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  • #21
Something to keep in mind is that these plants grow very slowly. Some of them can live for decades, and grow on a scale measured in that time. My Lady Luck produces a new leaf every week or two, at most. This time of year it's more like one a month, or no growth at all until it warms up in spring.

I've never heard of a nep where the growth was visible every day, on a day to day basis - maybe the final stages of a leaf opening up, but that's about it.
 
  • #22
It's not that it shows growth every day. We're looking at two plants in one pot and two leaves on those plants since I got it several months ago. It's just that it'll start putting out a leaf and if the humidity is low it won't move. When I up the humidity, it starts growing and standing up off the leaf below it. I reduce the humidity and it stops showing as much activity. It's like playing red light, green light. I suppose I could be playing with the humidity and it just seems like it's affecting it. I don't know.
 
  • #23
You have to give the plant time to adjust. You're not doing it any favors by raising and lowering the humidity repeatedly. If you find the plant stalling, slow down the adjustment rather than reversing it.
 
  • #24
^This, give it time to adjust. Also, how will it ever adjust if you keep changing things back to its original conditions?

When I receive new plants I end up needing anywhere from 1 to 4 months for them to acclimatise, and in that time I might see up to four leaves that are smaller or don't end up pitchering at all.
 
  • #25
I understand what you guys are saying and I tried to do that. I put it where I though it would be happy and it was okay for a few months, then the lower leaves started shriveling and dying. I didn't want to loose it, so putting it in the coke bottle humidity dome was an effort to save it. Once it started perking up, I tried to bring it back out. It started showing a little decline, so I decided to just bag it till it warmed up enough outside to put it out for the summer. I've been gradually, over a week, lowering the humidity in the bag from 99% down to around 70%. I'm going to put my meter outside on the porch and see what the actual humidity is outside and try to have it lowered to about there before I put it out.
 
  • #26
If it had a few months in your target conditions and then started to decline, that suggests the problem wasn't humidity. It had already adjusted. Your treating symptoms, not the cause of the decline. When did you last repot?


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  • #27
I bought it online at the end of August 2015, I believe. I was a plug in what looked like peat moss. They sent sphagnum moss to pot it in. I did so at that point. It's possible that the leaves were coming off due to some combination of stress from shipping and old age, but I don't know. That's why I was trying to be cautious with it.
 
  • #28
This may be a bit tricky to answer, but what environmental conditions can you think of that might have changed during that time? Did the HVAC start to be used more often when the decline started?
 
  • #29
I really couldn't pinpoint an exact cause. The heat would have been turned on between when it arrived and when it started to decline, but it would have been on for a long time before I saw it decline.

My family is kind of weird with the heat. Some of them like it ice cold. It's possible the temp dropped, but I don't think it would have dropped far enough to affect the plants. I thought it was dropping a lot, because I'd wake up really cold. However, I think that's just a matter of me laying there and not moving while I sleep, so my body is cooling slightly at my extremities. Once I got the little temp and humidity guage, I saw it's only fluctuating by 5-10 degrees throughout the day and night.

I don't remember if I changed the lighting before or after the decline, but definitely within a reasonable time frame of the lower leaves wilting, I swapped the lamp bulb from a standard house CFL (5000k or 5500k I think) to a 6500k daylight CFL. All of the plants seem to favor it. They're now leaning toward the lamp as opposed to the window that's 3' away.

Besides that, the only thing that should have changed would be the amount of daylight coming through the window. I wouldn't think it's the new light bulb, though. I understand that CP's like brighter light and that the 6500k bulb is only equivalent to a cloudy day as far as lux goes.
 
  • #30
To me, my best guess would be the AC and Heat are the culprit. These don't like low humidity, and they react with the warping of the leaves shown in the pictures. They also like rapidly fluctuations in humidity even less than low humidity. They can adapt to low humidity - but won't if the humidity is constantly changing. Changes like that might be caused by the intermittent random use of the heater, combined with winter weather. If the weather lowers humidity enough, the use of central heat could bring it way below the minimum requirements . Above all, the fluctuations don't allow it to adapt.


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