Giving your Neps a coffee treatment

I can't see any harm but it seem like a poor substitute for a real fertilization regime.

Sam you could be right in that it could turn out that coffee isn't a perfect food for Nepenthes.

But I find this evolution of Nepenthes soil fertilizing to be quite interesting. And I think the coffee feeding is just another baby step in this evolution.

Not too long ago, it was considered blasphemy to even suggest that Nepenthes be soil fed. After all, they were carnivorous plants, were they not. They caught there own food in their pitchers, and to fertilize them would surely put the plant at risk, if not down right kill it.

Then growers such as Rainforest and others challenged this notion of not fertilizing Nepenthes. And you well know the consequences of challenging the status quo...the outrage, the ridicule, the initial dismissal of these new ideas, and the heated debates.

But if the new ideas are worthy and do indeed work, and if the 'heretics' are not first burned at the stake, but instead able to persist on to spread the new truth, then these new ideas can gain acceptance.

So then the popular thought became, "Okay, Neps can be fertilized, but one should really know what they are doing, so that is best left to the advanced grower".

But what I am seeing now with coffee, is that the novice grower, though skeptical at first is beginning to experiment with coffee. There seems to be a growing movement out there now, judging by what I have seen on some of the other forums.

These average growers might not be quite ready to try fertilizers on their Neps just yet, but that time is coming.

And I expect to see a commercial brand of Nepenthes fertilizer on the market in time, just as there are orchid and bromeliad specific fertilizers for those niche markets.

And I think coffee feeding is just one of the transitional steps in that direction.

dvg

Actually, Sam, I had a fairly good idea of what you meant. I was just trying to deviously lure you into my logical net, and it seems to have worked



I was hoping you'd say that Until someone either a) offers up some kind of chemical content analysis comparing coffee to more traditional, store-bought fertilizers or b) posts pictures of (at the very least) 3 plants, one grown with no fertilizer or coffee, one grown with coffee, and one grown using regular fertilizers -- keeping all other conditions the same -- then we just don't know how coffee-fertilizing sizes up against regular fertilizing. (Some other kinds of controlled experiments would do, too, I'm just giving an example). Speculations, hypotheses, and even wild claims about how coffee can balance the chakras of our plants are all fine, as long as we recognize their limits.

As for coffee fertilizing seeming like a "magic bullet", I'd have to agree that it does have the trappings of a magic bullet. In the end the proof will be in the pudding...or pitchers...or tree-shrew poo (I get confused...).

And I don't mean to sound mean or argumentative; I don't have strong feelings on the matter. I just enjoy playing with people's minds, especially if it involves logical games

When did the notion of not fertilizing ever arise? in the 1970's it was normal practice to give Neps diluted fertilizer and probably well before that.

Adrian slack was advising the use of full strength fertiliser in his 1979 book, his favourite was baby bio, seem to remember around that time using diluted phostrogen myself.

I am not opposed to the use of coffee as a growth stimulator. I just wished someone could show me/everyone an experiment showing results. I have and many others have shown their plants given fertilizers producing result, why would they stray away from a proven thing?

I have not seen pictures of a test where three identical plants were tested against each other. If one exists, point me in that direction. So far it's been hearsay that it works wonders.

The good thing with fertilizers is that it's there on the shelf, I don't have to brew anything and I wonder if using fertilizer is actually cheaper than coffee. I would rather have my potted plants smelling like dilute seaweed (hardly anything to smell) than smelling like an expresso machine.

Fertilizing works even if BE doesn't support it with his ridiculous double blind experiments showing that non-fed, non-fertilized plants did better than fertilized plants which was even less than insect fed plants.

For those who feel that nepenthes and other CP's are obligate nutrition through insect digestion, you need to wake up. Insect digestion is a SUPPLEMENTAL food source to an already existing nutrition by root feeding.

You've seen people's plants doing poorly and your first intuition is to check out their soil. You can see that a plant is doing or will do poorly by just checking what their media looks like. If one would believe that nutrition comes entirely from insects fed through pitchers, then it wouldn't matter what they are growing in. Because with this thinking a plant will do good regardless of what it is growing in because they are carnivorous.

The coffee may contribute nitrogen, or maybe a hormone from the seed itself. I think one should see what the agent is before treating your rare hamats, macrophyllas with it.

M