Who is your Venus Flytrap guy?

[Brontosaurus]

I was at the grocery store the other day and they had giant, beautiful venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) that I can only assume were pumped full of growth hormones for a quick turnaround. They are difficult enough to grow when they are healthy. Can anyone recommend a retailer for healthy, hearty flytraps?

[toadstar]

There's a large number of cultivars out there. I assume what you saw would be one of those. Why not give it a chance?
I wouldn't say that they're any more difficult to grow than cacti. Like both, the parameters for success are somewhat narrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_V ... _cultivars

[Aiko]

I don't consider them hard to grow. Just give them rain water and no tap water, and you got the difficult part basically covered from my experience.

And you might want to have a look at the webshop of http://www.flytraps.nl (it's partly in English). It's a private grower who apparantly likes the venus fly traps a lot, and grows them for his webshop. I bought some seeds from him. I have mixed results in sowing carnivorous plants, but the venus fly traps seemed to be reasonable okay going for me. My oldest batch of three years old seedlings are now flowering for the first time!

[Brontosaurus]

I'm still a little weary. I think because of the climate I live in it's really hard to keep a flytrap well lit, humid and warm, especially if you can only use distilled water. I think I want to figure out spacing or something before I try growing one again.

[Zhanna]

I've had good experiences with FlytrapStore.com and California Carnivores. (Flytraps and Sarracenia, all healthy and growing like crazy!)

[Aiko]

I'm still a little weary. I think because of the climate I live in it's really hard to keep a flytrap well lit, humid and warm, especially if you can only use distilled water. I think I want to figure out spacing or something before I try growing one again.

Where do you live?
And can't you collect rain water?

[Brontosaurus]

Siskiyou County. We're zone 7. It's very wet in the winter and very dry in the summer, which is kind of the opposite of what a flytrap likes. I could collect rainwater but I have access to free distilled water so I do it that way.

[Brontosaurus]

The reason it's difficult to only use distilled water with the flytrap, for me, is just because then I have to keep it in a separate section of the greenhouse away from the other plants.

[Aiko]

Siskiyou County. We're zone 7. It's very wet in the winter and very dry in the summer, which is kind of the opposite of what a flytrap likes.

Probably depends on the specific genus / species.

Up here we have very wet winters, with regularly quite moderate freezing temperatures. And we do have some native Pinguicula growing up here (but other species should do well too, such as Dionaea, they don't mind temperatures around freezing and slightly wet feet).

The Netherlands is one big swamp / delta in origin, so not strange we have carnivorous plants up here, even if just a few species of pinguicula and Drosera. Dry summers we don't really have, as we have about the same amount of rain throughout the year, but it could still get warm in summer and we could get weeks without significant rain (we just had a relatively dry spell of a few weeks behind us). But watering plants is not hard, easier than to protect them from frost. So don't give up that easily, many plants are more robust than you actually think they are.

[Brontosaurus]

So I'm trying again. This one I left in the greenhouse at work and it looks terrible. My first guess as to why it's so unhealthy is that it got too much heat, and my second guess is that someone at work has been triggering the traps with their finger. Y'all seem like you know more about growing these than I do. Any input would be terrific.

[Aiko]

Why would you think it looks bad? The individual traps just fade away after not much time.

My plants also get a lot of heat. It can easily reach 50C on warm summer days. Just as long as the soil can be wet / moist, the plants should be able to handle the heat.

[Brontosaurus]

The leaves turned yellow practically overnight and the traps closed when there was clearly no bugs that were caught. Is that normal?

[Brontosaurus]

I solved the mystery. Coworkers were sticking their fingers into the traps to set them off. I moved the plant to a place where they can't mess with it. Thanks for the help y'all!

[xerophyte]

Hi Brontosaurus, I am not really an expert at Flytraps, but what works for me is to stand them in a tray during summer, and make sure that they get plenty of light, but with excellent ventilation. The leaves start to go off in autumn, and when the first ones start to turn fully black, the pots must be taken out of the trays. They need a definite dormancy during winter, during which they will most likely keep a few leaves, with much smaller traps, and the substrate can be kept moist, but not soggy. I cut the dead leaves away just so they look better, but I don't think it is strictly necessary. Our winters on the Highveld in South Africa regularly drop below -2 deg C, but the flytraps are hardier than that. I keep them in the greenhouse on a top shelf without much shade. We have four clones, of which two are 'regular' green ones, one is a small red variant, and the last is a lanky green giant, three times the size of the others. They are finicky and sensitive, so I am sure if they were fed hormones they wouldn't have survived. Incidentally, I prefer the 'normal' ones most, as they just look more natural.