Jump to content

Rob-Rah

Full Members
  • Posts

    654
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    2

Everything posted by Rob-Rah

  1. Simple question: What are people's experience of subjecting D. regia, D. hamiltonii and D. villosa var. ascendens to temps down to 2C? Thanks.
  2. I'd take a pair of scissors to the parent leaf - it'll make more!
  3. I have some plantlets on mine too. I was planning to just cut the said leaf off halfway and lay it onto the new pot.
  4. Rob-Rah

    ebay neps

    Ah - it was your bid then! Well done - excellent price indeed.
  5. Rob-Rah

    ebay neps

    The fusca is just going for a song....
  6. Rob-Rah

    best media

    I like half branded medium/fine orchid compost and half sphagnum moss, with a little perlite. Neps are reputed for being quite unfussy about the precise maekup of the compost, as long as it's open and retains enough water. They just like being left alone in whatever is acceptable.
  7. It seems to behave as an annual. One website says that it can be regenerated for longer life by regular stolon cuttings.
  8. Mine's annoyingly dwarf. It's only around a foot and it's six years old now - though it's not flowered yet so maybe there's a little more stature yet to come. It clumps a lot though, which partly makes up for it. Way more pupurpea than leuc in it I guess.
  9. My D. binita dichotoma gets far more than anything else.
  10. Rob-Rah

    Pot size

    Ignoring the issue of stress, is there any reason why a plant would make vegetative growth at the expense of flowers? If it's happy, why should it not do both? (as mine seem to do)
  11. Rob-Rah

    Pot size

    I have heard the same, but I still question whether it is one of those urban-myths.... When, for instance, you grow tomatoes, one type of fertiliser will stimluate vegetative growth, whereas another will stimulate flowering. Nothing to do with stress. What is really happening is that the plant is looking for optimal conditions for its seedlings to grow in. Stressed plants do produce flowers out-of-season, but I would not make the leap that the means to achieve flowering is to stress the plant - it can only be a bad move. To anthropomorphise for a moment, if I were a plant, I would not want to produce lots of seedlings in an area already full of my own roots, but would rather produce them in an area where they had good soil and plenty of space for themselves. For sure things like strelitzeas and figs do wayyy better when pot-bound, but I don't see any reason to assume that this is a general rule.
  12. Rob-Rah

    Pot size

    I can only speak for experience of a handful terrestrials and "epiphytes", but I can see no difference in the flowering habits whether the plant is established, pot-bound, or newly repotted with lots of free space. It's often suggested as the means to get a plant to flower, but I have suspicions that it may be only indirectly realted, if at all. For example, a pot-bound plant will have a greater concentration of bladders per unit volume of soil (for as long as the soil remains effective at transporting beasties - a pot full of stolons and no soil won't do the trick nearly so well), and will be catching more prey and therefore be more likely to flower. But with that in mind, I think that a good condition of soil, plenty of water and light and stable temperatures are far more important in encouraging flowering. Well, for me at least. And it seems from other peoples' reports that the introduction of occasional "feeds" of things like daphnia are more likely to encourage flower production.
  13. Just wondering... Is a 12 inch square waterlilly basket suitable for larger adult neps (specifically khasiana, ventricosa, truncata, burbidgeae, x ventrata, and spathulata x maxima)? Or is it the wrong shape and size - do they need something narrower and deeper? I have my small ones in 5" plastic mesh watergarden pots from B & Q, but will eventually need something larger. There seems to be annoyingly little available midway in size between the two though. Nice and easy to thread wire through to suspend them too. :)
  14. I have seen something similar on my Darlingtonia. The plant seems to be OK though. Might there be minor salt deposits from rain water misting?
  15. Mildew is encouraged by dryish soil and wet air, so can I ask whether you are growers who believe in keeping cephs in or out of the water trays? Thanks.
  16. Rob-Rah

    Pot size

    I guess the corollary to my question concerns how long one leaves a plant in a pot before having to repot it. I am planning to put the reniformis, humboldtii and nelumbifolia into 12 inch (or so) waterlilly baskets next year. Endresii seems to be a small-grower for me and is happy in smaller containers, and longifolia and alpina flower in 5 inch pots with no problems. I have read that Utrics like to be left undisturbed to flower. Is this completely true though? I notice that they all put on substantial growth spurts after repotting. As it's going now, I will be repotting many of the smaller ones once or twice a year! Any views?
  17. Rob-Rah

    Pot size

    Slightly specious question here, but I'll ask it nonetheless: What size pot is suitable for epiphytic Utrics? (alpina, humboldtii, endresii, longifolia, nelumbifolia, etc.) Mine are in 5" square mesh pots but growing out all round the sides - it's good healthy growing I know, but do these plants form huge mats in the wild or are they more or less self-contained at any given size? Thanks.
×
×
  • Create New...