| You can do what I am doing and grow 3 times as many orchids in the same space, since most of the space is taken up by the oversided pots needed to allow three years growth. SO:
1. Always divided immediately when a plant gets big enough, and give away, sell, or trade the extra pieces. If you give them to friends, you have a source of replacement down the line should something happen to your plant.
2. Grow in my mix. It gets replaced every year so you only have to leave room for 1 years growth, and sometimes not even that. It is 3 parts small perlite to 2 parts coursely sifted Canadian peat. I also add a 1/4 cup gypsum and 5/8 cup (exact best amount TBD) of pelletize dolomitic limestone (E.B.Stone) per 1/2 cuft.
The advantages are:
a. The mix can be hosed out of the roots with no damage to them. So, unless you are going to divide a plant with a very badly intertwined root system, the plant can be repotted anytime since the plant won't know it has been repotted.
b. The mix, when pressed very well into the pot and between the roots by nudging the roots aside in spots to allow pushing the mix in, will wick the moisture thruout the mix causing uniform drying and making it easy to know when the plant is dry and needs watering. Many plants will suck this mix dry in a very short time.
c. Requires less water to saturate the mix. Great for fetilizing with less solution, for those buying water or collecting rain water, and for using systemics as a drench, tho I have had very poor results with systemics lately. Seems the bugs are getting resistant to the really good systemics.
The mix is bush snail proof. You can just laugh with delight when you see one of these roaming around, because that is all he can do. He can't get into the pot to eat the roots.
d. It is cheap, cheapest mix I have ever used by far.
e. Skewers for testing the mix for wetness work really well because of the intimate contact of the skewer with the mix. However, I find that the skewer needs to bleached (10% bleach) every so often because the fungi really like the wood of the skewer, but the fungi are growing in the wood of the skewer, not the mix.
Downsides:
1. Repotting more often, tho it is extremely easy.
2. Backbulbs are very small, like 1 or 2 pseudobulbs at a time, not the prefered 3.
If you are going to try my mix, I recommend a PH meter to check on the effectiveness of the limestone. Without the limestone, the mix can get pretty acid depending on the variety of peat you get. You want the mix to be 5.5 to 6.5.
Cynthia  |