It's hard to know what is wrong with your plant without knowing the condition you are growing your plant. What's the humidiy in the room, what type of water do you use to water your plant, how much light is it getting? Did you transplanted it and what type of soil are you using? And is it really the hybrid nepenthes 'Miranda' ( a cross of N. maxima x N. northiana)?

You may be doing it 90% right and 10% wrong, reason why your plant is not pitchering. Or you may be growing how you did it last year but the problem is that you may have purchased a whole different plant that requires different condition. Like a lowland which require more humidity while 'Miranda' can be grwon as a intermediate plant and can tolerate lower humidities.

The nepenthenes grew outside and for the past 4 weeks or so in the master bath. Humidity is between 60% and 100% ( I live in Houston ) in the bath and outside.

Sun is dappled outside ( under a tree ) and bright mostly indirect in the bathroom.

Yes, it really is Nepenethes 'Miranda'.

Soil is peat moss/potting soil mix.

Water is tap same as I used last year and on all the carnivorous plants I grow. They are all doing fine with it.

To help initiate pitchering next spring spray the leaves with a 1/4 strength solution of orchid mix every 2 weeks. Just spray the leaves.

Peat moss and potting soil mix is a very bad mix for neps or for any other CP, and watering with tap water is just a s bad.

Neps needs to grow in a medium thas good drainage and can hold humidity well, so the mixture preferred by most growers is 1 part long fiber sphagnum moss and 1 part perlite, some add 1 part orchid bark. I don't now it was planted that way the nursery or you made the mix yourself but you have to change it quick. The mix you got has minerals and the potting mix may also have fertilizaer, that will kill the roots system of the plant. Neps have week root system and that will kill it.

Plus watering your nep with tap water, all you are doing is adding more salts to the pot. Not to mention, fluoride and chloride, 2 chemicals that are deadly to CPs. The best water for your plant is distilled water, rain water, or at least R/O water but never tap water.

Those 2 reason is more then enough to cause your plant to go into shock, so its investing all its energies simply to survive instead of producing new urns.

Foliar feed as 'tommyr' recommends is good for nep but first you have to change its soil and the water you provide.

That should help out with your plant. Good luck!

The potting soil was fertilizer free, but I'll try repotting it in sphagnum/bark/perlite, I've plenty in the garage.

Lots of rain water here this week I can feed it that for a while and see if it helps.

Thank you. This is the first problem I've had w/ a carnivore and it's been stumping me.

The problem with regular potting mix is that it already has minerals. One thing you have to be careful about some perlite. I have discovered to my shock and for many growers to, some stores sell perlite treated with some wetting agent or fertilizer. That has cause the death of some of my prized plants because I didn't read the bag & I have heard to other grower too. I trusted it and it cost me.

For new people, it has killed their 1st plants and have angered them and made them think growing CP is simply too hard so they quit.

Be carefull, read and ask question to the store. If not too sure ask here and anyone can advice where or what to buy. You can never be too carefull.

As you can see, 'Miranda' is a tough & forgiving plant and can take abuses so you should have no trouble growing it. You grew one before so you should have some experience to grow it.

So good luck and happy growing! ;^)

Its best to buy the peat in bale bags to ensure that there isn't fertilizers in the mix, for my nepenthes they get the bottoms of there pots filled with coconut husk:peat mix, with the top half of live sphagnum, i do plan to just use live sphagnum in the future, the basic peat perlite will work just fine too, Your n. miranda should be just fine, nepenthes are able to live in some mixes with little fertilizer, and ive heard that you can water with tap as long as you flush the pot out with rain/distilled/or reverse osmosis every few days depending on how many time you water with tap. The only side affect is your plant might not produce pitchers because its getting all of its nutrients through the fertilizers and minerals in the water so it doesn't need to catch prey in order to get the nutrients, therefore no trap is produced. If i were you though, dont water with tap and switch to either the basic peat:perlite mix or a mix with low nutrient levels, live sphagnum, rinsed orchid bark, etc. hope this helps :)

Thank you.

Other'n not having the pitchers the plant is growing like a weed and perfectly happy.

I have some rain water collected for it and will repot it this weekend. Hopefully that will get the pitchers going.

I would try and increase humidity either with a 'pebble-tray' with water in it and place it under the plant or increase the general humidity of the room.

