I’ve recently acquired some Venus Fly Traps and they seem to be a bit fickle. I mixed 50/50 sphagnum moss & perlite. They’re in a large round globe-like bowl that’s roughly shaped like a jack-o-lantern - it’s rounded but squat and open at the top. I watered them with tap water.
I’m not messing with the plants at all, but they seem to be dying off quicker than they’re growing back.
Thoughts? Advice?
Sorry, just a sad anecdote: I was thrilled when I found some at Home Depot or Menards and only 5 bucks?!? They were all dead in a couple weeks. I’d buy some more but would fully expect failure.
It sounds like you’re saying I should just buy new ones as the old ones die off. 
I’ve never had those kind of plants, but I heard somewhere about feeding them bits of raw hamburger.
We have successfully kept a Venus Fly Trap alive for 5 years now (although only barely last winter). They are pretty damn fragile.
Ours is potted in 50/50 sphagnum peat moss and sand. They are very picky about water. They’ll die if you give them most tap water since it has too many dissolved solids in it. RO water or distilled water.
They need to always stay moist (or they’ll dry out and die), but can’t sit in water (or they’ll die). We accomplish this by setting the pot they’re in in another shallower pot which is always filled with water. The water level is about 3 inches below the top of the fly trap pot and the moss/sand will wick the water up so they stay moist but not waterlogged.
Also: at winter time, it will look like they’re dead. All the leaves will shrivel up and die. Keep watering them and keep them cool but not frozen, and they’ll come back in spring.
If you want a hardier canivorous plant, get a pitcher plant. We have those in the same pot, and while the fly traps have barely hung on, the pitchers are absolutely thriving.
We moved a few months ago, and we’ve been giving them tap water since we moved because the water here tastes better than where we used to live so we didn’t install an RO filter and I’m definitely not schlepping to the store for special water for a plant.
I just took a look and the VFT is not doing well. Confirmed: don’t water them with tap water. They’ll die.
Pitchers are still looking great and have put up their annual flower bloom.
In the sense of “never, ever feed them hamburger”? Because when I had two VFTs and was looking for advice, every website felt the need to mention that you shouldn’t feed them burgers.
I dunno, maybe the websites are still combatting rumors about feeding them hamburger, because that was what I heard.
I had some that lived on my desk at work for several years. They died in a major catastrophe when I left one job and started another on the same hot August day. All the plants died of heat in the car. I still get sad when I think about it.
Anyway, I did give mine a small amount of real soil. Sphagnum moss is hard to get around here without also picking up spider mites. So I put it in the oven at 150F for a couple of hours before using it on them. Then I rubbed in just a handful of good filtered compost, and shook it out again.
I planted them with a too-large pot half filled with cellulose sponges, then the nutrient-loaded sphagnum on top. But what I think is the key for these plants: I placed a glass bowl over the top of the pot. Every now and again I would open up the bowl to look at them, or take away the dead leaves, but 99% of the time they had the bowl covering them. They need humidity.
The soil you have is good. The water isn’t ideal (distilled water is best.) Like the walrus said, they need to always be wet. I also kept mine in containers sitting in trays full of water. Give them full sunlight. Never, ever, ever fertilize them. (Having said that, I’ve never had one last longer than about 3 years. Eventually they don’t come out of winter dormancy. Mine were always outside.)
I also had more luck with Sarracenia sp. pitcher plants. I had some very nice ones for a number of years, until a fast-moving fungus possibly brought in by a new plant wiped out my whole crop. This Facebook album should be publicly viewable, you can see some of my VFTs and other CPs there. (I had a big Photobucket album, but Photobucket went to hell.)
(If you really want to commit to caring for the plant and becoming a eccentric carnivorous plant collecter, this is the book to buy.)
As others have said, use distilled water only and keep the soil moist, but not soaked. I would also strongly recommend a bowl or planter that allows for water drainage (unlike what is being used now). In general, try to convince your plants they are in Southeast Asia where it is hot and humid most of the year. Extremes of heat or cold will tend to kill them (and slugs will eat them). Finally, resist any temptation to trigger them into closing with your fingers or other implement, but feel free to drop insects into the traps. Feeding them by hand can be satisfying.
When it comes to carnivorous plants, I’m partial to butterworts. They tend to be reasonably hardy, they have very pretty flowers and you can see them taking out little gnats and such on their leaves.
I’ve had a Nepenthes pitcher plant that has been doing great for nearly a decade. It’s just in a vase with some marbles and tap water. Every year or so I’ll drop a bug in one of the pitchers, if I happen to catch one.
I also had a sundew (sticky plant) that lasted about 5 years, and it caught gnats and flies from an open kitchen window. I kept it in sphagnum, and made sure its bowl had distilled water. They don’t use much, so if I saw it on sale I’d buy a few gallons, and that would last for months.
I did not have good luck with my venus fly trap. When it was new I got to see it close on an ant, but the ant got away. A bit after that all of the traps fell off. It lived for another few years in sphagnum with distilled water, but it never grew any more traps, and eventually died.
Why would you want to do that when they are from Carolina Bays in coastal North and South Carolina? That is terrible advice.
I got them confused with Nepenthes. Sorry.
That makes sense.
My last house was half a block away from a small farm, so we had tons of flies. Inevitably, they’d get in the house. My neighbor hung up fly strips in her house which seemed to take care of them, but I thought it was really ugly. I saw some Venus Flytraps at Lowes one day, and decided to give it a shot.
It was more work than I thought it would be.
Here are the things we learned:
Put the plant’s pots in a tray, and water the tray. This way the peat can stay moist, but the plants themselves aren’t sitting in water.
Only give them distilled water. They evolved in a very mineral-poor area, and took to eating insects to supplement their mineral intake. If they have regular tap water, they don’t bother eating insects.
Don’t feed them. Don’t even touch them. Each leaf can only open and close a total of about seven times.
They worked really well for keeping the fly population down- better, I’d say, than my neighbor’s fly tape.
I’ve not had good luck with them. I do have one with my Sarracenia outside in Zone 7A in a raised pot with sand and peat. It made it through the Winter. When there isn’t any rain, it is watered with a hose.
They must have Winter dormancy, or they die. Some folks have Wintered them in the refrigerator. I had no luck with that.
One in a buried pot outside came back in the Spring, but died in the Spring after Winter dormancy when it began growing again because it had not enough drainage. This was one grown outside by a guy in my state.
If you use the Book of Faces, check out the groups and search for like-minded people. You’ll find plenty of expert advice there!