Epidendrum has strange whitish growth! help!

[miya]

Dear Community,

Can someone please help me and my epidendrum - the plant is very healthy and just sent up a new leaf and looks fine - roots look good, it's attached to a piece of wood. There is this weird white bulb of what appears to be some sort of fungus on the root - can someone please tell me what this is and if i need to kill it with anti-fungus? there are two clumps of this growth.

[Tobi]

Hi Miya,
If you could post a picture of the mount and the white clump that would be
very helpful for us to identify your problem. Also is it outside or inside? Please
update your profile because that would also help us based on your location
Thanks

[miya]

thank you so much for your response - i am in new york city - the plants are indoors. the growth looks like a mushroom that grows on trees - it is in a little nook on the bark where my plant is attached to - the growth is on top of one of the roots, but not near the leaves of my plant. I'm trying to attache 2 photos of it but i'm having troubles uploading my jpegs - i will try again.
Thank you again and again!

[miya]

Hello,

Here are some photos of the weird white growth on the bark of my epidendrum - it's growing right over one of the roots and looks a lot like a mushroom/fungus which sometimes grows on trees - can anyone tell me if it is hurting my epidendrum and also how i can get rid of it?

Thank you so much,

miya

[Tobi]

Miya,
Is it possible to get a closer view of the white stuff? I can't really make
out what it resembles that far away. Is it powdery, fiberous or brittle?

[miya]

Hi,

Thanks so much for the feedback, here are a couple other images, i'm sorry I can't seem to get the camera to focus in closely - it really resembles a fungus/mushroom - it looks very dense and solid with a brown edge and lumpy surface...
It's quite disgusting, actually.

Anyway, thank you!

miya

[kmarch]

Having grew up and regularly played in and explored the woods, this looks very much like a puffy kind of fungus I'd see growing on rotting wood, especially bark except that the stuff I saw wasn't white, it was more of a caramel colour.

I don't know much about fungi but it's probably safe to say it is some kind of wood fungus. I would be suprised if it caused any harm. If you find it disagreeable you could always scrape it off and spray the whole mount with some fungicide that is safe for orchids.

[Tobi]

Originally Posted by kmarch

Having grew up and regularly played in and explored the woods, this looks very much like a puffy kind of fungus I'd see growing on rotting wood, especially bark except that the stuff I saw wasn't white, it was more of a caramel colour.

If you look around the edges, it is a caramel color. I have seen these as
well with a little white in the center. Probably a tree bark fungus. I would
also remove it and spray.

[jbigio]

I would scrape it off and then treat the log and plant with a fungicide as well

[miya]

Well, I managed to scrape most of the fungus off, but noticed that there were 3-4 other little clumps of it, so I did carefully remove the plant from the tree and transplanted it into a different container - I didn't have a good piece of bark and so now it's in a wooden basket with moss. Hopefully it will be ok, I felt badly having to detach the roots, but I managed to do so without breaking them off.

Thank you so much again for the great advice - it looks like that bark was in pretty bad shape - I'll monitor the epidendrum to make sure the fungus doesn't come back - I did spray it just in case.

Hopefully the plant will be able to adjust to the basket - there is a brand new leaf coming in from a couple of weeks ago and I'm hoping it will be fine.

Thank you so much!!