Nepenthes near-disaster

Nepenthes ventricosa in flower

I had a near-disaster with the Nepenthes. It all started with two plants living on the bathroom window sill and growing like nobody’s business. This would normally have been a good thing, except that N. ventricosa was now trying to drill through the top of the window area, its leaves taking up weird and ugly configurations in the process.

When the problem became too serious to ignore (i.e. the flower stalk snapped nearly in half) I installed a large recyling tub outside the house, added dried and live sphagnum moss, filled it with water and moved both plants into it.

Almost immediately the weather turned hot, with a dry wind blowing in from the west. All the lower leaves on N. ventricosa and most of N. maxima x fusca promptly dried up, and in the days that followed I had the dubious pleasure of watching the upper leaves of both plants go the same way (glabrous-leafed N. ventricosa fared better than hairy-leafed N. m. x f.).