FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

today after the morning wake call, i see four of mine 9 trap are closed in the hot and they trapping insect . this is considered as overfeed ? it might stupid and sound ridiculous to say because most insect in my my garden house seem to like the plant so much than other non cp plant flowering such a roses and orchid in rural garden in mine hometown and the insect eventually died, it hard to prevent the plant from devour insect too much and i can,t stop the insect from coming. it,s normal for the plant who trap a larger amount insect on their own than overfeed by hand-feeding ?

as long as its getting lots of sun,it wont get overfed since nature is the one who's feeding it.

My VFTs always trap mosquitos and flies but my Droseras catch the most(moths,butterflies etc).



H

I sometimes feed plants that many crickets in one sitting, and I've never seen any bad effects from "overfeeding," ever. I've never actually seen real data which suggests that feeding a plant a LOT is bad in any way.

Perhaps it depends more on what is being fed rather than the quantity. I've noticed in cultivation venus fly traps are fed all sorts of bugs and insects they wouldn't usually catch in the wild (not that I know of at least) so by allowing nature to do its thing I don't think you need to worry, vegabundos.

I thought it was bad to overfeed because a trap can only close so many times before it dies and if you feed very often the traps would die and the plant would have a hard time growing well if it loses too many leaves/traps at a fast rate.
so from what I know (which is very little) there is no problem with feeding a lot at once but you shouldn't feed too often.
P.S for anyone with more experience then me please correct me if I'm wrong, thats how I learn

ziko88 wrote:I thought it was bad to overfeed because a trap can only close so many times before it dies and if you feed very often the traps would die and the plant would have a hard time growing well if it loses too many leaves/traps at a fast rate.

It takes quite a while for a trap to digest an insect. During the active growing season, the plants are growing pretty quickly and even more quickly if they catch insects. There isn't much reason to worry if the plant is feeding itself very well because insects are only very active when the plant is quickly growing. It will likely produce more traps faster than it will lose any. But if you're feeding your plant a lot of insects during the fall and winter months (when there really aren't any insects for the plant to catch), you'll could end up killing all of the traps and it won't be able to grow more until the spring. That would put it in a compromising position because it can't photosynthesize as well without traps.

Just some thoughts of mine...none of what I typed above is necessarily correct, but only what I've been able to reason.