How to place growing medium on seedlings.

[FLaCo]

Guys I am sorry for bombarding this forum with redundancy. The thing is that I am trying to put all my ducks in a row before I de-flask.

Today I heading to my local gardening retailer and bought some Miracle-gro perlite and Shultz orchid bark. I plan to do a 2-1 ratio of bark to perlite for my seedlings mix. After that I am soaking the mixing a Physan solution to take care of any contamination. I plan to buy a Jiffy seedlings starter greenhouse...removing the peat pots that come with it and spreading my mix onto the tray (after I disinfect it of course). I will then dimple the bark mix and place a seedling in each dimple. I will adjust surface area accordingly and will give each seedling a decent amount of space between each other.

Should I spread the mix and just dimple? or do I plant in 2 in net pots?

Any, any! insight would be greatly appreciated it. I am searching as I type in all over the web...I have a pretty good idea on how to...but again...this is my first time.

Thank you!

[brookn]

I know nothing about de-flasking (well I have not done it myself). Deep breath, it will come out okay, and be a great learning experience for you and the rest of us. Good luck.

[Vivienne]

I just deflasked 2 flasks last week. After searching for info, I ended up doing the following to get the seedlings in to the media.

I used an 8" x 8" seedling tray which has holes in the bottom. Poured the media in to the tray and then placed the filled tray in to a larger tray and filled with water. The media in the smaller tray becomes a slurry where you can easily move the media around (it's basically floating). I then placed each of the seedlings at equal intervals in to the media slush and tucked the roots down using a glazed chopstick. Once all the seedlings are in the tray, lift the tray out of the water and the media settles down around the roots nicely.

I then dumped the water out of the larger tray... placed the smaller tray back in it and covered.

Sure hope that makes sense!

Note: I used the same principal to get the next flask in to 2" pots.

[FLaCo]

Ok let me see if I get this right. The water came through the holes of the smaller tray soaking the medium but not to the point where it overflowed over the smaller tray and back into the larger one, right?

The water you used...was it treated with a fungicide?

Oh, by the way, what did you use for your medium?

Thank you guys for the replies!

[Vivienne]

Correct... the smaller tray held the media just about at the top (before it spilled over to the larger tray). I used distilled water with a small dose of fungicide.

[Ellen]

What kind of orchids are you deflasking? How mature are the seedlings? How you treat them will depend to some degree on their needs. Some can be planted out individually, but others are better mounted or compotted. Generally, there is no need to treat with any sort of chemicals. For a good tutorial on general-purpose deflasking, go to the "informational pages" on Troy Meyers' website (Meyers Conservatory).