FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

I got this little guy back in fall last year. It went dormant for the winter, and came back and spring. It was growing new leaves until semi-recently, when it just stopped. All the old leaves died over time, at the same pace they would normally die off. However, nothing has been growing to replace them. Yesterday, I noticed that the smaller leaf in the image here had grown a black tip, so that leaves only one healthy leaf left on the plant.

I keep it out on my deck, so it should be getting enough sunlight. I also keep the soil moist (maybe too moist though?) I only ever use distilled water or rain.

Since there's only one leaf yet, I honestly don't know if this one is salvageable (although I would be grateful to hear that I'm wrong on that point). Any advice would be much appreciated.

Just from the photo it looks like it could be being kept too wet and suffering from rot. Using a growing media with something like perlite at 50-60% would help with that. Looks like a very small pot too which does not leave much room for error watering from a tray and is very easy to over water. If it was mine I would repot with 40/60 peat/perlite in a larger pot right now. The plant is on its way out. Water to a level about 1/5 to 1/4 up the pot if using a tray and let the media dry out to just barely damp before re-watering. Would not expect much soon but you might be able to gain enough by dormancy to survive winter. Bringing back plants like this takes me 4-5 months in the growing season.

Agree with both posts above, but as a newbie I also find it easier to tell what the dampness is at a glance (although I do still lightly push a finger on the surrounding media), when I use straight up LFSM.So far I have only used Better-Gro for LFSM which I get from Lowe’s which is where my VFTs that are planted this way came from. I still use peat/perl sometimes (I use Premier peat and Vigoro perlite from Home Depot)
because I got some really good recommendations on a handful of common good and bad brands in the opinion of a member here. Although truly I think just fixing the issues above would help fix the issue. I only mentioned this stuff because I am not sure if you’re new to carnivorous plants, and if you are looking for a basic answer, I’ve asked many when I felt google was contradicting itself.

Also likely everyone is different, but I got the recommendation when I first got the Lowe’s typicals to just put them out without acclimating them, let them go through that so hopefully the new growth would be hardier. I probably wouldn’t try this if I had had only one plant because I would have been too nervous, but box store typicals are kinda rolling the dice as to whether they could survive anyhow, so I figured why not, to be clear definitely not recommending for your current plant there.

My point for saying that is that I had trimmed them down to stumps with no sign of green or new growth on top, but after about a month for me they started slowly putting out traps, and a half month (maybe full) after that they were growing like gangbusters. The difference in the amount of time could be a lot of different reasons, but I wanted you to know they might pop back a lot sooner provided they get the proper conditions.

Out of curiosity how many hours of direct sun do you think they get?

Keep your head up