Despite several months of research involving 184 cuttings and several species of plants, wewere unable to detect any beneficial effects from
SUPERthrive™ on the success rates of ourNepenthescuttings, or on the growth rate of our established Nepenthesplants. We cannot excludethe possibility that
SUPERthrive™ has subtle effects, but these were not observable in ourexperiments. This being the case, why is it that some of the finest Nepenthes horticulturists embrace
SUPERthrive™ with such gusto?
It might be that when horticulturists apply
SUPERthrive™,they do so in a way that is beneficial to their plants, and in which the presence of
SUPERthrive™is irrelevant. For example, when a grower plunges freshly made cuttings into a water bath (as inExperiment II), the harmful effects of cavitation are being abated. During the course of this experiment, we learned that a water soak encourages our cuttings to root, so water soaks with-out
SUPERthrive™ are now standard practice for us. Similarly, we learned that weekly sprinklings of water (as in Experiment III) improved the growth of our Nepenthes, whether or not
SUPERthrive™ is included in the water.
Nepenthes plants have variable growth rates, and this can confound horticultural experi-ments. For example, in the population of N.×superba, we observed a range of growth rateswhich varied by as much as a factor of 7.7 within the same experimental groups. This variabili-ty produced enormous standard deviations in our statistics. They might also fool horticulturists into thinking that a treatment method, which might have no value, is having a large effect.
