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Brown spots on leaves of N. bicalcarata

Hi, everyone

As I said in the earlier introduction, I'm new to carnivorous plants and right now I'm putting my effort to raise my N. bicalcarata to new heights.
But it seems my journey won't be as smooth as ideally perceived to be. There are brown spots appearing on my N. bicalcarata leaves.

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I used 70% cocopeat and around 30% sphagnum moss for the growing medium. Back then I was uninformed that I didn't soak the cocopeat in pure water before applying it as a growing medium. I'm thinking of replacing it with new medium, cocopeat which I am currently soak and drain everyday using water from air conditioner condensation. But, I am kind of reluctant to repot the plant which will set back the plant a bit and currently the plant have one healthy pitcher.

I also suspect mites or thrips but I'm still not sure which pesticide should I pick. There are white objects around the stem of the unhealthy leaves which I suspect the work of mites. Pic below is probably a candid photograph of the culprit.

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Aside from all the problems above, the plant is growing rather nicely, new growing bud has formed and it's separating from one of the leaves' bone at the moment and new leaf is very healthy without defect. Shame that the leaf posted above used to be healthy also but I think just recently it caught the brown spots.

I hope you guys can give me a solution which I can follow to protect my plant :awesome:
 
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Hello CaptainPink! Nice Bical. you have there! I suspect it is the work of the mites, but it could also be too much sun. Where do you grow it and how much sun does it get? Sometimes this is usual, my leafs on my sanguiana sometimes do this, my solution is to put them in a little more shade. But if it is because of the bugs, I unfortunately don't know what to do about them. You could try to manually pick them off, but otherwise, I don't know. Wish you luck!

Happy Growing,
Christian H.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Thank you for the reply, Christian

Yea the symptoms kind of similar to sunburn. But I'm pretty sure that it is being grown in partial shade with some direct sunlight around the time of sunset. But I also googled and mites or thrips kind of making similar symptoms so I'm not sure yet. But your suggestion is worth trying, maybe I should move my plant a few centimeters aback further into the canopy area so it won't receive as much sunlight.
 
Thank you for the reply, Christian

Yea the symptoms kind of similar to sunburn. But I'm pretty sure that it is being grown in partial shade with some direct sunlight around the time of sunset. But I also googled and mites or thrips kind of making similar symptoms so I'm not sure yet. But your suggestion is worth trying, maybe I should move my plant a few centimeters aback further into the canopy area so it won't receive as much sunlight.

Looks far more like too much light than any pest to me. Most pests will kill the tips and edges of leaves before the centers of them, and they don't affect all leaves fairly equally unless the infection is so severe there is no way you wouldn't see the pests. If you do see pests, there are a couple different methods I have used for getting rid of pests before. Check the undersides of the leaves; a lot of pests like to hang out there.
 
It wouldn't hurt to check for pests, but nothing's really jumping out at me as appearing wrong. It looks pretty typical for an outdoor-grown plant.
 
It looks fine to me. If you suspect there are pest take a closer look a it. I never had pests when I grew my Nepenthes outside.
 
The new leaves are fine as others have said; if it were sunburn you would get an unhealthy red or coppery flush to the leaves before it would turn brown or black, and if it were pests you would see very distinct symptoms such as deformed leaves, lots and lots of black dots, exoskeletal remains etc.
 
Looks almost exactly the same as mine, which grows outside too, for over a year. All my leaves get that spotting as they age. It's normal, I think.
 
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