To get good advice you need to show your climate zone or state on your my page details.

Lycaste are not widely grown around here because of space considerations and I am talking about outdoors all year culture.

One guy has them growing in a shade-house all year on a shelf up off the ground so that the plant can get gentle air movement. Shade-cloth is at least 50%.

Temperatures.
Summer Average Low 17C High 27C
Winter Average Low 7 High 17C

There are 2 groups of Lycaste. The skinnery type like it warm and moist and do not go deciduous. Bloom in the spring with multiple flushes of flowers. Cal-Orchids has beautiful hybrids of that type. Their home page at http://www.calorchid.com/ shows about 5 or 6 of them.

Then there are the more common ones of which Lycaste aromatica is a good example. They go deciduous and prefer a cooler, dryer winter. In the spring they'll flower, often before the leaves emerge. Completely different cculture. You need to know which type you have in order to properly care for them

Nick

I am in Peru, in Lima the coast and have a very similar weather like Sidney as you mentioned. Maybe in summer itme we go up to 30 C as max, and winter maybe 10 minimun, and it is very humid.

Sorry i didnt mentioned Nick, the variety of Lycaste is Macrophylla, a local specie.

When I got them they had root rot, so I treated them and some bulbs separated, the biggest bulbs are the one that are not flowering, while the medium size already flowered from the newest bulb. They are potted in plastic 1 ltr container with spagnum on top and fern chips in the middle and styrofoam at the bottom.

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~tomnz/anguloa/macrophyllae.htm

Everything you ever wanted to know about the macrophylla complex. I have never grown it but it is a great-great-grand parent to the hybrids that are on CalOrchid's page.

Nick

Thanks.