You Need to Cut These Off of your Venus Flytrap - Propagating Venus Flytraps

So you want to know what the hell is going on over here? Well as you can tell I have a pot over here and inside this pot is a Venus flower trap. And in this video I'm going to tell you exactly what this thing over here is and what you should do with them if your plant is making one of these. So let's start the video. So as I said this is a Venus flower trap and it's making this long stalk and our other Venus flower trap right over here is doing the exact same thing. This one is actually a bit longer because it's just a taller plant I guess. Anyway these guys make flowers and if you didn't know that now you know. So the reason why they make these flowers is so they can obviously make some seeds make some babies because every living thing their end purpose is to just make more of whatever they are. So that's why they have the flowers. Now the thing about Venus flower traps and something that people may not actually know is that these are traps they are not flowers. These are flowers they are not traps. These trap insects and these make babies. So that is something that many people don't actually realize and something that you should know to make sure you don't look like an idiot in front of someone else. The thing about these Venus flower traps and their flowers is that many times when you a regular person go to the shops and they buy this flower trap for the first time they may come with this thing or start making this and you have no clue what it is. Your plant isn't looking that healthy anyway because you aren't really sure on its care instructions. It is always recommended that in those cases you cut your flower stalk off and that is what we will do in this video as well because I don't need Venus flower trap seeds. I don't want more Venus flower trap seeds. If you didn't know this in a previous video we have already sowed hundreds of different Venus flower trap seeds so I don't need any more. But I'm going to show you how to cut this flower stalk off and how to actually make more Venus flower traps from this flower stalk that you cut off. So I'm going to go and get some scissors and some pots of soil and I'll show you exactly how to do it. So now that we have our pots and our scissors and our soil all ready to go I will give you guys a little bit more information on the flower stalks and what they do and everything and Bear is here with us. Bear come say hello. So the reason why Bear is actually here right now is because the smell that the flowers make it smells pretty bad I don't have very good smelling senses but I do know that the smell that these flowers make is not a very good smell or maybe it's just a weird smell and that's why he likes it because I think it smells similar to cat pee. So that's why he's over here busy investigating. But in any case let's talk more about the flowers. Now as I said you should really cut your flowers off even if your plant is doing well unless you want the seeds. There's no real need to have the flowers everywhere because they are very boring and they just use energy from your plants and you can just make more from the flowers. Now many times when people get a venus flower trap their plant will make their flower stalk and it will completely drain the life out of the plants and then your plant dies and that is the reason why we always cut them off and if your plant is healthy obviously these ones they are very healthy your plant will actually be fine with the flower stalks so if you do want seeds and you have a very healthy plant it's definitely fine to let it flower. I've actually let these guys go for too long now. You can see that the flower bud is busy opening on this one. You can see there the white tips of the flower coming out and I have not been doing many or any videos in the past two or three weeks because I've been very very busy. The very simple thing to do when obviously you cut your plant is you need to know where to cut it. You want to cut the plant's flower stalk right at the base so as close as you can to the very bottom of the plant and the reason for this is so that you have a very long stalk and this allows you to have more space and more energy inside of the stalk so that when you put the stalk into the soil as we're going to do you have a greater chance of this flower stalk making more venus flower traps and I'll go through that with you guys now so let me change the camera around for you and I'll show you guys exactly how to do this. So here we go guys I'm going to show you exactly when how to cut these guys and it is very very simple. You should get your scissors. I have these small ones because it's much easier to maneuver within the plant but as I said you want to get right down to the base make sure you don't cut any other growth at the same time and there we go and just pull it off and there we go we now have one of the flower stalks from one of our typical venus flower traps. Everyone's always asking me what type of venus flower traps these are and people always think that this is a b52 which is like one of the healthiest biggest venus flower traps it's not a b52 guys it's a typical venus flower trap any random one you can get from the shop but yes it is quite big compared to my thumb they're both actually pretty big as you can see but yeah they are just typicals this is how a typical will look if it's looked after pretty well and it's very happy they do get very big venus flower traps do get pretty big so we'll do the exact same thing for this guy over here making sure to not set up any of the traps and there we go we now have culled any potential babies that could be coming from our two venus flower traps and i'm going to show you now what to do with these flower stalks so we have two pots here these are just pots of carnivorous plant soil so this is a mixture of peat and perlite the ratio of how much to use is one to one so one pot of peat one pot of perlite very easy very very simple and what i will do is that i will actually put the smaller flower stalk on the left one and the big one on the right now what you want to do with your flower stalk is that you could just stick it right into the soil right now but it is best to cut them into smaller pieces and the size is generally about an inch to two inches an inch and a half really and the reason why you have in these lengths is so that there is a good amount of you know plant matter available to help in creating the new propagated venus fire traps that you will be making from these flower stalks but anyway i'm gonna cut it like about one inch two inches and just stick it into the ground about halfway down and just do this for the entire flower stalk and that's it guys it's very very simple very very easy you may even notice that this flower part of the flower stalk it may still flower and that's normal that's what the flower is meant to do it's meant to flower so it has energy it will still flower if it has water it will still flower you won't really get seeds from it because it will eventually die off and the success rate of this is not always very high because this is actually quite a weird method of propagation for venus fire traps they generally make babies all by themselves if you see over here you can see that the main crown of plant is here but there's also babies coming out the side here so yeah venus fire traps they do make babies and they come by themselves but of course doing this flower propagation method you can get maybe a 25 to 50 percent success rate if you're very lucky you can get them all to make babies for you so we will do this exact same thing for this flower stalk right over here and i always like to spray down my plants every time i do anything with them just so that there's water on them it's not going to do much for these flower stalks but you know i just do it anyway and that is easy guys it is now done you put these pots back outside into the water tray you make sure that their bowl of water is always full with rain water distilled water ro water and hopefully you guys should get some