View Single Post
  #5 (permalink)  
Old 07-13-2007, 06:03 AM
Ray's Avatar
Ray Ray is offline
Senior Member
 

Join Date: May 2005
Location: Southeastern PA
Posts: 1,887
Default

S/H is just a different way to anchor the plant and provide water and nutrients to it.

Concerning whether there is a meaningful difference when having high- or low humidity, I would tend to say "no", but I should qualify that to say no more so (or even less) than with other growing techniques.

Let's go to the opposite extreme as a comparison - mounting on cork bark. In that case, higher humidity causes the plants to dry out a lot slower - giving it more time to absorb water and nutrients - and there is less driving force to extract the moisture from within the plant, so it's a definite "plus".

Moving the plant to a potted environment does nothing to affect the desiccating driving force, so again, higher humidity is a plus, but the humidity becomes far less of an issue when it comes to absorbing moisture and food through the roots. Yeah, it slows the drying rate of the medium, but compared to mounted, the difference in medium drying rate in dry-or humid environments is not significantly different - the plant is probably affected less by a change from a two- to four day drying time than it is from a 15 minutes versus several hours.

Now, if you move to s/h culture, where the medium doesn't ever dry out, where's the impact of humidity?
__________________
Ray Barkalow
First Rays Orchids
www.firstrays.com
Reply With Quote