The Ultimate Venus Flytrap Care And Info Guide

hi everybody its devin here at predatory plants this video is going to cover basically everything you need to know about venus flytraps yeah you know the most famous carnivorous plant that there is we're going to talk about the different parts of a Venus flytrap and how to care for them and the way they they grow over the course of the year and so we're going to go through all that right now these flytrap of course is from North Carolina a lot a lot of people realize that it's also found a little bit in South Carolina it's from the area right around Wilmington North Carolina called the green swamp it's a very small area they're quite endangered there and there's poaching and all that we only source our fly traps from from tissue culture so they're produced out of clonal culture we also do leaf pullings and we do some seed in-house but it's important to never buy a wild collected venus flytrap because they're actually quite endangered so we grow our venus flytraps in a greenhouse but if you would like to grow it at home the best way to do that is actually outdoors so the environment that they are in is extremely sunny and it has a whole seasonal shift it gets very sunny and warm and bright in the summertime it gets cold and even experiences light Frost's in the winter and they need all of that to live successfully over the long term and so they can't really be grown as houseplants a lot of people want to grow them in a windowsill but they do best actually on a balcony or a patio some area where they can get at least like 6 to 8 hours of direct Sun per day as you can see we grow them sitting in trays of water so they are kept wet at all times and the soil that they are in is a mixture of peat Magnum peat and sand in this case or just pure lung fibre Spagna moss over here that's also known as orchid moss so those are the two good ways to grow venus flytrap in terms of soil so you either go with the pure orchid moss or you can make a mix a carnivorous plant mix which is peat moss and sand or peat moss and perlite and you keep it sitting in water at all times to simulate the bog environment so in a bog the water table is very high the plants are kept very wet and venus flytraps really can't tolerate dry and so it's important to keep them sitting in water at all times and it needs to be water that isn't too hard so a hard water that has a lot of mineral salts especially calcium salts can be very damaging to venus flytraps because from the we're adding that in the wild there's all this water moving through and that flushes it flushes out any minerals in the soil and so they can't tolerate that so if you're on a well or if you have very hard tap water you're gonna want to use distilled water or rainwater certain places like like a lot of San Francisco and other parts of the country can use their tap water but unless you know what your mineral content is safest to stick with distilled water reverse osmosis water or rainwater and again just have it sitting in water at all times and keep that in the sunniest place you have outside and just leave it like that year-round there are a few different types of Venus flytrap that we sell and that are available this is kind of your standard flytrap clone this is just a common clone from Agra starts they tend to have the red traps and the green leaves the one I was starting with here is the b-52 which has been bred to have bigger traps than normal they're quite large as you can see and they also have a stronger red color we've also got the dente variety which has these short hairs compared to the long hairs on the traps of the the other ones I've shown you and then we've got the red dragon over here which is solid red the entire leaf not just the trap can get a deep kind of burgundy red there are more flytrap varieties out there stranger stuff with weird mutations and sort of different sorts of colors and all that but these are some of the common ones that we sell that are pretty popular besides the the inherent traits that they have either they get red or they have the short teeth or whatever there are also a couple different kinds of Leafs that Venus flytrap will make so this is what we would refer to as an autumn leaf actually or a summer leaf that is it's short it's flat and low to the ground and and doesn't stand upright very much some of the other ones that we have actually this one is just starting to some what we call spring leaves which is these tall upright ones and you can kind of see that on this plant here they're sticking up in the air there they greet each about three inches tall when they're full-grown this this patch over here has has a lot of spring leaves and so that's just that's just an indication of the different time of year these will make autumn leaves in a few months it's it's about its main right now and so in a few months these all shed their their big spring leaves and grow some autumn leaves and then they'll go dormant so Venus flytrap to go dormant in the winter time which means they kind of slow down growth a lot of their lease will die off and this is when a lot of people think oh no I killed my flytrap and they throw it away don't do that it'll come back