Hello,
welcome on my Nepenthes cultivation page.
Nepenthes are my favourite plant genus and so I started growing these fascinating plants about four years ago. On this website I want to show some pictures of my collection and share some of the experiences I made growing these plants indoors in a terrarium. At the moment I cultivate about 30 different species of Nepenthes, which I hope to add to this site over time. Of course I couldn't avoid getting other way too interesting carnivorous plants as well, but I am not as experienced in cultivating them and so the main focus of this site will be Nepenthes.
I'm not going to add another growing info page for Nepenthes to the web as there are already some very good ones. Jeff Shafer's site www.plantswithattitude.com provides excellent cultural information on most Nepenthes species and Martin Reiner's site www.drosophyllum.com provides lots of useful cultural information for all kinds of carnivorous plants also including a very nice section on Nepenthes - sadly most of his page is only available in german language.
I am no web designer and so I try to focus more on contents than on style. As a result the structure of this page is quite simple :-) All pictures on this site are thumbnails, clicking on them will show bigger versions.
If you have questions concerning my plants or just want to comment on them, feel free to drop me an Email.
I am cultivating all my Nepenthes in a terrarium at an east facing window, where full sun reaches the plants from sunrise to 12 o'clock. The temperatures inside rises very quick in full sun, so I have installed an automatic system blowing humidified cool air into the terrarium when temperatures inside reaches about 30 degree. Night time temperatures drop to 14-16 degree depending on the outside temperature. These conditions are best suited for intermediate and highland Nepenthes. Lowland plants don't grow well under these conditions and so I have just few very hardy ones remaining.
This is an overview picture of the whole terrarium:
At the front the two white air intakes of the cooling system
can be seen. The terrarium has a 4cm wide opening on top
running over the whole length. At the left side hidden
between the N. inermis x ventricosa leafes I have placed an
additional fan which circulates the air around when the
cooling system is running.
Below the grid, on which the
pots stand, the terrarium is filled with water about 5cm
deep. The plants don't have contact with this water. I have
placed two aquarium heaters in this water to heat the
terrarium during daytime in winter. Due to this water no
additional misting or fogging system is necessary and I only
ocassionally mist the Heliamphora by hand.
During winter the days get quite short here in Germany down to ten hours of bright light or even less. For good growth day length is increased with artificial lights for some hours. I use two 70W/4200k metal halide lamps, which not only have the best spectral power distribution, but are also very energy efficient.
Two lamps are preferable over a single one. The light emitting area of a metal halide lamp is only very small and so dark shaded areas under the plants are the result. With two lamps sitting next to each other this problem can be overcome.
To find out what changed since your last visit have a look at the Changes page where all changes of this homepage are documented.
Joachim Danz
P.S.: Before you confuse me with the very well known Joachim Nerz, here is the link to his page.
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