FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

I purchased four sets of small VFT's from Lowe's at $5 each. They seem to be healthy. Today I left them out in the sunlight for a few hours to acclimate them. What steps should I take to ensure that they live healthy lives?

Can I leave them in the same pots? They are tiny. I have also purchased distilled water. I'm in New York so I plan on leaving them in my porch during dormancy. Also, what kind of traps are these? Thanks all!

Your best bet is to continue what you've been doing. The pots and media look OK for at least a year. Lots of Sun is one of the big three requirements. Distilled water is a second of the big three.

Matt, our glorious leader, has posted a lot of basic care and feeding feeding articles. They can be found here: Http://www.flytrapcare.com

He can explain it much better than me.

And by the way, Welcome to the forum!
You'll find a lot of nice people and a lot of good information.

Good growing,
Mike

One thing I like to mention to new growers with plants from Lowe's or Home Depot etc., Your new leaves will likely be much smaller than they are if they receive proper light. Also be prepared to lose several of the current leaves on there. This does not mean you're doing anything wrong. As far as what type of traps, those are typicals.
Best of luck!

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my only advice comparing those to our identical plants we got in April.

get new medium and larger pots ready, squeeze the sides of those lil 2" pots a bit and try to work out the entire chunk of root/plant/medium in one big unit (ours were packed insanely tight) and transplant that whole chunk into your new larger deeper pot, if you are careful the plant shouldn't be any the wiser.

the only reason I suggest that is our plants were of a similar size (just very much pathetic looking, yours look decent!), and the roots were wrapping the entire bottom of the pot and poking out of the bottoms of our three we bought.

they will be fine in that pot -- if you wanted to wait and just repot next spring after dormancy - but I wanted to get them something a little deeper and we were still...pretty early on!

edit to add photo of how sad ours were at the time

My biggest piece of advice would be to wash the media several times with your distilled water until it flows out the drain holes. Stores like Lowe's use hose water because they don't know better (and probably don't care) that the salts in tap-water kill this kind of plant. Furthermore, it would be a good idea to follow what riveraXVX said and put the whole plug of media into a new pot so those roots have somewhere to go without disturbing anything, but still rinse that media out either way! Your plants will look great soon.

Patrick

not really a rescue. let me tell you about a lowes rescue...

it didn't look bad on the outside, still had its big green leaves, but it has taken two months to "wake up." it's finally making some heads in the middle.

they just need time and delicate care to start thriving

ayyyy I also did a rescue myself, and they were the most beat up sad little things, one had barely no rhizome and another
had 2 dead leaves and only one new growth. one thing that I can tell you for sure is that to not disturb them. Im pretty sure one of mine died from repotting. I did my rescue recently and I can say damn is the moss packed in tight, so you are pretty forced to loosen it up but you can just use rivera's technique, wish i did that instead lol.
http://www.flytrapcare.com/phpBB3/post3 ... ml#p300176
here the thread for more info

Great advice here. I would actually recommend putting them in larger pots, though. Small pots are difficult when it comes to watering and those are as small as they come. They can dry out suddenly and flytraps can't handle being dry. They're really intended just for transporting the plants, not for them to live in. You can remove the whole ball of soil from their existing pots, loosen it up a little without disturbing it too much and just put it in a larger pot of sphagnum moss, or remove the old moss altogether...whichever you're more comfortable with.

Shadowtski wrote:Matt, our glorious leader

riveraXVX wrote:my only advice comparing those to our identical plants we got in April.

get new medium and larger pots ready, squeeze the sides of those lil 2" pots a bit and try to work out the entire chunk of root/plant/medium in one big unit (ours were packed insanely tight) and transplant that whole chunk into your new larger deeper pot, if you are careful the plant shouldn't be any the wiser.

the only reason I suggest that is our plants were of a similar size (just very much pathetic looking, yours look decent!), and the roots were wrapping the entire bottom of the pot and poking out of the bottoms of our three we bought.

they will be fine in that pot -- if you wanted to wait and just repot next spring after dormancy - but I wanted to get them something a little deeper and we were still...pretty early on!

edit to add photo of how sad ours were at the time

also as a comparison the above photo was 5-17, here is the same trio of plants (topview...the plants on the right obviously!) on 8/27 (a couple days ago)



patience, time, larger pot, proper conditions = no problem!