FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hi! I realise there is a section for introduction but I wanted to go straight to sharing photos I can hardly believe there is a flytrap forum as friendly and welcoming as this! I would love to share pictures now and in future, read on proper care and hopefully find answers to some question. Well, let's start!

Here's my plant, which we called "Torfik" but it only makes sense in my native language, so I made up "Turfy" to fit English. It derived from the 20-litre turf bag which we had to drag home for our lovely new carnivore. It's the earliest picture I could find. It looked way worse and was very tiny. Half of its leaves were black and it looked very sad and miserable in general. Here most of the weak leaves already died off.


It sprouted a wonderful flower! I already knew that it costs a lot of energy for a venus flytrap to grow one and that people often choose to cut it off but I really wanted to see it for myself and watch it blossom. Too bad I didn't try to pollinate it!


Most recent picture of the entire pot:


Aaaaand now something interesting. During the growth of the flower my plant completely stopped producing new sprouts. As soon as the flower died off, so many of them sprouted at the same time! I've read that one or two trapless leaves appeared on a plant with its flower being recently cut off, but here I have FOUR trapless leaves (not all visible in this picture) and one... well it reminds me of the Goombas from the 1993's Super Mario Bros. Take a look:

Here are all the trapless leaves with the Goomba:

But if the Goomba is weird... then what is this? (Torfy you're drunk, go home!)



Aren't flytraps just wonderful! I am clearly enjoying mine way too much but as long as it's just making me happy and makes me care for it extra, I shouldn't mind, should I?

Welcome to the forum. Someone here will most likely be able to help you.

I mostly grow Drosera so my knowledge of FlyTraps is limited. The big 3 in the CP rulebook are:

1: Plenty of light. Outdoors with full sunlight is best for VFTs.
2: Clean pure water, distilled water, rainwater, or reverse-osmosis filtered water. TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) should be below 75 P.P.M. (Parts per million) Add enough to keep your growing medium moist, not sopping wet, not crunchy dry.
3: Acidic, nutrient-free growth medium, peatmoss, silica sand, long fiber sphagnum moss or mixes of these.

Looking at your pictures, I'd suggest more light is needed, but that's only my opinion. Low light will give you undeveloped traps sometime.
Often trap deformity is often caused by pests. The trap deformity from your pictures is new to me. Hopefully someone else will pipe in if they recognize the problem.

Good growing,
Mike

Having a double trap is just an added bonus I was so excited when I had one grow a triple trap.
http://www.flytrapcare.com/phpBB3/tripl ... lit=Triple
But your plant would benefit from more light.

Thank you two for opinions and tips! I also wanted to give a tiny update on the weird trap:



Can't wait for it to fully open, if it's going to fully open at all. I'm trying to give my plant some more light but my room is on the east side of the house and there's not much space in any other window (no balcony or garden here, unfortunately), maybe I'll figure something out.

The Goomba trap doesn't seem to be developing any further though:


And last thing in this post:


There are more flies here than I thought and the flytrap is swifter than I assumed! After just one evening in an open window it had 5 or 6 closed traps and 3 live insects in them. I'm so proud.