spiffyzha
Carnivore
So this little guy has been confusing me for a while. It has gotten progressively less happy over the last 6-ish months under my care, and I've been trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong. I don't yet have very good generalized plant-intuition, so I encourage you folks who know what you're doing to chime in with insight and whatnot.
It was initially a very happy plant when I got it in February/March from Brad's Greenhouse, putting out new leaves like crazy. I also appreciated its unusual color profile, with the dark red new leaves fading to a sort-of dusty mint green in older leaves. Yes, it dropped its pitchers after I received it, but that's not too unusual, and it was growing so fast!
I should've taken a picture back then. Here's the earliest one I've got, from June 21, when it already looks unhappy.
You can see the older leaves are sort-of splotchy. At the time, I interpreted this to mean that it wasn't getting enough bugs to eat. It hadn't pitchered for me yet (still hasn't), despite putting out a whole lot of new leaves.
So, I tried foliar fertilization with orchid fertilizer, ~100 ppm. Here's the result as of today:
As you can see, I managed to kill off a couple of leaves' worth of new growth this way. The subsequent leaves are also looking smaller. I guess I wouldn't have expected this to fix the splotchiness on older leaves, but it's sort-of hard to tell from this whether the plant appreciated the fertilizer at all. Also, are the old leaves possibly looking even splotchier somehow?!
But then, I stumbled upon this view of the plant!
I guess I hadn't looked at it from the underside before. From this angle, it looks (to my untrained eye) much more like it's been getting too much light! I had read that N. aenigma would be happy with lower light levels, but that's not quite the same as saying it would be *unhappy* with higher light levels.
The spotting is less prevalent on the non-dead newer growth, which maybe makes sense, since (A) it must be able to adapt at least somewhat to changing light levels, and (B) the days are shorter now than they were a few months ago. Timing-wise, the splotchiness also appeared to begin around the time when the days were getting longer.
So, mystery solved? I hope? I've moved it back a ways from the window, even though there isn't nearly as much speckling on the underside of the new (non-dead) leaves. Hopefully I don't shock it. I'll plan to move it back a bit closer in a month or two.
It was initially a very happy plant when I got it in February/March from Brad's Greenhouse, putting out new leaves like crazy. I also appreciated its unusual color profile, with the dark red new leaves fading to a sort-of dusty mint green in older leaves. Yes, it dropped its pitchers after I received it, but that's not too unusual, and it was growing so fast!
I should've taken a picture back then. Here's the earliest one I've got, from June 21, when it already looks unhappy.
You can see the older leaves are sort-of splotchy. At the time, I interpreted this to mean that it wasn't getting enough bugs to eat. It hadn't pitchered for me yet (still hasn't), despite putting out a whole lot of new leaves.
So, I tried foliar fertilization with orchid fertilizer, ~100 ppm. Here's the result as of today:
As you can see, I managed to kill off a couple of leaves' worth of new growth this way. The subsequent leaves are also looking smaller. I guess I wouldn't have expected this to fix the splotchiness on older leaves, but it's sort-of hard to tell from this whether the plant appreciated the fertilizer at all. Also, are the old leaves possibly looking even splotchier somehow?!
But then, I stumbled upon this view of the plant!
I guess I hadn't looked at it from the underside before. From this angle, it looks (to my untrained eye) much more like it's been getting too much light! I had read that N. aenigma would be happy with lower light levels, but that's not quite the same as saying it would be *unhappy* with higher light levels.
The spotting is less prevalent on the non-dead newer growth, which maybe makes sense, since (A) it must be able to adapt at least somewhat to changing light levels, and (B) the days are shorter now than they were a few months ago. Timing-wise, the splotchiness also appeared to begin around the time when the days were getting longer.
So, mystery solved? I hope? I've moved it back a ways from the window, even though there isn't nearly as much speckling on the underside of the new (non-dead) leaves. Hopefully I don't shock it. I'll plan to move it back a bit closer in a month or two.
That topside blotchiness looks really dissimilar from what my other nepenthes did when they got too much light, but the speckling underneath looks about like what I'd expect. 
