Just providing this for interest or pretty-picture sake :)

In March 2005 I bought a Nepenthes ventricosa at a local greenhouse. It was a young plant that was a rosette of leaves and pitchers, but hadn't grown into a vine. I grew it under 4-4 ft fluorescent lights, setting the pot in a 10 gallon aquarium for humidity. 20 months later, it was a vine 1.5 ft. long and growing out of the aquarium.

In Nov. 2006 I decided to cut off the vine and try to propogate some of the leaf and stem cuttings. I removed the entire main vine so that a small offshoot that had formed at the base of the plant could take over as the main stem. That was 15 months ago, here's some views of it now, it has 5 open pitchers and 7 developing:

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I kept the top 6" of the original vine, stripped leaves off the bottom half, dipped the bottom inch of that in rooting hormone, and insterted it in wet LFS. It rooted nicely, but has smaller pitchers and much paler coloured pitchers than the original plant or the offshoot I mentioned above. I don't know if that's because it's in a smaller pot, or whether it's because it came from the tip of the original vine (which had smaller pitchers than lower down on the vine):

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I also took a lot of different leaf and stem cuttings, trying fresh-cut leaves and parts of leaves, stems stripped of leaves, stems with leaves left on, some laid horizontal on wet sphagnum, some insterted vertically into sphagnum, some with rooting hormone, some without. Of all those, only one method worked. That was a section of stem about 4" long, leaves stripped off the bottom half, and two leaves left on top (but each cut back to 2" long to reduce evapotranspiration). This stem had the bottom half inserted vertically into wet LFS, and it began to put out a tiny new growth node after two months. Here it is now, small but cute:

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And here's the setup where I grow them - a cool basement, in a 10 gallon aquarium that has much of the open area covered with plastic wrap to keep humidity high. Not perfect, but it seems to work.

-Don

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