cephs from Meadowview Biological Research Station

[Steve D]

Here are several photos I took today (March 19, 2007) of a cephalotus I got from Meadowview Biological Reasearch Station-- www.pitcherplant.org/ --about 3 years ago.

The first year it barely grew as it recovered from transplant shock and became accustomed to its new home in an arid environment. The second it grew well. The third year it grew vigorously and has now produced about a dozen offshoot plants.

This has been my first experience with Cephalotus, and for a while I puzzled over two things: 1) how does the plant get water into its pitchers, since it seems to shield itself from rainfall; and 2) how should I feed it, since it was planted in a pot and not too many crawling insects happened to walk up the pot (or be able to walk up the pot) to explore the nectar-laden openings of the pitchers.

In answer to the first question, I noticed that Cephs exude an adequate quantity of fluid into their digestive chambers, in contrast to Sarracenia purpurea for example that seems to require some rain to fall into the pitchers. In attempting to answer the second question, for a time I would place paper weighted with rocks outside, on which I placed several drops of sugar water to attract small ants. Then when the paper was generously populated with ants I would take it into the greenhouse and shake the ants onto the Cephalotus. Most of the ants just walked to the edge of the planter and fell off. They wandered around disoriented on the concrete floor. It was a pitiful sight, and the process was disappointing.

Then I asked at a forum (TerraForums.com) how others fed their Cephs, and got the following interesting suggestion from "Wild Bill." He said that he fed his Cephs fish food, which are mostly dried insects anyway--right?--and specifically Betta Bio Gold fish food, which comes in very small pellets that can easily be dropped into Ceph pitchers with tweezers.

I've been feeding my Cephs with this fish food for about a year and a half now, and I have to say that they do seem to like it, and it makes feeding time a lot simpler.

Anyway, the photos--







Best wishes all--

Steve D
New Mexico, US

[pinglover]

What medium do you grow your cephs in please?

The Betta Bio Gold fish food tip sounds good.

[Steve D]

pinglover said:

What medium do you grow your cephs in please?

The Betta Bio Gold fish food tip sounds good.

These Cephs are growing in a mix of 1 part sphagnum peat moss to 2 parts coarse (#2) blasting sand (silica sand marketed for sandblasting purposes). After I began to feed them the fish food (Betta Bio Gold brand) their growth and vigor really seemed to improve. Initially I fed each open pitcher 1 tiny pellet about once per week. Now I feed each pitcher from 1-4 pellets about once per 7-10 days. I'm very pleased with them and they seem happy to grow in my particular medium and environment, for which I am grateful.


I water them from above or below, but I never leave them standing in water and allow them to drain completely and dry until just moist before watering them again. Actually, they let me know when they are getting dry because the lids of the pitchers close at times (too much sun, too much dry wind, too little soil moisture) to conserve the liquid in the pitchers (or so it seems to me).

The only problem I have had with them is a brief outbreak of scale which was easily and quickly remedied with a few spray treatments of acephate.

-sd

[pinglover]

Hi Steve, what ever you do... don't laugh! There's a photo of my very first ceph here-
icps.proboards105.com/index.cgi?board=cephalotus&action=display&thread=1174060324

I think I'll have to wait a bit before I try to feed it any Betta Bio Gold fish food. It needs to grow a little bit more.

I currently am using a sphagnum/perlite mix. The plant is tiny but it was sent to me healthy so it's actually doubled if not tripled in size since I received it last year. I don't plan on re-potting it until it outgrows its current pot but do you think I should change the medium then? I've got tube sand and can get coarse blasting sand.

What kind of lighting does your plant have and are you growing it in a terrarium?

[Steve D]

pinglover said:

(...)
I currently am using a sphagnum/perlite mix. (...) I don't plan on re-potting it until it outgrows its current pot but do you think I should change the medium then? I've got tube sand and can get coarse blasting sand.

What kind of lighting does your plant have and are you growing it in a terrarium?

What is tube sand?

I grow my Ceph in the greenhouse (really just an enclosed concrete patio just outside the back door that now has multi-wall polycarbonate on the south slope of its roof, and tall windows all around the south and east side) with my VFTs, sundews and orchids.

Cephs have kind of a woody root system unlike a lot of other CP, so my personal feeling is that they do better in a planting medium that is well drained and never soggy for long. I think they like to be a little drier around their roots (I think they would be prone to root rot if kept too wet). With that in mind, I think the main thing about the medium is not exactly what composes it so much as the proportions one uses. What I mean is that I'll bet it's not so important whether one uses perlite or silica sand, but to keep the moisture retentive component (sphagnum peat moss in my case) at a lower percentage of the mix. Mine is 1/3 sphagnum peat and 2/3 "other stuff that doesn't absorb much water" (sand in my case).

