Saturday, 7 January 2017

More Nepenthes pictures

We had a quite a downpour of rain last night and its been 34 degress celsius most days
with the nights in the twenties. Very Humid with the insects being a nuisance.
I started diluting a teaspoon of lemon juice in a drinking glass about a month ago and
placing a small amount into each bromeliad and nepenthes pitcher that I saw after watering.
Somewhere someone had said that mosquitoes don't like citrus that I remembered.
A couple of days after I have done, this I've noticed a large reduction in sandflies and mossies
around the yard. Just one or two instead of many and here where I live there are natural swamps.
I don't see any larvae in the pitchers but I think the fluid attracts them.
I've now done it enough times to say it does work and the last couple of times I've used
citronella oil drops diluted into water (just a couple in a haws spray bottle I received at Christmas) and its effective.

I've been putting up another greenhouse , a smaller one to place the high altitude nepenthes in.
Its really difficult to keep them cool enough. I've resorted( apart from placing them in the shadiest area) to placing blue esky ice blocks around them in the morning touching them against their pots.
I started putting cold water in the nepenthes faizalana's pot because I realised it was a highlander from papua new guinea and it hadn't grown and it hadn't  pitchered, then
one morning I got foolhardy and put ice  in the pot and it was fine. So all through summer a couple of cubes of ice daily and it pitchered.
I did accidentally place ice cubes in a lowland nepenthes truncata's pot and it was dead the next day, so beware of doing this.

















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