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Orchid
orchidnick

Phaelanosis experiment

11 years ago

It's been over a year so here is the summation. I cannot find the original blurb, if some one can find it please bump it up.


Only one died. The one I put in HD insulation stuff immediately died.
Must have had some bad stuff in it. All of the rest are doing well
to a varying degree. Most are in bloom or spike. The one disapointment
is that the one in horse manure is not in spike, I would have loved to
put it in my clean-freak daughter's home. The one in water has small
leaves but is making new ones and has a spike. The bare-root ones are
doing as well as the others.

The one left alone and is still in
the original media, tightly packed sphagnum moss, has the largest new
leaves. It is doing best of all. Could be that the method is the best
or a reflection of the fact that it is the only plant which was not
ripped out of it's growing environment and asked to start all over in a
new method.

I eventually divided them into 3 groups related to
watering. 1) Watered sparingly once a week. 2) Soaked fully once a
week. 3) Watered daily or every 2 days depending on temperature. I
think you can put them in anything you like, as long as you water them
correctly for your media, they'll do well.

I am still getting
new ones regularly and my chosen method is a fairly large pot full of
Hygroton pellets. Can water it as often as is convenient, never needs
repotting and the plants are accepting it as well as anything else. The
pot is large enough for many years of growth. The reason I'm not going
to leave them in the original tightly packed moss, even though it works
extremely well, is that it needs attention. Needs to be watered
lightly and needs to be re-potted. I prefer to hose everything down in a
downpour of water and not having to re-pot. At the rate I'm getting
new ones I can easily see eventually having 100, I don't want to have
to give them the time they would need if they stayed in the tightly
packed moss. For a collection with a small number of plants the tightly
packed moss would be my choice.

Now that the point has been
made, I'm going to remove the ones in the weird materials, like crushed
glass and put them all in hygroton so they are all in the same watering
situation. Bare-root or pot full of hygroton. That's going to happen
when I find time. Hillary may be contemplating her second term by then.

The
only problem is that they are beginning to occupy too much bench
space. I'm going to rig the pots so I can hang them all on my chicken
wire wall thus clearing the bench. I think a simple 'S' shaped hook
near the top of the pot should do it. A wall covered with Phaelis in
bloom should become an eye pleasing feature of the greenhouse and new
ones can be added without occupying bench space needed for 'real'
orchids.

The only uprising thing to me was how well the one in
the tightly packed moss did. Since everyone kills them when they leave
them in that, I sort of expected other methods to work better. When you
think about it though, the people that know most about these plants
(George Vasquez from Zuma Canyon etc) choose that method so it really
should be no surprise as they would obviously choose the best.

Nick


Comments (7)

  • 11 years ago

    Thanks for updating! I was curious as to what the result was. I have also recently become a rest home for donation Phals and have been diligently repotting them out of packed moss into bark/charcoal/perlite/hydro-clay stuff (from IKEA of all places!) but now you're telling me to leave them in moss? Hmmmmm. I need to think about that one.

    Any photos of the results?

  • 11 years ago

    Now for the update Nick. I wondered how the experiment went. I am surprised at the results with the one in tight moss. I too take mine out of the moss and plant in bark with a little moss mixed in. Time to rethink.


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  • 11 years ago

    I'm not trying to encourager people to leave them in moss. You may have noticed that I'm not leaving mine in moss but not because it is not a good way to grow them but because it does not suit the environment in my greenhouse. If you can treat them properly the tightly packed moss seems to work real well. Most people cant do that and kill them.

    Many of my plants end up in my daughter's homes for a month or two. I doubt that they would treat them properly if they were in tight moss. In the hygroton they can't do too much damage and the plants come back to me in good shape.

    Nick


  • 11 years ago

    I've always removed any tight sphag especially in Florida. Now in the middle of repoting too many orchids I noticed a Cymidiella Rhodochila, which I bought last May (year ago) was in tight sphag. I hadn't realized it and didn't repot it when I got it from the Redlands show last year. It was in a small pot and growing well. When I removed it from the pot a few days ago, it was so tightly packed I could only remove a small amount of moss without damaging the new, beautiful roots. I decided to stick it in a basket of wood bark without removing the sphag.

    I was equally surprised to find such nice roots and the plant doing so well. Actually, I was shocked when I saw how packed it was in sphag and it was a difficult decision to not pull the sphag out. It had beautiful healthy roots.

    I've gotten Phals over the years from Normans. I was always upset with their method of packing the Phals in sphag. I know they had their reasons but I just thought it was dumb.

    I am a bad waterer and do add sphag to whatever I mix to help retain moisture in the mix. Never understood the concept of the packed sphag.

    Thanks for the updates, I thought the broken glass was intriguing!

    Jane


  • 11 years ago

    George Vasquez from Zuma Canyon Orchids talked to us about Phaeli culture and he showed us the tight moss routine without discussing the alternative. He also did not explain why it works, just showed us how to do it. He is taking care of literally thousand s of these plants at any given time. Growing them like this gives him the luxury of using very little water. Waters them once a week , not very much, whatever that means. Also does not fertilize that much.

    He claims that Sphagnum Moss treated that way, tightly packed, watered sparingly once a week and fertilized lightly once every 2 to 3 weeks will last 5 years or more. Loosely packed moss soaked frequently will turn nasty within a year. At this point I am convinced that this works for Phaelies, I have seen some of his plants in 5 year old moss that looks like new. If it also works for everything else, Dracs, Pleuros and Bulbos is another question.

    Andy packs them tightly in moss but he also waters the daylight out of them. His place is always dripping with humidity and frequent watering. That seems to be a paradox. The only way to find out would be to create a corner where water is only given once a week and sparingly at that and place some plants there to see how they do. I have such a 'dry' corner in the warm house where I had the Phaelie in tight moss that has done so well. I think I will give it some friends, and see how other genera do with this. In the cold house, every thing gets soaked at least every 2 to 3 days. To find out, I need to create a dry corner and place test plants there. A Drac, Masdie and Pleuro for starters. This would fundamentally change how I take care of plants and significantly reduce my water bill.

    It's amazing how I could have watched plants form Norman's, Zuma Canyon etc in tightly packed moss over the years and not have accepted the fact that this is the best way to do it. Instead I always got them out of there as soon as possible and put them in something else. I'm a heavy handed waterer and that does not work with them. Maybe after all these years it is time to change. Jane, how much water did your Cymbidiella get?

    Nick


  • 11 years ago

    Thanks for the update Nick.

    Bob


  • 11 years ago

    It goes to show the old wisdom that almost nothing is a bad potting media for these plants, if you can adjust environment and/or watering schedule to compensate. I also found phals to do best with a relatively water retentive media.


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