as much of this off in this water as possible and the reason i'm using distilled water again do not use any mineral water any any faucet water this has to be under 50 parts per million and you can actually get a meter but i know for sure that there's still still water that i get you can get this at any big box store whether it's walmart fred meyer anywhere and i know that there's no parts in this so i know that that's going to be really pure water and it's not going to hurt my venus fly truck all right so what i'm going to do is this is this this part here is just like any plant you're going to grab your plant you're going to pinch the sides [Music] you're going to try to get them out this part's always tricky so we're gonna pull him out here here he comes there we go [Music] okay so there's my plant oh i don't like that i don't want to get any oh whoops i thought that was dirt that's actually just that that uh that trap is [Music] black so there's my here's my root system right here you want to try to get as much of this root system as possible um so what i'll do is i'll get the rest of this off and then we will dip this i have a feeling guys that there might be more than one plant here so let's just let's get this dirt off and see what exactly we got [Music] just be patient guys uh with these you just want to make sure that you're not ripping this plant apart it's really easy to do sometimes it's really easy to rip all these roots you can see the roots right here and we want to make sure that they'll stay in as much tact as possible and let's see actually this looks like it might be this might be connected [Music] and i thought for sure let's go ahead and dip this real quick and let's see if we can get some of this dirt off and see if this reveals two plants or if this is just see the nice thing is is when you dip it in this water all that substrate just kind of falls off [Music] so this white part here guys is called the rhizome you can see here uh where it comes up to here to where it turns white that's the rhizome and that's the part you want to make sure it doesn't get too much water because it can get off here we go i knew it i knew that there was two plants see those roots should be separate there we go look so that's one of the reasons i picked this one is that i suspected that there was actually two plants um with this fly trap so uh yeah so that's kind of exciting two plants for the price of one so i'm actually going to um get these finished washed off here and then we're going to [Music] you guys can tear off some of these dead ones too while you're in here make sure you tear down though not to ruin a lot of the roots and sometimes it might rip a little bit of that rhizome off which is just i'm gonna leave that one that one's not quite completely dead um so yeah tears a little piece that rhizome off um this is actually the process that you would go through for propagating these if we were doing that today which we're not but that rhizome is actually what takes off and you can plant that um with one of these good pigs or one of these good um flight trap heads and then they can actually take off and grow a brand new rhizome from there so that's how that works but we're not doing that today see there's another piece that rhizome came off um there we go okay that one looks pretty good oh let's get this last guy off here oh come on there we go okay i'm gonna lay this one down actually lay this down off camera real quick because i'm running out of room here i probably should have got a bigger table i tried i couldn't get it to fit in this room the reason i'm actually in a room today instead of doing this outside i like to do this outside a lot more than i like doing it indoors but we actually have a gnarly windstorm going on right now and there would have been no way for you to hear me um or for me to even really have any peace because it is just whipping out there all right so let's go ahead and peel off a few of these dead ones from this one see look at that this chunk of rhizome came off that one that one still has a little too much rhizome i don't want to rip that one off this one looks like it's ready come on okay i think i'm going to leave this one and i'll cut this one i don't want to rip that one off the rhizome um because you can see it has a little bit of life left there so okay so i think now we've got these guys guys i'm going to cut this video real quick and i'm going to clean this off um just because i have kind of a mess here so give me just a second i'll clean this off and i'll be right back with you okay guys i am back um sorry about that uh so here we go so i've got my my two fly traps out now um so the next thing we need to do is we actually just need to put the substrate that i have premixed here into this guy again check out the link in the description if you guys want to know how to make this up straight if you don't want to have anything to do with that i understand you can actually buy a similar mix that's completely already made for you it's really affordable and it comes from somebody that i totally trust because i've actually bought it before when i used to live in a different area and i didn't have the the means as easily to buy my own mixes to make this substrate so i don't do that anymore but i do know that i used to do it and it was a great it was a great mix so okay so we're going to fill that about here you guys don't want to pack it down too much if you pack it