How to Prune Carnivorous Plants

Video Transcript

Hi my name is Wes for ExpertVillage.com and in this video segment I’m going to talk to you about pruning your carnivorous plants. If you want to know more about these plants you can visit us at Equilibriocarnivorousplants.com. Now one important thing to know about carnivorous plants is that just like any other plants they have leaves that grow old and die. Many people often times panic when they see their Venus Flytrap start to die, but you wan to make sure to note that these traps are really just modified leaves and when a trap dies it’s just the plant’s natural life cycle. Typically when a leaf dies, it’s because new growth has sprouted, you can see here this plant has perfectly healthy new traps even though these traps are starting to die off. Now it’s important to cut the dead leaves from your carnivorous plants for several reasons. Here we can see the Nepenthes with these dry leaves, they’re hanging and pulling down on the plant. When you trim the, you want to cut as close as you can to the dead part of the plant so that you’re eliminating as much of the dead leaf as you possibly can. We can see this also with this Sarracenia, cutting down at the base of the plant, as close to the plant as we can. Another important part of pruning your carnivorous plants is trimming the flowers of your carnivorous plants. Now it’s not always necessary to cut the flowers of you carnivorous plants especially if you’re trying to let them produce seeds, sometimes if you’re growing them outside or if these plants are growing in the wild, they have enough nutrients from insects in order to produce flowers and seeds without a problem, but sometimes when you’re growing them in cultivation they don’t quite have enough nutrients to do this, sometimes if you allow these plants to produce the flowers they can die. As you can see here, this butterwort has produced a flower and it’s now almost killed the plant. What we want to do is cut the flower as close to the base as we possibly can, trimming it as you see here and then we won’t have to worry about this plant dying due to putting too much energy into producing flowers and seeds.

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