This is repeated everywhere. But it doesn't make sense to me. Or, for that matter the alleged inability of CPs to deal with high TDS. fertilizers, etc. I've started fertilizing recently, and am seeing no harm, but before I decided to try fertilizing, I gave it much thought. CP's don't grow in a vacuum. There are plants all around them in the allegedly "nutrient poor" environment doing just fine. I won't comment on bogs, since I've never seen one. But there are other bog plants too and there are enough CPs that don't live in bogs. There is soil everywhere else!
I saw photos of butterworts in some meadow and there were a COW in the background. A cow deposits *cough* farm manure.
Orchids grow in similar places as nepenthes. Heck the nepenthes and orchids thrive on TREES! There is enough nutrition in the soil to grow entire trees for the nepenthes to climb. And the surrounding vegetation, etc. If carnivorous plants were to die every time a dog or wolf or whatever decided to piddle on them, they wouldn't have survived (that would also be not just um... high TDS but urea....)
My nepenthes are doing just fine. In fact, fertilizing has helped intermediates and highlanders do better in my hot climate than they were doing before I fertilized them. They also put on size faster, which also ties in to the observations about the plants in forests, etc. We don't know a lot about how fast nepenthes reach maturity in forests. If the plants in forests grew as slowly as those we have and were as vulnerable to damp off and what not... they would be extinct. Think, even of the notorious slow growers. The infamous villosa. If vilosa in the forest reached a sum total of a few inches over years..... but the forest floor has a lot more nutrition than our pots.
I'm playing it safe by watering often between fertilizing, but so far I haven't killed anything from fertilizing as long as I stay away from anything in trays. I don't exactly focus on the drosera, but there are drosera volunteering in nepenthes pots too and they are alive.
I'm wondering how much of what we believe is truth and how much is plain CP superstition.
Anyone know better?
I saw photos of butterworts in some meadow and there were a COW in the background. A cow deposits *cough* farm manure.
Orchids grow in similar places as nepenthes. Heck the nepenthes and orchids thrive on TREES! There is enough nutrition in the soil to grow entire trees for the nepenthes to climb. And the surrounding vegetation, etc. If carnivorous plants were to die every time a dog or wolf or whatever decided to piddle on them, they wouldn't have survived (that would also be not just um... high TDS but urea....)
My nepenthes are doing just fine. In fact, fertilizing has helped intermediates and highlanders do better in my hot climate than they were doing before I fertilized them. They also put on size faster, which also ties in to the observations about the plants in forests, etc. We don't know a lot about how fast nepenthes reach maturity in forests. If the plants in forests grew as slowly as those we have and were as vulnerable to damp off and what not... they would be extinct. Think, even of the notorious slow growers. The infamous villosa. If vilosa in the forest reached a sum total of a few inches over years..... but the forest floor has a lot more nutrition than our pots.
I'm playing it safe by watering often between fertilizing, but so far I haven't killed anything from fertilizing as long as I stay away from anything in trays. I don't exactly focus on the drosera, but there are drosera volunteering in nepenthes pots too and they are alive.
I'm wondering how much of what we believe is truth and how much is plain CP superstition.
Anyone know better?