down too much the problem is is that it doesn't get good flow um so you want to make sure not pack it down too much okay so i'm going to actually move this out of here now that we got that going i want to make sure i'm gonna look at my camera real quick and make sure that this is kind of all in the middle here we go okay now actually don't have my that's what i'll just use my finger so uh what you really should do is you should have like a pen or a popsicle stick give me a second oh okay i found this super fancy double-sided colored pencil okay so what i like to do is i have two so i'm not going to go right in the middle i'm actually going to put one hole here i'm going to go ahead and poke way down do you go as far as you can um one tip i should have said earlier that i didn't is make sure that your substrate is a little wet first of all the peat moss is needs to have a little bit of water in it and it retains a ton of water but the nice thing is is now that i'm making these holes this hole actually stays completely open i don't have to battle keeping this open because it packs a little bit you don't want this to be soaked but if it's just a little moist just like you should keep the substrate anyway then this will be much easier to work with okay now the reason i want the pencil is i want to take this and i want to stretch this out as far as it can go this one's going to be tricky because it's kind of curly cueing on me but what you want to do is you want to take this and you want to push it down as far into the hole as possible these roots and the reason that you want to do that is these roots like to be stretched out they like they don't like to be doubled up if possible and then what you want to do is you want to bring all these guys up kind of pinch them a little bit and you want to make sure that when you put the dirt over here i'm trying to make sure that you can see that you want to go almost up to the top of that rhizome but you don't want to completely cover the rhizome okay you want to pack that down a little bit because you want to make sure that it has a little bit of support okay you can see there's a little bit of that rhizome showing right there um that's exactly what you want if the rhizome is completely covered that's when you can get that root rot or i'm sorry crown rot and that crown rock can be really nasty for your plant so you definitely don't want that so that was actually the smaller of the two so this one here is a little bit bigger there's one more here that i need to pull off this guy's dead here okay pull him off and i'm gonna grab this one at the top here and see this one has a longer root i don't know if you can see that can you see that that long root right there against that white so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna try to make sure that that root gets pushed all the way down as far as we can go here as i'm pushing this down there we go let's get the rest of these roots down in there push this down there we go looks pretty good cover up the rhizome here make sure that it gets back down a little bit now one thing that kind of stinks is that whenever you take these out of their planner and then you separate them a little bit they don't they kind of lose a little bit of their ability to stand up as well as they did before but don't be alarmed after a few days they usually recover from that and they'll be standing up again just fine so don't be alarmed that they don't stand up quite as good as they were in the old i guarantee you once you take them out of that old substrate that they've been in forever probably for weeks or months or whatever and you put them in their new substrate they're going to be significantly happier now one thing i will say is don't be alarmed if you have an initial period where it doesn't seem like these guys are doing very good sometimes the shock of being replanted and then being acclimated into real sun sometimes that's kind of a lot for these plants to go through and sometimes they take right off and they do fantastic and then other times they just take a little while to acclimate like i have some outside right now that look like that they were almost ready to die um and you can actually check out my video that i have where we brought them home i have a an update with them and then my next update you're gonna see how much better they're doing they went from looking pretty good to being almost dead uh to now they look like they're making a really strong comeback so now they've acclimated to my my substrate they've acclimated to the amount of sun that i'm giving them um they're starting to make a really good recovery and i think these ones are going to do really well you do want to make sure that you acclimate these to the sun so the way i like to acclimate is i like to do uh basically an hour a day um so what i'll do is i'll do an hour a day for like two or three days and then i'll do two hours for two or three days and then i'll keep doing that all the way up until i get to about five or six hours um and then once i hit that five or six hour mark that's when i'm comfortable with putting them out to the sun and then uh giving them that that ability to be full sun again i'm gonna go ahead and pull this off the tripod real quick so i can give you guys a good look at this plant now that we are planted all right guys here we go look it uh we are replanted now um we are looking great this plant did a really good job it's even