Hi guys,
Its been a while since I have been back to TF. Life takes its own turns and in the last 4-5 months, my life has changed tremendously due to family issues. As a result, I have almost lost my entire collection of plants. I had to go away for over a month and I gave some important plants to my friend to look over. Unfortunately, some of them didn't make it. I lost a lot of very very rare and dear to heart plants. The less critical ones, I left on my balcony sealed up in a bag with water. Surprisingly, some made it, while most highland nepenthes didn't. Before this year, I had over a hundred nepenthes ranging from seedlings to nice sized juvenile plants that were worth 6 years of effort/time and money. I now have less than 15 neps left.....lost all of my rare little plants such as my 6yr old 6" villosa, one macrophylla BE, all my jamban seedlings, jacquelineae, flava seedlings, matalingajanensis, hamata, rajah etc.
Its inescapable and I do have family matters to attend to and will be going away again for another month and a half, so the option was to either let the last few plants in my collection die as I don't think these will survive another move to my friends and back again to me. Or, to try to keep them alive by making an automated setup. I figured whether they make it or not, I might as well learn something from it.
So here it is: My first try at an automated setup. I must say thanks to my good friend Butch for all the support and also especially to Paul. His watering setups were are great inspiration.
Its too early to say if this will work, but I leave in a couple of weeks and this will soon have to be functional. I know my cephs hate water on the crown. Unfortunately the plants are all over the pot and I can't fully position the water away. On top of that, I have plans to add fans at the top to blow over the plants after watering (timer controlled) to remove the staleness.
The reservoir is around 6 gallons max and I will fill it up before i leave. The pump is 180gph and the only managable one for this size that i could find. Unfortunately, splitting up the outlets severely effects the pressure as expected. Need a better solution in the future.
Either way for now, the objective is to keep these alive and if I may, growing back as well as they used to. But once again, only time will tell how it fares.
cheers,
V
Its been a while since I have been back to TF. Life takes its own turns and in the last 4-5 months, my life has changed tremendously due to family issues. As a result, I have almost lost my entire collection of plants. I had to go away for over a month and I gave some important plants to my friend to look over. Unfortunately, some of them didn't make it. I lost a lot of very very rare and dear to heart plants. The less critical ones, I left on my balcony sealed up in a bag with water. Surprisingly, some made it, while most highland nepenthes didn't. Before this year, I had over a hundred nepenthes ranging from seedlings to nice sized juvenile plants that were worth 6 years of effort/time and money. I now have less than 15 neps left.....lost all of my rare little plants such as my 6yr old 6" villosa, one macrophylla BE, all my jamban seedlings, jacquelineae, flava seedlings, matalingajanensis, hamata, rajah etc.
Its inescapable and I do have family matters to attend to and will be going away again for another month and a half, so the option was to either let the last few plants in my collection die as I don't think these will survive another move to my friends and back again to me. Or, to try to keep them alive by making an automated setup. I figured whether they make it or not, I might as well learn something from it.
So here it is: My first try at an automated setup. I must say thanks to my good friend Butch for all the support and also especially to Paul. His watering setups were are great inspiration.
Its too early to say if this will work, but I leave in a couple of weeks and this will soon have to be functional. I know my cephs hate water on the crown. Unfortunately the plants are all over the pot and I can't fully position the water away. On top of that, I have plans to add fans at the top to blow over the plants after watering (timer controlled) to remove the staleness.
The reservoir is around 6 gallons max and I will fill it up before i leave. The pump is 180gph and the only managable one for this size that i could find. Unfortunately, splitting up the outlets severely effects the pressure as expected. Need a better solution in the future.
Either way for now, the objective is to keep these alive and if I may, growing back as well as they used to. But once again, only time will tell how it fares.
cheers,
V
