Nature at Work, with a little help

On Sunday, we took a little roadtrip down to Janesville, WI to check out the botanical gardens. Good fun, and afterwards we stopped by a little nursery in town to check out the early season plants. There was nothing we were interested in yet, but the girls were absolutely fascinated by a Venus Fly Trap, so we picked one up.

Every kid gets a Venus Fly Trap at some point. You poke at it a few times, set off all of the little mouths, put it on a windowsill and forget about it until 2 months later it's dead. It's a fun cycle.

By the time we got the thing home, three of the five mouths had been triggered by false alarms of one kind or another (only one linked to the kids). I'd set it up in the living room, nice bright warm room with a lot of indirect sunlight. Everyone was playing around the house, and I heard a big ol' housefly buzzing around the front room. Not a normal housefly, but a big, slow ginormous one. Stupid guy too, kept buzzing in the same circle by the front window.

I grabbed a paper towel and batted the dude down... didn't kill him, just stunned him a bit. Grabbed his wings and took him over to the fly trap and fed him in. It looked pretty comical... the dude was way too big for the tiny Venus Fly Trap mouth. It looked like an anaconda trying to eat a deer. But the plant dutifully closed as best as it could, and I ran to get the kids.

Unfortunately, the fly unstunned himself and pretty quickly realized that he could just walk out of the trap. He did so, and spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out on the warm stems of the fly trap. At this point in the season, there aren't too many flies in the house for the plant to feed on, so maybe I'll take it outside in the evenings to get some grub.

Fun times at the Das Binky house.