What's up epic gardeners? Kevin here starting today's episode off with a little bit of a story.

Let's zoom back in time to nine-year-old Kevin who was obsessed with collecting bugs, collecting rocks, and carnivorous plants, specifically a

Venus fly trap. I loved the look of these things and to me it was fascinating that a plant ate animals and not the other way around.

So I begged my parents to buy me one.

They ended up ordering one, maybe from Home Depot.

I'm not really sure where I got it from and I was amped. All I wanted to do was feed this thing. But, you know, I was nine years old, didn't really know a lot about botany, didn't really know a lot about gardening. I was just an excited kid who really wanted to basically

make my plants eat flies.

That's what I was obsessed with.

That's what I wanted to happen.

But the trick of the Venus fly trap is that it's actually

quite hard to care for. So in today's episode we're going to talk about Venus flytraps and exactly

how you can make them thrive.

First we need to understand how Venus fly traps grow.

They have a different type of growth in each season.

So starting with spring, the plants are coming out of their

dormant phase and they will produce a bunch of short leaves that hug the surface of the ground and they have a fly trap at each tip.

Usually the plants are pretty small at this point, not more than half a foot across.

It's also at this time that a very tall spike that has several flowers appears.

Now when we get into summer, they produce a different type of leaf.

More upright leaves higher off the ground that hold traps above the soil.

These traps will also change in appearance, they'll get larger and they will have a little bit of a notch on the back.

Now once we move into fall the fly trap goes back to that

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