Re: Feeding Plants

Richard Marsden (marsden@digicon-egr.co.uk)
Wed, 5 Jun 96 9:25:25 BST

> >While reading books, scanning WWW-pages and reading
> >your articles in this group I as a beginner get more and
> >more confused about feeding the plants. There are a lot of
> >opinions. "No food", "Maybe food" and "Yes, food ". ?????

Sounds like opinion is varying quite a bit on the list.
I'm in the no-fertiliser, but some feeding camp.
I have NEVER fed any fertiliser to my plants. They did evolve for
low-nutrient environments, remember!

As for food, if they're not catching anything (and I mean anything), then
I have been known to catch flies, moths, etc. for them. Experience shows,
that Drosera and VFTs seem to prefer live or nearly live insects.
Size also matters. Typical English moths are just a little too big for
a VFT - it will eat it, but the trap will rot and die.

In the past week, I've tried half-dead ants on my D. capensis. some escaped!
Also, the leaf I tried them on is in a sort of limp black condition!
I then fed a disabled daddy-long-legs to another leaf on the same plant, and
the capensis seems to be doing very well!!

My Sarracenia are still too small to catch much/anything. The latest trap
on my largest plant, has quite a large mouth (relatively speaking), so
this summer should see plenty of flies caught...

Richard Marsden