dudo klasovity

January 30, 2009

Hi Heather!

Thank you for the comment. The day temperature peaking at 45C was really a bit too high for them. I noticed some of the leaves have burnt. So I bought PHILIPS TURBO ENERGY SAVER TORNADO lightbulb (23W which equals light output of 130Watt). It is much cooler so now the temperature is 35C top and the light is very intense because the bulb is 4cm from the plants. The plants love it and came back to an active growth! The bulb is a bit expensive but has 8 years warranty and a great performance so I think it was worth buying it.

January 28, 2009

I was gone from the campus for over 2 months and I made a mistake to have my roommate take care of some of my petiolaris drosera. To be fair- he tried his best but knows as much about CP as fish does about bicycle racing. In other words- an apocalypse. Here is what they look like now. I grow paradoxa petiolaris and kenny there. What he did he (perhaps accidentally) moved the light about 20cm away. In the picture you can see the further positioned drosera was not getting enough light:

Other thing he did was he poured so much water in the terrarium that one could drown an elephant there. Kenneallyi likes fluctuating water level and now she was almost drown there for 2 months and most of the leaves are dead now.

Now what should I do? With the petiolaris and paradoxa maybe giving them more light will be satysfying?

As for kenny should I give it a dormancy? ( I definitelly decrease the water level).

I removed the regular light bulb (100W) and replaced it with SUNGLO light. The temperature during the day reaches 43C (used to be 35C with regular lightbulb). Do you think it is too hot for them or can they withstand such heat? (Night temperatures drop to 22C).

Thanx for any comments! :-)

January 28, 2009

I have the flowers and see it is spathulata. I bet later the seeds will fortify my conviction. Thank you for your help! :man_in_love:

January 26, 2009

Lovely pics! Looks like yo have some high skills with the camera! I love Australia! (hopefully someday I will make it there too;-))

January 25, 2009

Hi Sirkristoff!

The same thing happened to me this year. I sowed gemmae on october 30 they sprouted mid-november and today I noticed one of them getting ready to flower. They are so tiny! Cant wait to see the flower open:-)

January 23, 2009

so far I used 20% per weight but will try more concentrated solutions or even a powder form.

January 22, 2009

Well for this pilot experiment I used a protein shake readily available in any gym/wellness centre. I have been using some myself for sports activities but then I read the composition label and noticed some of the components match the substances that are digested by CP's enzymes (as they are by animals). So let me point out that it is not MY mix nor is patented by me in any way. The protein shake (which in fact is not a protein shake but a blend of over 80 chemical compounds and majority is not a protein compound). Needless to say this mix is not perfect because there are so many ballast chem. substances that may or may not harm the complexity of digestion mechanism and consecutive process (pH as most important factor). It has been proven that major compound in this mix (sacharides) is of no use (nepenthes) and even harmful(drosera) for the plants. There is a need for significant improvement of such blends.For me this was just to make sure that this really works and I think that with some reservation it might be said that in some cases it really does....Luckily I have some gadgets like HPLC available to carry on to this research and find out the enzymatic nature of each genus and therefore to design an organic fertilizer for each particular CP genus. It is more than clear that this is a long run experiment and the verification of its outcome is time consuming (thankfully not very expensive). When the effects of particular mixes are shown then mixes of chemicals will be made and later put on market. Unfortunatelly at this time i am consumed by work on finalizing my PhD so the CPs must wait...for now....If anyone has some time on his/her hands I would be more than happy to cooperate:-)

January 22, 2009

Mobile: I suppose i could have used powder form but I didnt want to. Neps and sundews cannot digest poly and oligosugars because there are no glycosidases enzymes to break them down. See my mix contains a lot of sugar so I feared when using a concentrated form I would kill the pitcher (or the plant) by creating perfect media for fungus attack. The exactly same hapenned with sundews. So i tried a solution instead. Maybe if the pitcher has plenty of concentrated juices inside a bit of powder would work just as well. Dont think the amount of water in the pitcher makes a big difference but i might be wrong. Or if I used pure aminoacid mix there would be no problem for use on drosera as well:-)This area need far more extensive research than this:-)

January 21, 2009

Hi Heather!

