I'll start this off by presenting my plant. I got it in Oct 2014 as a small seedling and it's had a rather hard life until recently. It got less than optimal care (i.e. neglected) for over a year when I was in the last phase of my PhD. It then got more than half eaten by snails in the one summer I put it outside. Once it recovered from that, it was attacked by a mysterious pest/disease that left awful pitting on the leaves and caused them to shed prematurely.
It is still far from being in great health, but has been doing better and better in the past year, and the pitting seems to be gone (knock on wood).
My conditions:
LIGHT:
Grows indoors, on shelves in a south facing window. In the winter it gets positioned to get full sun as much as possible (whatever sun there is), and since this past winter also had some LEDs above it. In the spring I pull it back slightly from the window so that it only gets a couple hours of direct sun per day.
TEMPERAURE and RH:
Temperature is over 24-35°C in the growing season with a RH of 50-60%. In the winter it's usually 20-22°C during the day, 18°C at night,*and RH is 30-50%. This doesn't stop it from putting out a new leaf in the middle of winter.
POT and SUBSTRATE:
Until last year it was potted in bark. I repotted it in straight leca so that I could water more often, and it had some rather explosive root growth (Kelpak probably has something to do with it). Note that I didn't actually repot it, but picked all the bark out and replaced it with leca, without removing the pot. That was a dumb move, as I've discovered that plants with comparable a leaf size are in much larger pots than mine (15cm vs 10cm). I plan to repot it later in the spring, still in Leca, but still questioning how I want to repot it. Maybe I'll test double potting with it (net pot in a standard pot) or pot it in a normal pot and set that in a glass bowl for both stability and humidity around the roots that venture outside the pot. Yes, the roots currently growing out the bottom of the pot are in sad shape...
Hybrid Mode