Hi
This has been an ongoing problem with my N.maxima.var. miranda. Sure sounds like your experience is what happened to mine.
My wife bought this in a hanging basket. Having no experience with the Nep except for a small pitchered type that grows wild in the shadehouse. I hung it in a dappled sunlight area. Grew well for about 4 weeks producing awesome pitchers Had no idea any got that size lol Suddenly pitchers started drying up at about 2 inches.
I was told to repot into canadian peat and perlite at 50 percent.. This produced worse results. Smaller leaves less growth and the stems dried up that hold the pitchers.
Went back to long fibered sphag, new zealand type moved it to the shade of a Carambola tree was warned about "Tap" water and the whole SH has a built in irrigation system. Has never bothered the small pitchered type in fact it is downright weedy,grows everywhere lol
Anyway the maxima began to get "knobs" on the very end
these developed into incredible flower stalks.
Was told flowering was bad for them so snipped them off. Produced 4 more lol. Let two develop (no seeds btw)
As the flower stalks began to fade it sprouted in three places.. Since except for the lack of pitchers it obviously was in good health i decided to wait and see.
All the flower stalks have now faded and all the new leaves including the sprouts are producing pitchers. Two are on the way to rivaling the originals in size color and matiurity.
IMO this is just a flowering cycle as seen in many types of plants.
I have never read anywhere about cycling within the entire genus and have never had flowers to my knowledge on the small one. I knew they were flowering plants like all CP
but never thought about it until now.
If this is not a "flowering" cycle " someone explain to me what it is lol.
It has returned to very rapid growth in all directions
Maybe this is what is happening to yours???
gary

Thank you!

I'd never heard of such a thing either. That is really cool. Now I'm anxious to see what flowers look like. I haven't had any nepenthenes flower for me.

Except for the lack of pitchers it's a gorgeous, healthy plant.

I'll keep watching and post back here and let you know whether it flowers then grows pitchers or what ever it does.

Fascinating, thanks again.

Hi
I hope you do report back the results. I grow mostly epiphtic type orchids and often find "Culture" info extremely misleading for my area and culture method.
Find it interesting that if this is the "normal" habit of this particular species of Neps., where is the info.?

I was shopping for orchid cuttings when the wife bought it. lol As usual ended up with a bunch of plants that I didn't want in the first place lol.
BTW. The flowering stalk was a huge cone shaped with hundreds of very tiny nondescript flowers that have a slightly offensive odor lol.Some tropical plants die after flowering but so far have not noted that,in fact just the opposite.
I grew a tropical tree from seed ,Schizolobium parahyba.
That developed one of the most striking characteristics I've seen . It produced a resin from nodes that is so adhesive it actually traps lizards!! It is so adhesive that the legs of the lizard will pull off !!
On the internet I found this plant is being commercially cultured in S. America for plywood products. Very common within it's range . Have yet to find a single mention of this in any info. i even tracked down people to translate spanish info for me.
Interestingly I seem to be the only person in my area with this tree. Via GW 's in California I learned that there's was also doing this.
Sounds like some type of Carnivorous activity to me??
is so it's not listed in any CP lists. Of course niether is the famous" bird catcher tree" Pavonia species. Produces a resin to trap small birds to be used as fertilizer for the seeds. Not your usual method of of carnivory I admit but certainly worth a paragraph or two?? lol
Oh well ,have been growing "weird "plants long enough to know that I have to make up my own methodslol.
good luck with yours and please report back your observations?? We'll write our own books lol gary

I too am interested in the most unusual plants. I've been growing things long enough to be bored with the usual stuff. The husband will be thrilled to hear I've gotten us another 'carrior' type flowering plant :D I don't yet have a sunroom/greenhouse at this home like I did at the last one.

I have a couple of plant websites and hope you do too. It's much easier than writing a book. And you get meet some cool people who have similar interests.

I was at a talk on carnivorous plants a few months back. To be technically carnivorous the plant must digest as well as catch the food. Plants that just trap food, or trap it temporarily are considered pre-carnivorous. There are several considered to be in the pre-carnivorous stage of development, Dutchman's pipe, and there's a bromeliad whose name escapes me right now.

The Schizolobium parahyba sounds fascinating. I'll have to look them up when I get back this afternoon.

I will drop back here and post a note when it either flowers or pitchers or does what ever it is it intends to do next. Thanks so much for all the info. I can see I'll be Googling plants instead of working this afternoon.

Hi
If you happen to find any info. about the resin on the Schizolobium please tell me ??
Another interesting aspect about it is that it seems to repel insects. Even florida ants that are not even repeled by raid lol, I don't find the resin has ANY odor while the dog sneezed for 10 minutes and was definitely repelled he bit me lol.
A friend sent me some pix from Panama in full flower but knew nothing about the habits.
I suspect there are actually a whole bunch of Broms maybe even an orchid or two that may be carnivorous. Some species go to great lengths to attact, capture or direct insects which seems to be for pollinatin rather than a nitrogen source. Some broms that collect water have so may types within the "vase" they must be a much greater relationship. With all the insect activity they are a tree frog magnet as well,as several species of frog use them for spawning. Much ,much more going on there than meets the eye.
gary

I could swear I left a reply here, but it seems to have vaporized.

This week has become far too busy for me to do any research, but I will this weekend if I don't get to it during the week, these plants are entirely too fascinating.

The Giant Dutchman's Pipe is one that traps flies over night to make sure they get a good healthy does of pollen before allowing them to escape. Not carnivorous but still cool.

I read through a lot of science journals doing research for the websites, and there is so much cool stuff going on we don't know about in plants. Many of them use chemical signals the way ants use pheromones to communicate danger or other information.

The below link is a great site to catch cutting edge science stories on plant life. Like this one on dodder vines http://www.physorg.com/news136655158.html

Here is a link that might be useful: physorg.com