FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hi everyone...long time no see! At the time of posting this it's been a year a month and three days since I first got my VFT, just something that dawned on me haha. How have you been + your growing journey?
Unfortunately, in that time, despite having trawled the deepest recesses of VFT blogs and agonized over my plant daily...I have not improved much. (I've never had a green thumb, all the plants in my grade 8 science experiment died).
My VFT is holding on. However, as you can see from the title post, it has been suffering from something that I suspect is mineral burn, crown rot, or root rot. I noticed three days ago that there was the tiniest yellowing of edges, which has since progressed rapidly. Certain leaves are yellowing (a bright yellow) and blackening around the edges.
CONTEXT:
- SOIL
--- Recently repotted about 2 and a half weeks ago
--- I bought it almost a year ago, maybe that affected things; I opened the package and didn't give it time to air out before repotting my VFT. But I never used this brand before, though; I was waiting until it came out of dormancy to repot and I never got around to it until recently.
--- Specifically made for carnivorous plants, from "Crazie Nannie" (a provider specializing in carnivorous plants I found on Amazon). I can't find the specific product.
--- From a post in this forum I saw recently, they said that new soil may cause mineral burn despite being made for carnivorous plants, and you might need to rinse it out. I didn't do that. Should I do that?
--- Also added a tiny bit of sand
--- Composition: "coarse and silty clay sand, sphagnum, blended with distilled water, light weight mineral that is pH neutral, no lime and no nutritional value." from the package. I'm a bit confused because it's not that specific and I can't find the percentages, which is weird because I swore I saw it before.
- WATER
--- Distilled water, obviously.
--- Top watered, unfortunately - I switched to tray about two days ago after realizing that maybe that was the cause of my crown rot
- VFT
--- A year old now
--- Realized about a month ago that it was planted very deeply since I took it out of dormancy and had to remedy that
--- Grown inside, using a grow light; probably my hours of light are not enough, I've been upping them
--- A day before I noticed the yellowing, I accidentally allowed it to get dry, and it almost completely dried out - just like what happened in my first post on this forum. I feel quite guilty about repeating this mistake. Then I poured a copious amount of water because I was panicking.
--- In quite a large plastic pot.
--- It looks terrible
--- Uprooted it two days ago to check how the roots and the rhizome were doing. Roots are looking good - white-tipped (though they're black at the middle, I heard that root rot usually starts at the tip?) mostly. Only had to cut off one, and that one didn't seem very mushy and black either.
Hoping there will be some solution! Thanks for slogging through all this!

Picture is worth a thousand words. My guess is its starting to go dormant.

I would say the soil mix is what's killing the plant. This is a valuable lesson, from now on only use non fertilized peat moss and perlite or long fiber sphagnum moss. As ChefDean said it's the silt clay that's the culprit. Also I do not recommend growing VFTs indoors, some people have some success doing it but most people will fail at it. They really need to be outdoors under all day Sun to be the most successful.

Noting that "carnivorous plants" represent many, many species and worldwide growing conditions, including different soil compositions. Any "CP" potting mix should not be assumed to work for all kinds of CP.

Hi, thank you all for replying
Thank you for letting me know. In that case, would it still be salvageable in the next few days should I somehow manage to procure a more suitable mix? What brand would you recommend? When I first bought the old one I remember seeing positive reviews from VFT owners; I think the product itself has been phased out now because the provider doesn’t have a general CP mix anymore, though.
I generally don’t think I would be able to keep it outside as I live in Canada. I am sure there are many successful outdoor growers here I just feel I am not really on that level of ability of gardening - i guess I prefer the controlled environment? I get worried because the weather is rather hard to predict here, though during these summer and fall months we are getting a lot of nice intense sunshine (and rain as well). Also I work long hours and honestly only ever get to check my plant by evening.
here’s a few pictures of my VFT. It is very obviously not doing well. It clearly used to be planted very deeply, which was a problem ever since it came out of dormancy in April, and that I somehow only noticed this month right before I repotted it. The depth at which it was buried was horrifying. The old leaves keep sagging towards the soil and I don’t know if I should be putting some kind of stakes to help lift them up. I feel like a negligent parent haha, am totally going to be arrested by CP protective services, and for very good reason