One of the primary reasons I use blasting sand (silica sand) so much is that I use so many insulating foam pots at my high altitude (4,000 feet above sea level). Quite a few of my plants have died in the past from extreme overheating of the roots, planted in traditional plastic or ceramic containers the sides of which were exposed to direct high-altitude sunlight in an environment in which there are rarely many clouds in the sky.

So, since the insulating polyurethane foam pots are so lightweight (and our wind sometimes very strong on this dry grassland prairie of eastern New Mexico US), I tend to use sand instead of perlite in order to add more weight to the medium and better anchor the plants in their containers.

[pinglover]

Tube sand is very coarse sand that comes in a bag that is a tube from stores like Home Depot. I haven't a clue what it is used for. Perhaps mortar for stone masons? They also use this sand for sandbagging when the river starts to flood residential areas. One thing though, you really need to rinse it well until the water runs clear.

I'll add more perlite to my mix the next time I repot it. I did take it out of the standing water. I don't want this plant getting root rot although I did allow it to dry out between waterings and I didn't refill the drip tray.

Ah, the joys of high altitude and windy city gardening. I use a lot of sand too. I like to weight down my Sarracenia pots. It helps when there's a little bit of weight to them when the squirrels get frisky and when we get gusts of wind that are in the 60-80 mph range which does happen around here in the Midwest and not all that infrequently. I've had pots tipped over from winds before when they weren't weighted with sand added to the mix. The ceph is grown inside in an aquarium that has humidity around 80%. I don't believe that is necessary. I'm thinking this plant might do just find in a window with a western exposure.

[Steve D]

pinglover said:

(...) The ceph is grown inside in an aquarium that has humidity around 80%. I don't believe that is necessary. I'm thinking this plant might do just find in a window with a western exposure.

I agree with you. My Ceph is doing fine, growing without any humidity-boosting measures even though I live in what might be considered a semi-desert with less than 17 inches of precipitation per year and generally low humidity year round. My VFTs and orchids have also adapted just fine to this low humidity environment.

The only concession I make to the sun-loving carnivorous plants is not to leave them outside when the dry wind is too strong, or to put them in a place that is protected for the most part from the dessicating wind. In fact, our climate in New Mexico US is so dry and the wind often so harsh that there are cases where a dead animal or dead human have dried out faster than they were able to rot, making naturally created mummies.
:)

[Steve]

pinglover said:

Tube sand is very coarse sand that comes in a bag that is a tube from stores like Home Depot. I haven't a clue what it is used for.

Sounds like what they sell during the winter around here to put in car trunks and the back of pick ups to add weight over the back wheels and improve traction on snowy roads.

[pinglover]

our climate in New Mexico US is so dry and the wind often so harsh that there are cases where a dead animal or dead human have dried out faster than they were able to rot, making naturally created mummies.

Around here, not much gets a chance to rot. Seems as if we have the scavenger crew that comes in first. That would be turkey vultures and opossums. Believe it or not, eagles will even dine on carrion. After the bones are picked bare, the rodents have a go at what's left to keep their teeth in check. We can toss a whole left-over turkey out into the woods and there isn't much left of it after a few weeks. Sheesh, no wonder we've never found any evidence of Big Foot!

Needless to say, around here you have to be real careful protecting plants you place outside. Deer have been known to sample Sarracenia whilst the English House Sparrow has learned that pitchers contain free meals and then there are the squirrels that seem to root around rhizomes searching for that perfect spot to plant an acorn. Me thinks me should keep my precious little ceph inside where it is safe.

We use bags of cat litter in the trunks of our cars to get more traction but tube sand would certainly work.

[Steve D]

pinglover said:

(...) around here you have to be real careful protecting plants you place outside. Deer have been known to sample Sarracenia whilst the English House Sparrow has learned that pitchers contain free meals and then there are the squirrels that seem to root around rhizomes searching for that perfect spot to plant an acorn. Me thinks me should keep my precious little ceph inside where it is safe.