in spring time you'll get fresh new growth usually some nice upright growth you'll also get flowers if it's big enough so in the spring venus flytraps make these flowers these pretty little white flowers on these fairly tall flower stalks it's hypothesized that the flower stalks are extra-long so that they don't accidentally catch their pollinators because they need to be pollinated they don't want to eat their pollinators and so those appear at the first moment in spring and then if they get pollinated you can see some of them over here we've got some seeds cooking we've got some seeds developing here and they're not on all of these but but a few of them have seeds developing and those will be ripe sometime at the end of summer I got these little glossy black seeds which you can then you can sow and there's a process for that that we'll cover in another video people often ask us how to Phoebe anise flytraps I actually recently did a video about that which I will have linked in the video description of this one so go check that out it's a pretty cool how-to about how to feed your venus flytraps we want to go over some more technical things a fly trap has a rhizome it's kind of like a little bulb and that's where the plant stores all of its sugar and energy which is good to know because they shed their leaves this is especially common when you ship them and people can think it means that the flytrap is dying but it's actually just part of the normal life process so if you look over on these guys you've got this black leaf right here that's dying off we got a dying off leaf down there you see black around the tips this guy looks like it's dying as well that's just normal they cycle through leaves and grow new ones throughout the season as long as the rhizome here is nice and firm and white it doesn't have any discoloration or soft spots your plant is healthy leaves are temporary but the rhizome is the important thing with the in terms of the growth and health of your plant attached to the lead attached to the rhizome there are some roots which let me show you a little bit more clearly short blackish roots they don't have a lot in the way of roots they just have a few like a lot of carnivorous plants because they they catch their nutrients with their traps rather than as taking it up to their roots their roots are pretty small you can see this one's got little babies growing off of it they'll often divide up like that and and get new growth attached to the rhizome and when you repot it you can separate those out the the trap is actually a leaf it's a highly modified leaf and it's a there's the lamina which is the trapping portion and the PDL that's getting very technical but those are the different parts of a Venus flytrap again for the purpose of knowing how healthy it is you want to look at the rhizome new growth looks like this kind of emerging from the center of the rhizome little folded up guy here does developing even more and then that's what a fully open Venus flytrap leaf looks like right here this is a dente clone so fly traps are pretty fun to grow one thing you want to be careful of is not triggering the traps too often that does lead to the plant using up energy and if it doesn't get a meal eventually that energy can kind of wear it out they they can close their traps like two or three times and then the leaf dies out which is fine if they get a meal but if they haven't eaten and you just kind of watching it close its not not very healthy for the plant so it's trying to do it every now and again but mostly to grow venus flytrap successfully you want to keep it sitting in water at all times as we do here you want to use a special soil if you order from us we provide the the appropriate moss but keep an eye out with a special soil they can't grow soyal they can't be planted in the ground in most places they've got to be in their own pot sitting in water very pure water distilled the reverse osmosis of rainwater and they need a lot a lot of sunlight and the full experience of the season so make sure they're growing outdoors on a sunny patio or backyard or balcony or something like that and don't worry about them over the winter a light frost is fine down into the 20s or so if it gets very very hard you have a hard Chiltern the Upper Midwest or something like that you can go ahead and put it in like a windowsill in your house where it'll let kind of experience a little bit chillier and then put it back outside in the springtime they can't tolerate a hard Frost but something light into the 20s or so is fine so that's an overview of the Venus flytrap it's a great plant it's a famous plant it's very fun to grow let me know if you have any questions in the comments I'm happy to talk about Venus flytrap care this has been Devin from predatory plants we're going to like and subscribe to see more videos like this about fly traps and all sorts of other carnivorous plants

Channel: Predatory Plants

Views: 238,783

Rating: 4.954298 out of 5

Keywords: Venus flytraps, carnivorous plants, Predatory Plants, how-to guide, care guide, information guide, greenhouse, tropical plants, pitcher plants, bugs

Id: xhF2PWCgUeU

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019