FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hello,
This year I've collected seeds from one of my typical fly traps and they've been super successful sprouting into a load of baby traps, however in a few of the temporary pots, moss has started to grow pretty wild over some of the baby traps. Other pots are fine, and they're all using the same soil mix of Peat moss and perlite.
Should I remove this excess moss for better growth?? And how would be best to do that because I ideally don't want to cause too much damage.

Thanks!

Hmmm, I'm a newbie and still figuring out my mosses, but to me that doesn't look like sphagnum moss and it appears to be overwhelming the flytraps. It almost looks like it would be better to remove the flytraps and transplant to other medium than to try and pull up all the moss and still use the same medium. If you simply pull that amount of moss up it seems to *me* that there would be remnants of it that will resprout. If you transplanted the flytraps you could use a spray bottle of distilled water to rinse the flytraps roots off to minimize carrying over to the fresh grow mix/medium root pieces, spores, or whatever from the offending moss(?). Pull some "moss" up and see if it has roots to it...if it has roots then it's not sphagnum.

As I said, I'm a newbie so take my comment above with a grain of salt.

And welcome to the forum!!!!!

I would suggest to pull its string of moss one by one with tweezers, or cut them carefully. They will probably regrow so you will have to do it many times until the flytraps are in a descent size. If you repot them it will cause them stress and because they are seedlings they are a lot more weak than the adults so they might die. I would just cut them carefully because I don’t want to disturb the roots at all. Also they don’t look like sphagnum but you can use the trimmings for terrarium decoration or something.

Barlapipas 6 wrote:I would suggest to pull its string of moss one by one with tweezers, or cut them carefully. They will probably regrow so you will have to do it many times until the flytraps are in a descent size. If you repot them it will cause them stress and because they are seedlings they are a lot more weak than the adults so they might die. I would just cut them carefully because I don’t want to disturb the roots at all. Also they don’t look like sphagnum but you can use the trimmings for terrarium decoration or something.

Thanks! Never had the issue before so I was assuming the peat mix is the issue. Fortunately there's loads of baby traps this year so ill test out on one or two whether I can transplant them easily into something more reliable.
Still working to figure out what the moss is.. looks like there might be more than one thing, but I'll avoid this mix in the future.

Barlapipas 6 wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 1:45 pm I would suggest to pull its string of moss one by one with tweezers, or cut them carefully. They will probably regrow so you will have to do it many times until the flytraps are in a descent size. If you repot them it will cause them stress and because they are seedlings they are a lot more weak than the adults so they might die. I would just cut them carefully because I don’t want to disturb the roots at all. Also they don’t look like sphagnum but you can use the trimmings for terrarium decoration or something.

Thank you, I'll definitely try cleaning them up and seeing how well they continue to grow, fortunately seedlings and traps from this plant have always been super resilient and grown well.. but I've not had this issue before so I'll have to wait and see what happens.
And yup, I think I'll collect the strange moss and let it grow elsewhere since it seems interesting enough!