A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2004 NEWBIE - VENUS FLY TRAPS

Hello all, I am on a quest to help my youngster with their science project, can anyone help with this question? What happens if you feed the Venus Fly Trap vegetation - I know (I hope) - it dies, can anyone give a scientific explanation??? Help!!! Thanks.

Glad to have you here at The Garden Helpers Forum.

I would just like to let you know, I'm going to
move your post to The House plant Section......

That way the gardeners that specifically come in
to look at the house plant questions and they'll find your post a little faster,
as sometimes they never venture out!!

Weezie

I'm guessing that the plant has adapted to eating meat and the way it has adapted doesn't allow for it to get the nutrition it needs to stay healthy. This is just a guess, but maybe it's a theory worth looking into. Hope it helps.

Hello,
I know for instance if you feed it meat like hamburg it will die from the fat content in it so they are probably very sensetive to the vitamins, minerals the it recieves. Anyways welcome to the gardenhelper! Did it already die or did it get fed vegetables lately or is it a plant like in that old musical film about the plant store(Little Shop of Horrors) where they get a venus fly trap and it keeps growing till it's the size of a small room and it's starting to eat everyone and you need some kind of clever way to trick it into dieing because it's able to talk now and think and it's meen and it laughs at you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If so I'd tell you what they did but I was to young when I saw it.

Oh... also I know that they can't be fertilized. It will just burn the roots or overload the plant or something like that. The reson it evolved to eat bugs was because it recieved water normally but in places where the soil could not hold any nutrients or had none.

Thank you all for your responses. My 7 year old chirpped "but mummy they just snap shut for 24 hours". Anyway - I'm about to check out what House plants have to say - thank you Weezie. Will keep you updated on what colour ribbon "we" have won. Thanks.

Here's a link to one of a couple of discussions
here at the Garden Helpers Forum
venus fly trap #1.

Venus Fly Trap #@. With extra info from Bill

There's a few more from the forum...
If you look up at the top, there's 5 lines in a row, the middle one says FORUM SEARCH,
if you type in VENUS FLY TRAP, you'll get a bunch more of places to go to, to read up on the plant..

Some one like Will Creed will come through, and
help a little bit better than I can....

The second URL, has 2 links to Bill's info here at the GHF...........

Weezie

The energy it waists closing could do it harm if it doesn't get any nutrients out of it if it happens too often, it could slow down it's ability to close which would make it hard to catch anything.

Bill\'s info @ The Garden Helper

Lot's of good reading there!!!

Weezie

...instant death if you fertilize them.....



guilty of that one, here.....

Just to let you know - "we" won the third prize ribbon for "our" science fair project

That's great!!!
Glad they got good marks!