Expert: Christopher Littrell - 4/22/2008

Question
I just received a Venus fly trap, but when I feed it ants and little bugs, it won't eat them, and I don't really know how to care for it. I'm afraid it might die soon. Also, can I plant it?

Answer
Hello A. Cohen,

You do not need to feed the plant to keep it alive. It mainly just needs sunlight and mineral free water. Place the plant where it can get the most light possible as it is a full sun plant. Adapt it slowly to full sun if it has been indoors for several weeks or longer. It really needs a lot of sunlight, like a garen plant, to survive.

Give the plant distilled, reverse osmosis, or rain water as tap water will cause mineral build-up that can kill your plant. Never fertilize your Flytrap as that will also kill it. Never plant it in regular soil or potting soil as that will kill it.

Venus Flytraps live in bogs in North Carolina where they are basically in direct sun all day, get planty of fresh water welling up from the bog, and grow on Sphagnum moss layers with some sand thrown in for good measure. Their living conditions are fertilizer poor, making them unable to stand fertilizer on their roots, so they adapted by catching and digesting insects and absorbing the broken down nitrogen products through their leaves.

Venus Flytraps will catch insects, but only if they are in warm conditions of 60 degrees or warmer, preferably about 80. They also need to have enough energy to catch them, which they get through absorbing sunlight for photosynthesis.

Do not feed the plant until you are sure the plant has been growing in full sun and is in good health. By that time it will probably have caught its own fertilizer. In any case, if you do feed it anything, only do so every few weeks as they do not need much to obtain enough fertilizer.

Christopher