kept a little bit of its um ability to stand up you can see i'll come from the side here so you can see that it's still standing up pretty good some of them are leaned over a little bit but um they were anyway uh but some of them are still standing up too you got this one look at there's some new growth you can see the ones that are new uh so that's exciting to see that right there that's a new growth um this one here hasn't opened up yet that one that one looks a little unhealthy though so i'm not sure what that one's gonna do but um now i just got to make sure that i acclimated correctly i keep it watered oh and i'm actually gonna go ahead and go grab my mister real quick so i'm gonna grab my mister so that we can give it a nice drink of distilled water okay i'm back um i grabbed my mister i've had this mister for a few years now um i strongly recommend that you have a mister if you're gonna have carnivorous plants it just makes it much easier especially if you happen to paint these they do like a good misting because they like to be a little more they like a little more humidity so i like to keep them misted a little bit better but yeah i'll link one of these up in the description one that's a little bit better than this one this one's old uh but make sure you have a mister um these things will need a nice big drink after you plant them so let's go ahead and give them a drink here uh you can miss these it doesn't hurt them but there's not really any need so i try to just kind of keep the misting down by the roots i'm not going to put these in direct sun right now so it doesn't really hurt to get some water on them but it's just not necessary they don't necessarily need to be misted like maybe a tropical plant might that needs a lot of humidity so so no need to miss the plants you can if you want it's just not really necessary good this guy's a good drink these pump misters are really cool so again i'll have a link in the description for if you want to check one of those out so there we go guys it's going to get some good close-ups here so you can really check out this plant there's a head there this is probably the biggest and coolest one right here so that you can see the it's really cool you can see three little hairs let me see if i can get a little closer see those three little hairs on the right and there's another three little hairs on the left those are the trigger hairs when those hairs get triggered that's when the trap knows to close now these traps are smart once they get triggered the first time unless they get triggered again the second time it won't actually tighten all the way down they'll open up again and that's that's to prevent false positives like maybe a raindrop triggers it or a leaf they'll close and if they don't feel that bug wiggling on the inside then they know that they've got a false trigger and that they probably need to open back up because they expel a ton of energy when they close these heads and if they if they don't actually get a bug it can actually really hurt them and kill them so that's why you don't ever want to trigger these unless you are giving them an actual insect and then if you're going to give them a dead bug you want to kind of massage the outside of it a little bit so that it triggers those hairs again and then it'll do a tight squeeze and once it does that tight squeeze that's how you know for sure that they're getting ready to release their enzymes and digest that that insect so but i have all that information and much much more on my website at carnivorousplantshub.com i really hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did i'm sorry this this went a little bit longer than i thought it was going to i'm just i'm such a nerd with these i could talk about them all day um but if you really like this subscribe to this channel and i will make sure and give you guys updates on this plant to see how it's doing um anytime i have anything cool happens like if i catch them catching a fly something like that i'll throw it on my channel so you can check it out i also have some nepenthes right now that i'm growing um which are pitcher plants i have some saracenia which are like a trumpet pitcher uh saracinia purpuria and then my nepenthesis of ventrata uh and i give you updates on those carnivorous plants as well and then i have some other venus flytraps that are going right now that are a little smaller than these that didn't do so well but are starting to do awesome um so you guys can watch the videos on those as well but thank you so much again for being here like i said earlier my dream is to have a uh a nursery one day where i sell and house carnivorous plants for my community so i'm really really working up to try to do that so anything you do helps me a lot and just by you being here um is one of the biggest helps but subscribing and liking subscribing the channel liking this video all things that helped me out a ton thanks a lot guys [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Carnivorous Plants Hub

Views: 16,140

Rating: 4.9297218 out of 5

Keywords: venus flytrap, repotting a venus flytrap, how to repot a venus flytrap, venus flytrap care, venus flytrap care guide, venus flytrap care tips, how to keep a venus flytrap alive, how to grow a venus flytrap, where to buy a venus flytrap, venus flytrap repotting, venus flytrap soil mix, watering a venus flytrap

Id: j6UkfpWpe7U

Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020