Nepenthes not developing pitchers

Question

I've tried to look everywhere, but couldn’t find any good answer on why my plant is growing very nicely, but never developed a new pitcher.

I've got the plant about 5 months ago and it had many beautiful, grown pitchers. They eventually dried out naturally and I was just waiting for new ones to come out... But it never happened.

Basically as you can see from the pictures, the leaves are producing them, but they never grow large and eventually dry out directly when still small. I'm keeping the plant up close to a south facing window, at a temperature around 20 degrees and humidity around 50%, keeping the soil neither wet nor dry (basically watering every couple days). I am watering with decalcified water and once a week with rain water.

Do you have any suggestions?

Answer 1

Nepenthes are very sensitive to air humidity. Even the “modern hybrids” created for living room conditions prefer humidity in the upper range (60 - 70%), for older types even higher is necessary. The first symptom of too-dry air (and often the only one in modern breeds) is failure to grow new pitchers.

We found a very trivial solution, but it needs persistence and diligence: Spraying the plant, especially the leaf ends and new pitchers at least once, ideally multiple times a day. There’s no need to get the plant dripping wet (and ruin the window sill below), a gentle mist will do. We have ours hanging in a south-facing window with shade from the plants outside and use a repurposed nose spray bottle to spray from below, whenever someone walks by and remembers to do it. Watering by showering the whole plant is also helpful, but don’t let the pot stay overly wet all the time or you risk rotting roots (which is why some sources recommend watering from below). We have even put it outside in warm summer rain.

An alternative and traditional way of keeping nepenthes would be to plant them in a terrarium, but that also means monitoring both humidity and temperature (should be between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius all the time), especially if exposure to sunlight could drive temperatures up.

Looking at your plant, I’d say it’s quite happy and with a bit more humidity the pitchers should come back soon.

Those two did in our home: