Another coffee question

[back2eight]

I have been following the coffee threads, and so far it seems that everyone is pouring coffee on their plants. What about mixing the grounds in with the peat moss and planting the plants in it?

 

[Devon]

that's a good idea.... someone should try it

 

[petmantis]

I believe that had caused rot, or else I've misheard

 

[SirKristoff]

its had mixed results varying from rot, to nothing, to better growth....id just water em once every few months with coffee personally.

 

[back2eight]

I'm going to try it with some sarracenia and see what happens. I have some scarlette belles that need to be repotted, I'll do it on them

 

[SirKristoff]

ive never heard of the coffee treatment working on sarracenia....only neps.

 

[seedjar]

It's been done - I don't remember the details though. I think it was whole beans or rough grounds, used kind of like perlite. Definitely a risk of mold and such... you'd need to leach it out some. I don't think Sarracenia would appreciate it quite as much as Nepenthes, but when I make big batches I usually give some back to the Sarrs because it doesn't seem to hurt. I think that black tea is better for Sarrs - they like tannins for producing anthocyanin.
~Joe

 

[BigBella]

ive never heard of the coffee treatment working on sarracenia....only neps.

Yeah, I don't really know that Sarracenia requires anything in the way of fertilizer -- at least from my experience. The sheer number of insects they consume in the course of a season boggles the mind.

I have never known any Nepenthes to be quite that efficient . . .

 

[SirKristoff]

if ANYTHING i would add only a small amount of fertilizer to the pitchers, and strongly diluted fert at that!
i might give my sarras a "spot of tea" this year....

 

[mabudon]

One thing I do with Sarrs that seems to help is to add shredded pine-needles into the medium. I have never tried coffee on my Sarrs. A friend of mine used coffee on a Heliamphora recently I think, so I'll ask him about that and report back.

I have used coffee on my Neps for maybe a year and have seen pretty impressive results. I have a huge N. miranda that I've had for a few years now. When I got it, there were 3 pitchers on it, all around 6" tall. Over winter the pitchers died off, and the plant didn't do very much at all the next summer, making only 2 pitchers (despite having 3 growth points and being almost 3 feet across overall). Over last winter I found out about the coffee thing and started adding it to the plant about once a month. Last summer I put it out in the exact same place it had been the year previous. During this whole time I hadn't repotted the plant or changed anything besides the coffee, and I keep the plant inside in winter and move it outside in the summer so it's not like it was getting used to one set of conditions. Last summer I got more pitchers than I even bothered to count, all at least 5" tall.
Not a controlled experiment by any means, but it convinced me.