FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hello beautiful people! I have a question. Is it safe to cut off dead leaves from a Flytrap? Mine has a few dead leaves and I have been afraid of killing it. TIA

As optique said you can pull off the black leaves if they don’t need a lot of force to be pulled. But it’s kinda risky because sometimes you can pull off living rhizome parts and damage the plant. I did this with my old VFTs and I didn’t care if the dead leaves had living rhizome parts. Then on a rainy day microbes from the rain got into the open wound of the rhizome and one plant rotted. So there are 2 options. Cut off only the black parts with clean scissors or wait a month after the leaf got black and try to pull it. If you leave the dead leaves usually nothing bad will happen to the plant but if there are a lot they can block some sunlight, be a hiding spot for pests and sometimes they can mold if there is a lot of humidity and wet soil with stagnant air. I personally cut off only the traps and then wait a month. After that I pull off the remaining leaves.

When I trim back the plants, and I do that rarely, I only take off the black parts. The plant will continue to photosynthesize with green parts and will reabsorb some of the nutrients from yellow parts.