They are in the very same substrate.....pure peat. The spaghnum on the left is just a topping. The other one had that too but i removed it before taking that picture so you can see the smaller one in its full size.

January 21, 2009

I grow my plants in terrarium but this contribution to the forum is not as much about terraria as it is about artificial feeding of CPs so if needed please move it to more apropriate department.

Some time ago I have been thinking about how to keep the plants vividly growing even when the conditions arent very favorable (e.g. winter) when there is not enough prey/insects. It is well understood that CP are green plants capable of photosyntesis and that supplementation of N P and other lacking elements via digestion of prey is not necessary requirement for their survival. Of course a nourished plant grows and propagates better than struggling one. The importance of feeding the plants varies from one species to another and is maybe the most obvious in the case of tuberous droserae when they need (in very short time) grow rapidly bloom and create seeds or extra tubers. Without enough prey some of them only form a terrestrial rosette and then go back to dormancy without flowering and further propagation. All of the CPs are onlu capable of digestion of very simple molecules. So the prey body's components have to be broken down to its primary structures (aminoacids glycides fatty acids phosphosacharides etc). Depending on the CP genus not all of the components can be used for nourishing the plant. Enzymes available are the crucial determinating point. Well I designed an experiment to perform and determine whether there is a way to nourish the plants artificially to boost their growth and sustain wellness.

As we know the anorganic fertilizers work mostly on the principle of addition of nitrogen in ammonium or nitrate form (or both in case of ammonium nitrate) phosphorus in form of sec. and tert. fosfates....potassium as KNO3 or KCl..and so on....in other words in a form unacceptable for most of CPs.

Organic fertilizers are mostly urea guanidine calcium cyanamide (nitrolime) or other compounds with little tollerance of Cp to such fertilization.

So i decided to try a different kind of food supplement for CPs...the very same that is used for animals.

I took a powder mix of some aminoacids (lysine proline glutamic acid valine isoleucine serine tyrozine etc) fatty acids (stearic lignoceric acids and myristic acid) glycosides glycides and coenzymes and minerals such as Mg and vanadyl sulphate..)

This i prepared dilute solution from and fed it to the plant once a week for two months.

I only used Heliamphora and Nepenthes for this first experiment.

In case of Heliamphora (minor) I had two plants coming from a cluster division of one plant...therefore genetically identical and they were grown together under the same conditions except one was fed the solution and the other was just as a referrence plant. The pictures show that both plants grew the same amount of new pitchers and that the frequency of growth did not increase but the growth of each new pitcher of fed plant was more rapid and the traps distingtively better developed:

In case of Nepenthes i used common cheap hybrid x Ventrata. The young plant was fed for one month the very same nutrients. The next pitches was much bigger then the previous created by plant and actually bigger than tha plant itself:

It would be nice to see whether this works with slow-growing nepenthes and other carnivorous genus.

I havent tried this with pinguicular nor sarracenias (dormancy). But i have tried with droseras. The food was fed in solid/powder form directly onto the leaf. (D. capensis D.slackii D peltata) but before the food could be digested the affected leaf was a subject to rot/mould attack. This I think happens because droserae genus dont possess glycosidases-enzymes making the digestion of sugars possible. Since there were sugars present they remained undigested and therefore an inducement for fungus growth.

I think with the proper analysis of enzymes in plants it is possible to design a harmless fertilizer to be mixed to meet each plant`s requirements:-)

Sorry for the long lecture I just wanted to share my results and thought it might be of interest to some.

Also I would like to ask you whether anyone had tried this before i did and what was the outcome of the experiment:-)

P.S. Apologies for my English for it is not mu native tongue....

January 21, 2009