FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hello, I'm new here. So I was wondering how often do you feed your plants? I usually just do one trap a month while leaving the other traps alone. And that seems to work just find, but could the traps be fed at a higher rate or is my rate of feeding too high?

Well I should note the VFT do capture extra bugs, like flies that get into the house, but my main question has to do with the rates of me feeding it. Like what's the maxs and mins. Thanks for having me.

Flytraps dont need to be feed :0) more so if there catching there own insects etc

Good sunlight ,soil and water is all you need.

Venus fly traps are great at catching pray naturally. However if they are indoors and not in contact with insects, feeding them can help with their growth. There are no rules to feeding VFT's but one i go by is to have one trap 'eating' at any one time as it is possible to over feed resulting in premature dieing of traps.

What do you feed your traps generally? Seems kinda hard to catch live flies to feed them. Is it ok to feed them dead flies? Will spiders work too because I got lots of them.

Dead flies are fine but you must agitate the trap after you place the fly inside do this by using your thumb and index finger and gently squeeze the trap together i do this 20-30 times softly.

I also use koi carp pellets and dried bloodworm depending on the plant am feeding

SnapSnapIOM wrote:I also use koi carp pellets and dried bloodworm depending on the plant am feeding

ohh cool! So if I wanted to help my traps that are maybe a little too small to catch bugs grow, would you recommend I give it some of my betta fish food and agitate the trap like you say?

Yup thats what i do the best is using dried bloodworm which you can get from most pet shops, the bloodworm is really small and you can also crush it into powder (i used the crushed for my pygmy drosera)

Use the 1/3 rule on the trap size depending on the size of the plant i just put small pieces of bloodworm into the trap then agitate like i said in the previous post u need to do this so the hairs are triggered more than once and then the trap will seal shut and make seal and digest the blood worm

Dont go mad feeding all open traps sometimes it has a bad effect on the plant i would just do one trap per month and see how you get on

You can also use koi carp pellets by crushing them and then add some water to make a paste then i use a syringe to drip tiny amounts onto my Drosera leafs

I use maggots from a fishing shop and cut them in half for smaller traps. They are great escape artists so one needs to mame them a bit before putting them in the trap.

I use mealworms, and if they don't fit you can cut them in half and feed two plants with one worm

Nice tips everyone. I understand how to feed the vft correctly. Right now there are two traps with Indoor flies inside, so I wont have to feed until the next 10 days or until both traps open up.

Hey guys, I found this cool video on another post about how to feed your trap. Thought it could be helpful.

http://youtu.be/MVrUWr7Jg0E

As often as I find a bug in my house that would fit nicely into a trap...which is maybe every 3-4 months. I also only feed them if they have plenty of good leaves because feeding can cause the trap to die and it's usually more beneficial for the plant to use a leaf for photosynthesis than digestion. That's just for my plants living indoors though. My outdoor plants with medium to large traps are currently catching about 1-3 bugs per week, but that rate changes with the season. Crane flies particularly like trying to stuff themselves down into the traps for some reason.

My VFT are fairly young, there traps are about a half inch to a third of an inch in length. Are they too small to give them a bit of food here and there? I have read it is bad to give them anything that is more than a third the size of the trap.

Feed flytraps one insect to one trap once every two weeks to a month, if they're not catching their own food.

Feeding flytraps more than that can cause them to not color up as well. Why color up to attract food if the food is given freely? Make em work for it.

Overfeeding also causes slowed/stopped growth and distorted traps/leaves.

Don't feed food that's more than 2/3 the size of a trap, as this increases the chance that the trap will die during or after digestion.

I generally feed in early Spring to promote the larger traps faster, then leave them alone for a month or two while they color up.

For the most part I feed my flytraps pet-store-bought crickets. I have fed dead insects and dead bloodworm, but once the trap closes on dead food, you do need to massage the traps from the outside a bit to stimulate the trigger hairs so that the trap thinks it has live food and seals for digestion.

Spiders are some of the best food for flytraps because they are some of the highest in nitrogen, which is what the flytrap gets primarily out of eating insects. But again, any insect will do.

Cool thanks. I will do a time-laps video of my traps, now that I have an Iphone App that can record it.