General Venus Flytrap Care
Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) are native to North Carolina in the United States. Contrary to popular belief, they are not a tropical plant, but a temperate plant. They are typically found in bogs. Venus flytraps like to have their roots wet, but not the rhizome or “bulb” of the plant. Because of this, the preferred method of watering them is using the saucer method. Plants should be planted in tall, plastic pots with holes in the bottom of the pot. The soil should be 3:1:1 peat moss, perlite, silica sand. No fertilizer should be included in the soil (do not use soil with fertilizer added, like Miracle Gro etc). Adding some long fiber sphagnum moss to the bottom of the pot is useful as it keeps the soil from falling out of the holes and also serves as wick to bring water in. The pot should sit in a saucer with always 1-2″ of water in the saucer.
Important tips
Water quality is very important to carnivorous plants. Total dissolved solids (TDS) should be <50 ppm. For most people, this means that tap water is generally not ok to use. In the San Francisco bay area, those who have water from Heche Hechey Reservoir in Yosemite (San Francisco, San Mateo, Palo alto, Menlo Park, etc) are lucky enough to have tap water that has TDS <25 which is perfectly fine to use. Some areas in the Pacifica Northwest also have very low TDS values for tap water. For most Americans though, tap water isn’t safe to use for carnivorous plants — which means you have a few options:
- Rain water
- Distilled water
- Reverse Osmosis purified water
- Tap water only if your tap water TDS is <50 ppm
Where to grow
Venus flytraps enjoy full sun. They do not need fertilizer, and generally respond poorly to most fertilizer ( we fertilize in a very particular way, mainly just for seedlings). They will catch their own prey. One important to thing to remember is that these plants go dormant in the winter. This is multifactorial but primarly related to photoperiod. Shorter periods of sunlight will trigger dormancy. During dormancy, plants will die back, leaves will be shorter, traps are smaller, summer traps will turn brown then black and die back. Plant trap speed will decrease. During dormancy they still need some moisture but avoid keeping the rhizome too wet, as this can lead to root rot. Don’t give up on a plant in dormancy. They may appear unhealthy or nothing like their summer appearance, but they will return to growth in the spring.