A pot crowded with Venus flytraps against a black background, their open traps lined in red and fringed with long teeth

What growing them involves

Top up the tray, then mostly watch

Most of the week you do nothing but look. Every few days you check that the tray under the pots still holds about half an inch of water and top it up. Now and then you snip off a dead leaf. Indoor plants catch the odd gnat on their own, so every two to four weeks you feed each plant one small insect. Once a year, in late winter, you repot into fresh soil.

Which plant to start with

Cape sundew

The most forgiving choice. Thin leaves covered in sticky droplets catch gnats on a sunny windowsill all year, and it needs no winter rest.

Venus flytrap

The one everybody wants. It needs four or more hours of direct sun a day and a cold winter dormancy, so it suits a very bright sill or a spot outdoors.

Mexican butterwort

A flat rosette of greasy leaves that works like living flypaper for fungus gnats. It tolerates less sun than the others and stays small.

Tropical pitcher plant

A vine with hanging pitchers that likes bright indirect light and ordinary room temperatures. Water it from the top and let it drain, since its roots rot in standing water.

American pitcher plant

Tall trumpet-shaped pitchers that swallow wasps and flies. It grows best outdoors in full sun and needs a cold winter, so choose it if you have a patio or balcony.

Long, narrow sundew leaves fringed with red sticky hairs against a pale background — Sundew leaves fringed with sticky hairs

Your first two weeks

Tick each one off as you go

A young Venus flytrap planted in dark peat dotted with white perlite, with clumps of green moss around it — A young flytrap in peat and perlite

What you can grow and do in your first month

A properly repotted plant

Move your new plant out of its tiny store pot into fresh peat and perlite, sitting in a tray of distilled water.

A first feeding

Give one trap or leaf a soaked dried bloodworm and watch it seal, digest and reopen about a week later.

A flush of new traps

With enough light, a flytrap or sundew puts out several new leaves in four weeks, each a little stronger than the last.

A tested water supply

Measure your tap water, rainwater and distilled water so you know for certain which ones are safe to use.

A sundew leaf cutting

Float one healthy sundew leaf in a covered cup of distilled water on a bright sill, and look for tiny plantlets along it after three to six weeks.

The four rules that keep them alive

Water

Use only distilled water, reverse osmosis water or rain. Dissolved minerals in tap and bottled spring water build up in the pot and burn the roots. Anything that reads under 50 parts per million on a meter is safe.

Soil

Use sphagnum peat moss mixed about half and half with perlite, and check both bags say no fertilizer added. Ordinary potting soil and compost kill these plants within weeks.

Light

Give them as much as you can. Pale, floppy leaves and traps that stay green instead of coloring up mean the plant is starving for light.

Rest

From about November to February, keep flytraps and American pitcher plants at 35 to 50 degrees F in an unheated garage, a cold windowsill or outdoors with protection from hard freezes. Keep the soil just damp and expect most leaves to die back.

What trips beginners up

Expect black traps

Each flytrap trap closes only a handful of times before it dies, and old leaves blacken all the time. Cut them off. Worry only when new growth in the center turns black too.

Expect slow winters

A dormant flytrap looks like a dying one. Do not throw it out or move it somewhere warm to rescue it.

Expect a rough first week

Mail-order plants often arrive squashed and lose leaves before settling in.

Stop poking the traps

Closing with nothing inside wastes energy the plant cannot spare, and a trap you trigger for fun may never catch a meal.

Never fertilize or feed table scraps

Plant food in the soil burns the roots, and meat rots the trap. Feed insects only, each no bigger than a third of the trap.

Skip the sealed glass jar

Stagnant, hot air under glass grows mold and cooks the plant in sun. Open air at normal room humidity suits beginner species.

Avoid unglazed clay pots

Terracotta releases minerals into the soil over time. Plastic and fully glazed ceramic are safe.

A fly caught in a closed green Venus flytrap, one wing sticking out between the interlocked teeth — A trap closed on a fly

Buy nursery-grown, never wild-dug

Venus flytraps grow wild only in a small part of the Carolinas, where poaching has pushed them toward protected status and digging one up is a felony in North Carolina. Buy from sellers who state their plants are nursery propagated or tissue cultured, and be wary of bare, muddy plants sold cheaply with no grower named. Hardware-store flytraps in sealed plastic cups are nursery grown and fine to buy, but they are usually weak from low light, so repot them and move them into sun right away.

A Venus flytrap rosette growing in moss, with three open traps showing red insides in the foreground — A Venus flytrap rosette growing in moss

Where to learn more

Care differs from one genus to the next, so look up your exact plant before changing anything. The society and guide sites below publish free care sheets written by long-time growers, and the forums are quick to identify a problem from a photo. Many regions also have a local carnivorous plant society that runs plant swaps and bog visits.

Societies, forums and care guides

A stand of tall pitcher plants with white, red-veined tops rising out of grass in a misty bog — Pitcher plants standing in a bog

Why the kit looks like this

The plant itself is cheap. Most of the kit exists to keep minerals and nutrients away from its roots: pure water, a soil mix with nothing added, and a plastic pot standing in a tray. A meter that reads dissolved solids costs little and settles every question about whether your rainwater or filtered water is safe. A grow light is listed last because a sunny window makes it unnecessary, but in a dim room nothing else in the kit makes up for it.

Fill the bog tray

Compare the options on each line, then set your tiers and check out from the cart. Clicking a card selects it there, and clicking the selected card again takes that line out. The three optional lines start out of the kit.

EssentialPlants

Live carnivorous plant

You need a healthy, nursery-grown plant to start with. A potted adult is far easier than seeds, which take years to reach trapping size.

budget

Carnivorous Spoon Leaf Sundew Drosera Spathulata Plant 3 inch pot

4.3(716)

$13.99

Carnivorous Plants

What growing them involves

Which plant to start with

Your first two weeks

The four rules that keep them alive

What trips beginners up

Buy nursery-grown, never wild-dug

Where to learn more

Why the kit looks like this

Fill the bog tray

Live carnivorous plant

Carnivorous plant soil mix

Plastic pots with drainage holes

Water tray

Distilled water

TDS water meter

Fine-tip trimming scissors

Freeze-dried bloodworms

Full-spectrum LED grow light

Long feeding tweezers

Carnivorous plant care book