FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Adrien wrote:So if I get a TDS reading of under 60 With the maxsea could I just water the plants with it? Can VFT absorb nutrients from the roots?

Yes you could water the plants with anything under 100ppm. I've done it and it is safe. Yes, Venus flytraps are just like other plants in almost every way - they photosynthesize to get most of their energy and they also take in some nutrients from their roots.

I have always fertilized my flytraps and other plants by watering them. I prefer to water from the bottom rather than spray. No matter how hard you try to avoid hitting the top of the moss or peat moss and a ton of algae grows. Watering from the bottom avoids most of the algae growth and the plants respond well to it too.

twitcher wrote:Conventional wisdom is that if you fertilize the roots, you can damage or kill the plants

While this is true, watering with any sort of distilled water enriched with a high-nitrogen fertilizer until it is 100ppm or less TDS once or just a few times won't damage or kill Venus flytraps.

Thanks again Matt! I have a maxsea solution of 92ppm and I am spraying it every Friday, it’s been three weeks and so far so good! Noticing a lot of growth but I plan on experimenting with a control that doesn’t get maxsea treatment, I want to know how much of a difference there really is

Adrien wrote:I plan on experimenting with a control that doesn’t get maxsea treatment, I want to know how much of a difference there really is

Good plan! It is always good to measure how much good you're doing with the efforts you put into growing the best plants possible!

Not matt, but 0.01 M dyhnagro is the good stuff.

Jakob wrote:Hi Matt,
I just want to confirm if dynagro is safe for tinyplants?

What do you mean by "tiny plants?" I use it on plants out of tissue culture, just for the first couple of months, to help them grow more quickly. Some are quite small. But I've never tried it on seedlings, so I can't comment there if that's what you mean by "tiny plants."

Sounds like it'd have to be an experiment. I can say that I've used Maxsea balanced 16 on VFT seedlings as early as two weeks old without them dying off. Have to be careful with that kind of thing though. For me, humidity drops in the early couple months has given me more problems I was only inspired to fertilize them because the traps are tiny and my hands aren't really steady most of the time. I don't have the dexterity to work with plants that small.

Is Dyna Gro one of the better fertilizers you've used for flytraps?