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The dumbest thing I have ever done..... To a CP

  • #21
I had a beautiful Nepenthes ventricosa growing under a desk lamp at my university about 5 years ago. When I moved back to my house for the summer, I trimmed all the leaves off the plant (not just the pitchers, the leaves too) so it would be easier to transplant. I figured it was growing extremely good and would pick up again.

It rotted away within the week after doing that.


This was it right before trimming all the leaves off (and within a week it was dead)
thisone2-3.jpg
 
  • #22
When I was 12 I had a planted terrarium with potting soil, a VFT, D. aldelae, and a Nep all sharing the soil - it didn't last long.

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  • #23
One dumb thing? I have so many from which to choose!

One dumb thing I did was put a Lowes cube of death cobra lily in the direct sun, right after purchasing it. The next day the pitchers went limp and the plant eventually died.

I once suspended a bunch of temperate pitcher plants in the small, narrow, gentle streamlet behind our apartment. The remnants of what was once a hurricane made its way north and the gentle streamlet turned into a raging river, scattering the collection downstream.

There are other dumb things....
 
  • #24
Put plants within range of a sprinkler system connected to tap-like water...
 
  • #26
Guess my biggest one to date was explaining to my parents how some CPs enjoy bright light. They interpreted it as, it would help to put a covered seedling tray outdoors in midday sun. 30 minutes later, I had some freshly-steamed carnivores...
 
  • #27
My first plant was a small seed-grown mikei. Since I was impatient and it was growing fast (this was in January) I felt the need to "fertilize" it a tad. So I put a few tiny pellets of tree stump remover of all things (thinking that the KNO3 would give enough nitrogen etc) into all 3 pitchers. Once it had lost all its leaves except for the growth point, I managed to break the tip off accidentally.

I still miss that plant
 
  • #28
The first terrarium I set up (this is before the internet), I ordered some carnivorous plants from a science school catalog. Like most, I made the assumption that CPs must come from steamy jungles growing in rich, humus-y wet loam. I didn't know the names at the time, but I remember getting an S. purpurea, D. californica and a venus fly trap. I put them all in my 10 gallon tank where temperatures quickly rose to above 90 degrees and as much humidity and within a week the plants were dead.

Another infuriating mistake I've made is while trimming pitchers. I will sometime follow the wrong tendril to the leaf and end up cutting a good pitcher or one that was in process of developing. Once, I cut three growing pitchers on the same plant. I felt like a total jackass.
 
  • #29
Nothing yet... Everything has went smoothly with my neps and the greenhouse. Here's some things that weren't stupid, but they were issues...

1. I didn't have the swamp cooler connected to the outside air, so it was recirculating hot air. It kept the greenhouse at 95F on some days.
2. My N. densiflora x spectabilis had a bunch of little white cysts on it, which could have been from mealybugs but I'm still not sure, so I pulled off 75% of the leaves it had to wipe it and the stem down with alcohol since the cyst-looking things were in the crevice where the node is. I left three of the biggest leaves on, and two turned yellow and wilted. The last one is partially yellow and partially wilted. Haven't cut it off yet. The growth point is still good to go and it looks fine. No more white cysts for like a month so far I think.
 
  • #30
Oh, and I just realized the timer for my plant lights at work was stuck on 'on'. I have no idea how long that was going on but I'm guessing at least a few weeks of 24/7 ~28* C degrees and light. It would perfectly explain why my neps' leaves had started to shrink and why the petiolaris dews were looking particularly pleased. I hope the Neps don't die...
 
  • #31
the dumbest thing I've done, which was a few months ago was creating this beautiful floating island in my pond filled with Sarracenia's, VFT, & Drosera's and find out two days later Crows found a new bird bath to hang out and destroyed all of them :censor:
 
  • #32
^ worst by far sucks Favian.....


this is interesting LOL.. keep em coming
 
  • #33
Okay..I had been growing sarrs, vfts and temperate dews for a while and decided to expand to neps. I bought a mail order n. alata off ebay and it grew very well outside all summer long. Come fall/winter I moved it inside and to my dismay it kept growing tall and lanky, so I kept putting it in a taller pot, burying the stem in an attempt to keep it short with the pitchers hanging over the sides of the pot like they all do in the garden center plants. It actually survived and pitchered the following summer when I put it outside. (Turned out to be a JF.)
 
  • #34
did the stem shoot out roots when it was burried? haha
 
  • #35
worst thing i have ever done was grow a venus fly trap in natural clay with bottled water i totally regret it. i will never make that mistake again, now I grow them in a terrarium just for extra humidity, because my humidity levels in my house are below 37% (really 30%) and i need it above 70 % so that is why i grow them in there, and i use RO water for my plants now and a 25-25-25-25 sphagnum moss, peat moss, sand, perlite and it seems to work just fine! my plants are inside of a distilled water bottle cut in half and the bottom is where the plants sit and the top is the humidity retainer, so that is my setup and they are in my window sill
 
  • #36
i also put my healthy vft outdoors under a dome, IN FULL SUNLIGHT!!!!!!!! and came out an hour later it looked like burnt buttcheeks lol, it didnt look good so i cried for 5 days straight (this was when i was 7 years old) what a dumby dumb dumb move i made
 
  • #37
Resurrected a 9 year old thread...not quite a record, but up there.
Josh, you should not be growing Dionaea in a terrarium if humidity is your only concern; they do not care if they are properly acclimated, and survive outside around here in summer where humidity may drop below 10% regularly. And nothing that gets hit with direct sun should be under any sort of clear container, nor is a windowsill necessarily going to be enough light for them (savannah plants, full sun or just dappled under grasses is what they expect).
 
  • #38
My first attempt at growing drosea was to put D. Binata, D. capensis, D. Filiformis, D spatulata in one "bog" that was basically water up to the top two inches and straight LFS! I wish all I did was cook em. That would be less embarrassing 😳. I took plants with vastly differently growing requirements and water-board tortured them for months as they slowly drowned in a rotting media. I just can't belive they held on for soo long 😩🤧 Now I've resorted to just bullying them and roughing them up a bit 😏.
 
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