defunct drosera, hungry N

Douglas Wiggins (zoron@nwcs.org)
Mon, 29 May 1995 04:00:00 GMT

Y.:recover. Are there any pesticides organic or otherwise, that will work
Y.:without damaging the foliage? And why don't the aphids end up on the sticky
Y.:trap like other insects?

A better insecticide would be Orthene by Ortho - it is systemic,
which is ideal for sucking insects, and it has no harmful effects
on the plants providing it is given at the recommended dilutions.
It stinks, but it works so well that I put up with it even indoors.
It works on scale, too. As for the feeding grounds of aphids - they
normally inhabit the lower sides of stems, which is not the active
portion of these leaves.

Y.:Someone posted a note about feeding sowbugs to their Nepenthes. I felt
Y.:guilty, not having actively fed mine (Nepenthes alata) since I bought it a

One should be careful in feeding carnivorous plants - if you give
them more than the trap can digest, other organisms, potentially
harmful to your plant, can flourish on the carcass. Also, in the
case of sow-bugs, they might escape and set up shop in your
terrarium (sow bugs eat decomposing vegetative matter, and it is
hard enough to provide the plants with a good organic media without
bugs eating it up).

Y.:month ago. Is this something I ought to do? Aren't they supposed to do this

You can feed them, as long as you use common sense - no hamburger,
for sure, and no bugs larger than you would expect them to capture on
their own. They don't get the level of insect population in your
care that they would in nature (but they get much better soil and
other conditions and don't have predators beyond fungus-gnat
larvae, which can be avoided by scrupulously avoiding fertilizing
the soil medium).

Y.:on their own? I am willing to spoonfeed if advised to do so , but
where do I Y.:get insects from? (There are plenty of bugs in the house,
since I don't have

I used to raise fruit-flies, wingless or white-eyed (so that my
wife would not accuse me of being responsible for the kitchen
population - I went to white eyes because wings make nice handles
for tweezers), but they were too hefty for most CP - I had to kill
them with alcohol fumes or ether fumes, allowing them to air-out
before feeding. For a Nepenthes, larger insects are appropriate,
but a lot of fruit flies would also work (I got the strains from
Carolina Biological Supply in Gladstone, Oregon). I sometimes make
a very dilute (8 to 1) solution of organic fertilizer solution to
pour into pitcher plants - they absorb it very well.

If I put the fruit flies into the terrarium, alive, they would just
hang around on the bottom of the sundew leaves and other safe
places. I discovered that the sundews don't care if an insect is
alive - it responds to the proximity of protein (or something - I
will not swear to that, as it does not come from anything I have
read, although I have read that a sundew responded to nitrogenous
material in the form of a pellet of fertilizer-drenched
vermiculite.) Anyway, fruit flies are small enough to be digested
by all but the smallest traps. I prefer foliar feed, myself, but it
is very hard on media such as long-fiber sphagnum moss (if
fertilized, the moss will decompose in six months or less, but if
not, it will last for a couple of years or more.)

When I was first learning about these things, I started a bunch of
Drosera capensis clones, and, when I had two from different parts
of the same leaf segment, both developing at exactly the same speed
a quarter of an inch apart (same environment), it was interesting
to feed one of them a fruit-fly and leave the other as a control.
The fed plant did grow much faster.

My main success, though, came from my using an airbrush - it was
powered by CO2, and I got the idea of squirting some of it into the
terrarium; that was the first time I had really flourishing plants.
When I mentioned this several months ago, it started a long thread
of how to administer CO2 without the high-tech gadgets I use (I
believe it was finally decided that an acid slowly dripped over
something like baking soda or limestone would yield CO2 which could
be administered to the terrarium through a trap to keep the acid
fumes out - some thought of using yeast, but the acid seemed
cleaner and easier). Just increasing ventilation by putting a tiny
fan into the terrarium would probably help - I thought of getting
one of those tiny CPU fans for a terrarium which does not have a
CO2 feed. Then there were those who felt that just growing the
plants was better than messing around with all of this stuff (which
is fine, but I assure you that the success of all growing endeavors
can be greatly enhanced by addition of the right amount of CO2 and
the proper wavelength and quantity of light).

Time for a break. Good luck.

-Douglas Wiggins zoron@nwcs.org, Portland, Oregon

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