Wow! It never occurred to me that the hostile environment of New Mexico (the region I live in is fairly hostile to plants, with not a single native tree (believe it or not!) and grass that is dry most of the time and only springs briefly to life after each rare rain) actually can be viewed as an advantage of a sort, in that we don't have many animals that pester our pet plants. The air can be bone dry, the wind can be maddeningly severe and gusty, the soil like dry powder with not a river nor creek for perhaps a couple hundred miles, but at least we don't have deer and squirrels and other common pests of plants. Hmm--

[pinglover]

You're just jealous you don't have your own on-site smörgåsbord to offer all the woodland critters. Seriously, the English house sparrows (not indigenous to the continent of NA) are by far the worst. All it takes is one to make the connection there are goodies in pitchers and you might as well go out and invest in fruit tree netting stock.

[pinglover]

Try as I might, I could not locate Betta Bio Gold fish food. This is what I purchased-



It was the only fish food with gold in the name. The ingredients are:
fish meal
flaked corn
rice bran
whet flour
soybean meal
krill meal
glutton meal
enzyme
brewers dried yeast
garlic
and a slew of things I can't pronounce that are too small to read

Does this look comparable to the Betta Bio Gold fish food and if not, where do I buy the Betta Bio Gold?

[Steve D]

pinglover said:

Try as I might, I could not locate Betta Bio Gold fish food. This is what I purchased-
(image is in the quoted post)
It was the only fish food with gold in the name. The ingredients are: fish meal, flaked corn, rice bran, whet flour, soybean meal, krill meal, glutton meal, enzyme, brewers dried yeast, garlic, and a slew of things I can't pronounce that are too small to read

Does this look comparable to the Betta Bio Gold fish food and if not, where do I buy the Betta Bio Gold?

You know, when I read the ingredient list of the fish food you bought, I thought to myself, "How could a Cephalotus like that?!" --what with the soybean meal, wheat gluten, garlic, etc.

But then I read the ingredients list of the Betta Bio-Gold fish food that I have been feeding my Cephs for about a year now with good results (made by the same company as yours, Hikari, and suggested by Wild Bill at TerraForums.com) and was surprised to find that many of the ingredients were the same: fish meal, wheat flour, soybean meal, gluten meal, krill meal, wheat-germ meal, cuttlefish oil, astaxanthin, brewers dried yeast, enzyme, garlic, monosodium glutamate, vitamins and minerals including stabilized vitamin C. My Cephs have been growing great on that fish food.

But you know, I haven't tried any other type of fish food, and I'll bet that lots of them would work fine for Cephs (just a hunch). I bought my Hikari Betta Bio-Gold at Wal-Mart, but you can also find it online. You could try the fish food you have already bought with your Cephs (I would certainly try it myself, conservatively at first), but if you really want to buy exactly Betta Bio-Gold, here are a few online sources:

PetGuys.com
www.petguys.com/-042055191010.html
PetCo.com
www.petco.com/shop/product.aspx?sku=547859&cm_ven=biz&cm_cat=79&cm_pla=547859&cm_ite=547859
PetShopUSA.net
www.petshopusa.net/B00025Z74C/Hikari_Betta_Bio_Gold_Fish_Food_20_gram.html
Fish.com
www.fish.com/itemdy00.asp?T1=710061+001&srccode=FSHBZRTE
www.fish.com/itemdy00.asp?T1=710061+002

Now that I've read the ingredients, I might try some different fish food when my current Betta Bio-Gold runs out, to try to compare Ceph growth and health fed with various kinds of fish food. I think I would prefer the pellets (like Betta Bio-Gold) instead of the flake types of fish food though. I just think they would fit into the Ceph pitchers better and might perhaps soak up the digestive fluid easier (but that's just a guess).

[pinglover]

What's nice about the size of the pellets in the Hikari product is that they are tiny and can be inserted with a tweezers. Flakes are a different configuration and don't fit all that well into tiny pitchers.

Looks to me as if we have the same product only one is packaged for betas and one is packaged for carp. Their marketing department must have worked over time on packaging given I get the distinct impression the pellets for both are coming off the same assembly line.

[Steve D]

pinglover said:

What's nice about the size of the pellets in the Hikari product is that they are tiny and can be inserted with a tweezers. Flakes are a different configuration and don't fit all that well into tiny pitchers.

Looks to me as if we have the same product only one is packaged for betas and one is packaged for carp. (...)

Good point (regarding pellets compared to flakes).


Both products seem very similar if not the same, so I'll bet that either will work fine with Cephs. I have been impressed with the rate of growth of my Cephs over the last year or so while I have been feeding them the Hikari Betta Bio-Gold, although I can't say for sure whether it's because of the food or because they are now well established and happy in their container, or perhaps both.