So today we went to the garden centre and my 11 year old who is autistic discovered the vft and wanted it as he found this very awesome and very quickly became obsessed about it, I am very aware that this plant may become a me looking after it as some of his obsession can be very short lived, I am sure he will do his own research on it but I was wondering if anybody can give me some pointers so I can help him look after it proper and what exactly does it eat 🤦♀️
“Eats Meat!” But for real, if you get flies and other bugs that are a good size, it will take those. However, there might be times you may need to feed it. DO NOT feed it ground meat (hamburger meat). This is bad advice out there. You can feed it meal worms or small crickets. These can be bought at a pet store. How often to feed? About once a month. If it catches more, that’s okay. You’re providing enough to keep it going. DO NOT give it tap water. Distilled water is preferred. Don’t fertilize it. And it likes Sphagnum moss with perlite. About 50/50 mix. Hope that helps. They are fun and really cool. This year mine produced a flower. Wasn’t expecting that, so it was cool.
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They also need to have a winter dormancy period where they have all their leafs die off and need it to be nice and cold. Preferably in the fridge for a few months. If yours sends a flower up I would cut it off so it doesn’t use all of the plants energy. Most often is a vft flowers it blends up killing itself.
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I keep mine in a bowl of distilled water about 1/3 of the way up and in sphagnum moss. And since I don’t like live bugs, I feed mine dehydrated meal worms that are rehydrated in distilled water. You can buy the blood worms from a pet store or Amazon as it’s just fish food. I take 1-2 tiny worms, place it in distilled water and allow to rehydrate for like 5-10 mins and then using tweezer or toothpick, feed 1 or 2 traps, depending on size of plant, once a month. They do like a lot of light. One of mine was doing poorly even though under a grow light but it was a cheap grow light, when switched to placing it a few inches under a better quality grow light, everything changed, became healthy and started growing flowers along with new traps.
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If you keep it wet with distilled water and grow it outside, it’ll pretty much do the work for you with catching bugs, so you don’t have to feed it yourself. Also, I don’t know how cold it gets for you, but I keep mine outside year round since it doesn’t know here, and they grow really well because they get a natural winter dormancy, so outside is the best, especially for light.
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