u/Charming-Tradition-1

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The First 5 photos are now. The last 4 photos are from four months ago.

This is a follow up to this post I made 4 months ago, where I asked why my Utricularia sandersonni was producing hardly any leaves despite constantly flowering.

As you can see the difference in the amount of leaves, as well as the color of the leaves is night & day compared to 4 months ago.

Instead of giving them 24 hours of light 7 days a week light before, I switched them to a 16 hour light cycle.

I also introduced a tray on the shelf above them which blocks a lot of the light coming from one of my strong grow lights. You can see this by comparing picture number 5 (now) vs. the very last picture (before). There are still 2 weaker lights directly above it that are not blocked by anything.

By just doing these changes, within 3 months they were looking a million times better. Also, this past month, I've been increasing the humidity to 90+ percent, and this seems to have accelerated their improvement even further.

A lot of people ask for help in this reddit, including myself, but its not often that we get to see a follow up that shows if our answers made a direct implant on the life/health of somebody's plant.

There is also not much material out there about U. Sandersonni preferring less light. I was a bit surprised by this. As I had always been told Sandersonii needs lots of light to keep flowering, which caused me to give them strong light 24/7 which made them sick.

There is nothing online that would suggest giving them more shade, weaker light, and shorter light cycle would improve the health of the leaves themselves. Maybe because most people only care about the flowering.

Anyway, now there is photo evidence on reddit showcasing the effects of light stress on U. Sandersonnii, and showing what 4 months of recovery looks like.

u/Charming-Tradition-1 — 21 days ago

I've been noticing for a while that the tray of distilled water it sits in has been reading 40-50PPM. All my other carnivore trays read 15-25ppm max.

I ran distilled water through all the other carnivores that sit in the same tray as the cephalotus in the picture. The water all read around 30-50ppm.

When I ran water through the cephalotus itself, as you can see it was reading 110PM.

I understand over time, if you have lots of plants sitting in a tray together, then its normal for it not to read 0PPM exactly, but 110 is far above my usual accepted standard of 20PPM max.

- Is this emergency repot worthy?

- What could be causing this? I got this from California Carnivores like 3 years ago and it has been doing great. The only thing that's noteworthy, is that last year this plant completely died back on me, only started regrowing like this 6 months ago.

- Should I repot everything else that was sitting in the same tray as it?

- I do not have good quality sand. Could I repot this in a super perlite-heavy mix of like 60/40 Perlite/Peat Moss? I have never repotted a ceph before. I know they like it sand-heavy, but wondering if that can be substituted with perlite.

Please help.

u/Charming-Tradition-1 — 22 days ago