Alas Howard, my venus fly trap, didn't make it. Those plants are really hard to care for! I boiled water for it, ran around in the rain for it.... What's upsetting me now is that a month or two ago all the major stores sold them in these nice little packaged boxes. The boxes did mention how to care for it but mostly it was fun pictures and stuff like that. I don't think the average person who sees this nice little presentation realize how much work it will be, and with the drought we've been having there isn't a lot of rain water going around either. So I keep picturing these little venus fly traps silently dying in households all over the country....
I had the same king of experience with a Venus Flytrap. Broke my heart watching the slow demise of a wanted plant!
Oh wow Carolyn owning a greenhouse sounds like fun!! What kind of plants do you sell? What's your favourite?
Hi Christa.. I sell mainly vegetable transplants in the Spring, Hanging baskets, and a few houseplants that I propagate and keep, like aloes, cuban oregano, sweet potato vines.. etc.
One can keep these things but it will be necessary to either use a humidifier nearby them or cover them with a plastic bad at night after misting them. Tja...sad, but it sits in the dna of the plant. Ach--it's all a bit artificial, but one does what one must to keep the plants they love.
I bought one years ago for my kids. They were fascinated with and was catching flies for it. I thought that they had over fed it when it died.
I saw that the sundew is easier to care for but this year none of the local nurseries had them. I tried growing it from seeds but it never took. Will keep looking though....
Remember... these plants are native to swamps and require an enormous amount of "wet feet" and high humidity.... an environment we have a really hard time re-creating for them. I hate to see you disappointed time and again and waste your money at the same time. Try them in a terrarium if you are going to try them again.
Carolyn is exactly right. As charming as these little guys are - they really are not suitable houseplants, nor indeed, even likely to be successful greenhouse or garden plants for anyone but the most experienced growers, because they have such very, very specific needs - which most of us simply cannot meet over the long term. When you consider that they only occur naturally on such a teeny-tiny pinpoint of our planet, it's almost shocking that anyone has even been able to succeed in cultivating them elsewhere: Not only do they require exactly the right food (and not just any old bug will do), but they can only do well in wet/boggy, sandy, peaty, nitrogen- and phosphorus-poor "soil" - giving them too-much-love (say, fertilizer, or the "wrong" water, for instance) is likely to be deadly. Oh, and another thing that can make them die-from-too-much-love, so to speak - is keeping them warm in the winter - because they need some zone 8-ish winter weather every year to provide them with the period of dormancy which they require to survive: Attribution of quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_flytrap
