FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Ever since I started with VFTs a few years ago, it has always been my goal to have a big pot or 2, at least 12" wide, overflowing with Venus flytrap of my favorite cultivar. I'm still quite a ways away from that. I know one solution is to get a big pot, put a VFT in it and just let it fill it on it's own. The problem with that is the expense in LFSM. I currently have the main plants in a 5"x5" x 7" tall pots. I've been dividing the mother pots and putting the extras in smaller pots so as to maximize the space between each rhizome. I figured I will save considerably on the media over time if I let the smaller rhizomes grow out in smaller pots.

I know the ideal pots for VFTs should be tall for the rhizomes to reach their maximum sizes. My baby grow out pots are about 3" tall and I'm wondering if this would be enough to at least get them to a decent size. Coming from the taller mother pots, a lot of the small rhizomes that I have put in the small pots already have roots longer than the small pots.

The cultivars I'm considering for the showpiece pots are Low Giant, Big Mouth, Jaws, Trev's Dracula, or Royal Red.

Good idea! I wish I had that many flytraps. I think I might get some in bulk from Meadowview Biological Center, Holts Nursery, or AG3.

francisfaustino wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 8:04 pmI know one solution is to get a big pot, put a VFT in it and just let it fill it on it's own. The problem with that is the expense in LFSM.

You could always do what Matt does with his mother pots: fill the bottom half with peat/perlite/sand, and fill the top half with sphagnum moss. Check out this video:

Thank you for the suggestion. This is what I've been doing for a few years now even with just my smallish 5"x5"x7" pots.

This is my dream too. I'm not an expert. What I chose to do was let them grow in average size 3.5 or 4 inch pots for a season and by the end of the season most divided. I had a lot of them from FTS that I kept in their pots and just kept them fed (fertilized) over the time I had with them. I got a Schuppenstiel towards the later part of the growing season as a "starter." In the beginning I believe it was a sole plant, possibly 2. I had 5 divisions by the end when I repotted them. So I wonder if surface area isn't more important than pot depth for dividing. No doubt longer root systems will yield a better looking plant though. This year, I took the 5 plants and put them in a larger 5x5x7 hydrofarm pot and just separated the rhizomes maybe 1.5-2 inches from eachother. That should give the rhizomes a chance to swell and divide 1-2 times per plant (hopefully) With any luck, next year I'll have 10 plants and will probably make a second pot until I have enough traps to do what I want to with them.

Another thing I noticed that I don't recommend is trauma. I've had two instances, an uprooted plant shipped potted when I started that I didn't do my best work putting back in(which divided to almost a comical level) as well as a purple ambush that I scarred up the rhizome to save from crown rot. The Purple Ambush netted me 8 plants from a single rhizome in a few months. What I think may have happened there was the rhizome effectively turned into a leaf pulling "hub" because the original plant died back completely and plantlets burst from the spot in a clump. It's on a thread here. Wouldn't suggest it but it definitely created divisions

Apollyon wrote:This is my dream too. I'm not an expert. What I chose to do was let them grow in average size 3.5 or 4 inch pots for a season...

Thank you for the feedback. I'm actually not too worried about getting small divisions as fast as possible. I'm mainly concerened about getting the ones I already have get to be as large as possible. I know the divisions will come with time. I've read a while back one grower's experience saying that a deeper pot allows the rhizome to get bigger while the same plants placed in a shorter pots have a tendency to divide more. I have been re-potting my VFT collection these past few days and many of my older plants (2+ year with me) indeed have 4 to 5+ inches of roots. In my plants' case though, even with longer roots not even reaching the bottom of the pots yet, the rhizomes are still average size. By average size, I mean less than 1" rhizome with many being less than 0.5". Some of the bigger cultivars I got a few 2" rhizomes such as the DC XL, Jaws, and G16 but most of the plants were less than 1".

I went ahead and planted them in the 3" grow out pots and I will see how they do by the end of the season. I see a lot of photos from people having great success with VFTs in smaller 3"-4" tall pots with the plants overflowing the small pot which is what I'm looking up to.

Nice, I'm sure they'll do great. Perhaps using a heavier nitrogen fertilizer will help the cause, especially if it has a strong root system already. I hope it works out! If you remember the thread, post an update in the fall. I'd like to hear how it turned out.

Deep pots do provide bigger and healthier plants. As you will need to buy the pots and Sphagnum at some point, you may well be better off biting the bullet and doing it now if you can, and plant your display up in the pots and let them fill the display on their own, it will only take a couple of years to do in 12" pots.
Cheers
Steve

This is something I have done for neps, but have not tried for VFTs:

Put a tiny plant in a big pot. When potting, place the sphag moss in a mountain shape, so the plant is growing at the top of a "hill". Place some live sphag at the foot of the hill. The live sphag will eventually grow and fill in all the available space, and it's like you got a pot of LFSM for free.

Is this the "look" you're after?