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Fertilizer

  • #41
Vraev, alright you've cleared things up for me.

Thanks for the complement of my site. You have impressive plants yourself. Your 'B52' plants look very healthy. I remember earlier you saying you are quite sick of seeing the Dentate varieties at your local walmart. lol Send me a pm if you feel like a VFT chat.
 
  • #42
[b said:
Quote[/b] (Outsiders71 @ Jan. 07 2007,6:17)]Bah!!!

VTF's aren't made for terraniums or tropical conditions!  They are made for full sun, outdoor wetness!  This also includes a time to go dormant and rest!

Keeping a VFT inside a terranium will only produce weak plants with the tendency to rot from too much humidity!
If you have good lighting and good air circulation, Don't see why someone can't grow indoors if they give it a dormancy.

High humidity isn't bad. Stagnant air and hight humidity is. Add low light to that equation and soon you'll have a lovely mold farm lol



As for the asian growers not giving a dormancy, you must realize that they grow them as fast as they can and sell them as fast as they can. High light, humidity, and pressurized co2 can be wonderous for a few years, but just like steroids in humans it is not a permanent fix. You've got to stop and rest eventually. The more plants these companies sell, the more die and the more people get to buy more. It's a cycle of profit and thus is the wonderous invention of TC and mass marketed "novelty" plants.

You have pretty much a whole team of growers telling you the way to keep the plant alive and you won't listen. Is it REALLY that painfull to stick it in the fridge for a few months? Amino acids aren't going to be a replacement for dormancy, sorry. You can do what you are doing and hope for the best but without a dormancy it's going to die. A person can't stay away forever and keep going and going and going and a plant that has evolved to have dormancy can't skip it for too many consecutive years.

Amino acids are fine and well but I feel that you aren't getting the point. A normal plant does not need them, just as a normal person does not need hormones at the age of 17. If your plant will not grow normally without it then there is a problem and you need to fix the problem instead of putting a band-aid on it and hoping for the best even though everyone else is telling you what to do. Now you want to give it phenylalanine to make it red.. are you serious?

Let's look at a human example of what we are doing to our poor little plant.

Stacy want's to stay awake so she does meth every day.  Now she doesn't have to sleep! Afterall, she's missing out on a third of her LIFE when she sleeps!

Stacy wants a tan, so now all she eats is Diet coke, which contains Phenylalanine, and carrots which contain beta carotene. I suppose some brown dye number 2 couldn't hurt TOO much either.

Stacy wants to get rock-hard abs and grow big and strong, so she starts taking intramuscular testosterone injections.

Stacy died a year later. When she passed she looked like the crypt-keeper.
 
  • #43
phenylalanine is a precursor for anthocyanin. I'm serious about it. I found that cp has great capability to absorb amino acid from its prey and used it readily, faster than digest a prey. it means that I give the shortcut for cp to get what they need. off course external factor should be applied to make it red, it needs light... high intensity of uv to stimulate anthocyanin production. I have tried it in nepenthes, I will do the same thing to vft. so, I apply the factor: give it phenylalanine and full sunlight.
vft in the nursery I have told in last post are never sleep for years. they become tropical plant?
 
  • #44
Ok. whatever. Still not getting my point. Do it your way and maybe you can train your plant to become tropical like apparently they are all at the TC nursery, since the TC nursery is the top authority on Dionaea cultivation.

Perhaps one day all of Asia will be overrun with tropical Dionaea.

As far as giving it Phenylalanine AND high light levels, which do you think it is? An experiment is changing one variable at a time, not two. If you kept it in low light levels and gave it Phenylalanine and it turned red, then that's something fantastic. If you give it Phenylalanine and high light levels then that "experiment" is worthless. Nepenthes are not hard to please when it comes to light by the way.
 
  • #45
So which is it? Do they "never" need dormancy or is it that they can go years without dormancy? How long is never? If they the can go "years" without dormancy does that mean they eventually need dormancy? How many years is "years"? Two or three? Your run of the mill everyday VFT can go two, maybe three years without dormancy.
 
  • #46
It's possible that this plant is of the "Heterodoxa" form/variety, in which case it should normally be rosetted and lacking red all year round.
 
  • #47
It has a bit of red on the old leaves.
 
  • #48
I understand the guy here is trying to do a new method while going into the cellular and chemical aspects of hoticulture with the amino acids and so on. Being a biochemistry major myself, I know what you are talking about and understand what you mean. But, you have to realise a couple of things...ppl here are not stupid as well. Regular ppl who have reared VFT's for years and years.....Bugweed for instance 30 years and so on. Check every single website on the internet....all of them say VFT's need dormancy. That is just the way they evolved...you cannot take it all away in a day. If anything you have to look at the biochemical and genetic aspects. Construct a hybrid plant that can grow all year around and has hardy roots....VFT's will soon become a pest. The plant has evolved in a way in its habitat.....you should not try to be over confident and arrogant about taking its lifestyle away. Don't believe nursery stuff...as the guys here said ...the nursery want to keep selling VFT's. They probably never had to put any in dormancy as most are bought as novelty. Listen to the experienced growers here....listen to the resource out there....YOUR PLANT NEEDS DORMANCY. You can;t get around it. I was initially planning like u...no dormancy....artificial feeding...but I have gone back to the basics and I love my VFT's as they grow perfectly as they are supposed to if you treat them right.
 
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