I bought 3 Venus Fly Traps at Walmart last month. I left them in their tiny pots for a week while I fed them a few flies I caught. They sent out more leaf traps.
So I did some research and found they wanted deeper pots of peat and sand. So I gave them that. And I found they wanted distilled water or direct rainwater (as in not off the roof) because they didn't want dissolved minerals in the water. Happily, Walmart sells the stuff for 82 cents per gallon.
Then I learned that "sand" didn't mean "sand". It meant quartzite sand, not beach sand because regular commercial sand has a lot of dissolved solids in it.
So I gently removed the plants from the "regular sand" contaminated mix and re-did it with peat and perlite.
The plants are now in 6" deep and wide pots of soil they want, in the direct sunlight they want, and are watered with distilled water or rainwater from clean buckets outside whenever it rains.
They are thrilled! They have doubled in size and number of leaf traps, the traps are pink inside, and half have insects they caught on their own.
One thing that confuses me is that the container they came in says they want temps between 50-80F and I KNOW it gets hotter than that in NC where they grow naturally in direct sunlight.
Am I missing something there?
