Venus Fly Traps (Dionaea Muscipula) Care Sheet

The Venus Fly Trap (Dionaea Muscipula) is one of the easiest carnivorous plants there are to care for. Here are some key tips for providing top notch care to your traps:

Light

Venus fly traps love full sun and will generally not do well long-term indoors.

Water

Moist soil: They crave consistently moist soil. Use a tray method: place the pot in a tray filled with rainwater, distilled water, or reverse osmosis water. Keep the tray about 1 inch full.

Watering: Use rainwater, distilled water, or reverse osmosis. Tap water over 50 PPM TDS is usually harmful to carnivorous plants. You can water the plant using the tray method and if it has dried out, water from the top, but avoid pouring too hard as you want to avoid accidental trap activation.

Humidity: While not essential, higher humidity (50-70%) is recommended during the growing months.

Soil

Carnivorous mix: Use a specially formulated carnivorous plant mix, pure sphagnum moss, or a peat:sand mixture. Never use regular potting soil (even the peat from MiracleGro is tainted with fertilizers) as it contains nutrients that harm these low-nutrient soil demanding plants. Any fertilizers that are in the pre-mixed soil will likely kill the plant.

Drainage: Good drainage is crucial to prevent root rot. Choose a pot with drainage holes and keep the plant in a water tray that keeps the plant wet at all times.

Feeding/Fertilizer

No fertilizer for VFTs, they get their food from live food sources and need movement or stimulation in each of the traps to actually begin the process of digestion. You can feed live bugs, but generally they will catch what they attract. Spiders are a meal often for our Venus Fly Traps along with some flies and other various insects. A trap will close initially after 2 of the trigger hairs inside of the traps are touched within 20 seconds. After the initial close, the trap requires movement for a bit to fully close the trap. After the meal is digested, it will generally reopen and start over. A trap can have a meal up to 3 times before it typically will die off.

Temperatures

These plants do very well outdoors with warmer weather and are native to the Carolina’s. They also will enter a dormancy period where much of the plant will die back or slow in growth in the winter (typically down to the rhizome). These can stay outside during a freeze or cold weather.