FlyTrapCare Forums

I've been finishing up my repotting for the spring lately and oh my god is it a lot of work. Flytraps do well in pure lfsm for me but when it comes to breaking open the pots and dividing them it almost makes me want to switch to peat/perlite and never look back. The fragile roots of the plants that manage to get stuck right into the tendrils of sphagnum and take hours to tease apart and untangle. It's never a clean process, and I feel like I'm traumatizing my plants each time I do it.

So for this year I wanted to try something different. I got a larger styrofoam container (think one for frozen yogurt or soup) and plugged the bottom with scrap sphagnum from the old pots, but then filled the middle up with a peat/perlite mix. I then wrapped the rhizomes in sphagnum like normal and fit them in and filled the rest of the top with more of the moss. It was a lot easier to do and I suspect it will be easier to repot again in the next year or two because the peat will cleanly fall off of the roots. I think this is was Matt uses for the "mother pots" of his flytraps.

You might want to consider filling in the voids between the plants with peat as well. Maggie Chen advocates for that approach and calls it her "sphagnum taco" or something like that. She says it provides the best of peat moss (low cost, better moisture management and thermal regulation) and sphagnum (better growth) combined.

_-SphagnumFromHell-_ wrote: ↑Mon Apr 25, 2022 4:51 am I've been finishing up my repotting for the spring lately and oh my god is it a lot of work. Flytraps do well in pure lfsm for me but when it comes to breaking open the pots and dividing them it almost makes me want to switch to peat/perlite and never look back. The fragile roots of the plants that manage to get stuck right into the tendrils of sphagnum and take hours to tease apart and untangle. It's never a clean process, and I feel like I'm traumatizing my plants each time I do it.

So for this year I wanted to try something different. I got a larger styrofoam container (think one for frozen yogurt or soup) and plugged the bottom with scrap sphagnum from the old pots, but then filled the middle up with a peat/perlite mix. I then wrapped the rhizomes in sphagnum like normal and fit them in and filled the rest of the top with more of the moss. It was a lot easier to do and I suspect it will be easier to repot again in the next year or two because the peat will cleanly fall off of the roots. I think this is was Matt uses for the "mother pots" of his flytraps.

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The past few years I've tried using LFSM on a few VFTs and will no longer be using it. It's a royal PITA to remove and the risk of damaging or breaking roots is too great IMHO. It lengthens re-potting time by a LOT too. Peat/perlite mix is so much easier, it basically just falls off the roots.
And I won't use coco until they make it TDS free, I'm not going to go through all that rinsing nonsense.