roots busy growing out of these flower stalks and eventually little babies start growing too so let's go put them outside and there we go guys super simple super easy they are now outside with the rest of the collection in the water tray you may have noticed that they're kind of floating a little bit and the reason for this is simply because the peat still hasn't absorbed all of the water the peat was a little bit dry and it floats but as they sit there they will soak up that water and they'll just go back to a normal pot which doesn't float in the water and you guys may also notice that i did a whole second tray or a full tray of all of the drossera capensis red and filled up another tray with the rest of them and a whole other tray full of and the reason was because simply the spatula little pot was way too full and secondly i would like to sell more of these guys because i potted up 18 plants last time if you guys remember and i sold all of them and i am so super super happy that i was actually able to find a new homes because i don't need that many plants and i'd rather give them out to people you know who want to have them at their place who like these plants who obviously want to grow more of them so that's why we potted a whole bunch more we'll have these spatulatas the small little rosette ones and capensis so we have two different types for people that's why i did that and you can also see i made another colony pot of the drossera spatulata and that brings me on to the next point the weather here for the past two or three weeks which is kind of also reason why as to why i haven't been recording um the weather has been really really bad so firstly we had two weeks of non-stop rain and i mean pouring every single day in the news there were even issues down in different parts of southeastern queensland which is the area that i'm staying here in australia where huge hailstones the size of oranges was destroying people's cars and their houses now these hailstones are as i said a size of an orange and they went through tile and boards and roofing and all that stuff people can no longer live in their houses anymore because these hailstones have destroyed their houses and obviously this is extremely extremely sad and i feel so bad for these people but nothing really that i can do besides maybe make a video which they hopefully watch and enjoy but i feel so sorry for these guys their houses have been destroyed they can't live anymore some of them are homeless which really obviously sucks the storms have been pretty bad for the past two weeks so i have not done any recordings simply because of that now straight after that week i'll get back to the storms now straight after that week it was then one of the hottest weeks i've experienced so it went from two weeks of cold to another third week of super hot we had 38 degrees celsius the one day it was so damn hot and we don't even have air cons in this house so you can imagine anyway the plants as you can tell some of them they don't look that good the colony pot for the drosophila spatulata you may see that some of the actual plants in there they are actually dried up and dead they might come back they might not and the issue that happened here is that they were cold used to the high humidity and then they just jumped straight into super hot and dry weather and they didn't have a lot of water either because i was not able to actually water them enough with between those couple days so i'll just have to replant some into the colony pot it's not a big issue but there are some other things that have come up so what happened through all of this rain and those big storms is that we lost a couple plants so what happened is that as you know as you've seen in this video now we have a polycarbonate panel sitting on top of my rubbish bins because just like you guys i'm also broke i can't afford to really build anything for as a roof for them so i have the polycarbonate panel on top of the bins and that protects them from the rain now because the storms were so insane and severe the rain was flying in from the sides overflowing the panel and just falling all over the plants the panel did nothing so we lost a couple plants because the rain literally washed them out we lost some of our saracenia seeds that we planted up together um that sucks because they were really nice different crosses that i really wanted to have and we lost some drosera filiformis some drosera filiformis red we lost drosera pygmy or drosera mancara as richard davin calls them he's the guy who actually gave us those seeds and we also lost some other drosera admirabilis and we have lost some other saracenia flower seedlings that were actually growing up and we lost some darlingtonia californica the cobra lilies so yeah we lost a couple different plants a little bit more than that but um that sucked a lot and then what happened is that week where it was super hot i took the panel off because i didn't need that panel outside anymore it was just in the way on top of the bins like come on so i obviously moved it and that means that all i had was that fence around the plants and the fence has always been fun but because i had those trays in there i had to make the fence wider so we could fit the trays in the front and what this means is that there is a bigger gap on the top and what that means is that the birds got inside and if you guys own these plants you know what the birds can do they pulled out tons of different plants especially the ones that we just repotted and they messed with all the sphagnum moss so they would mess with some of our darlingtonia they ate more of the saracenia seeds overall these past couple weeks have been really sucky because we've lost plants like two or three times and it's been super busy for me at work and it's been visa applications and student visa and applying to studies so and the weather has just been insane so yeah that's an update for you guys just some more information but what that now means is that i actually need to look at making a proper table for these guys firstly because i want to have them off the ground i am tired of always bending over and sitting you know on my haunches to look at them and i would like to have a system where i can just water them all at once i don't have to water multiple different trays which takes ages to do and i would like to build a roof for them so that we don't have birds getting in and we don't have rain you know flushing our plants away obviously it's going to be quite expensive because you have to have to buy tools i don't have any tools i moved to this country with literally nothing like nothing at all so i'm gonna have to buy like obviously at least a drill and i'm going to have to buy all the materials and wood and more polycarbonate panels and obviously design it all again we have designed this before but i may have to do a design which requires me to not have a table saw because i don't have a table saw and of course they're expensive so i will figure something out and hopefully we'll be able to have a flood table for plants with the roof and bird prevention so nothing terrible like this happens again so make sure that you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any of that so that is about it for this you know fairly boring video i hope that if you watch the first part and you're still watching now i hope that you enjoyed it i'm learning about how to actually do the plants and then more stuff that's happening in my life and other stuff with the plants so if you did enjoy it please leave a like it really helps me out on the channel and i really do hope to see you guys in more videos so hopefully soon i'll be able to get back to a normal schedule of posting once a week once my student visa comes through i'm not allowed to legally work anymore don't really know why but that means i will be doing more videos a week as well i'm thinking of doing about three videos a week for you guys so i hope that you guys do enjoy that so yeah any more information that comes up i'll let you guys know in future videos so i'll see you then