Cattleya mossiae – When divide it?

[Intruder]

Dear All;
Cattleya mossiae flowered in May (this is the mayo flower of Venezuela). This year my cattleya mossiae has not flowered because there pseudobulbs were too small and they have produced no shields. This situation has arisen after a division made end august 2005, the obtained divisions (2) have produced 2 news pseudo bulbs for each old pseudobulb but there maturity has never been fully reached. Now I see that many of the new growths have started on these. What may I do, re-divide it now???
Many thanks in advance for your help and subgestions.

[Ross]

General rule-of-thumb is to keep 3-4 pseudobulbs in each division. Thus, you would want (theoretically) 7 pseudobulbs total before dividing. I personally don't divide unless plant is growing out of pot.

[nancy]

Perhaps you can learn from my mistakes. When I first started growing orchids, I read *everything*, and of course, found the references to dividing Cattleya-types to have 3 p'bulbs per division. My novice mind translated this to mean "when you have 6 pseudobulbs, divide the plant."
Which I did, religiously. So....after 2-3 years, I had about 8 pots of the same cattleya, and had never had even one stinkin' flower.
Now, I go with Ross - when a plant tries to invade the pot of its neighbor, I divide. Eventually.
Except dendrobiums, which seem just totally happy growing almost forever in a seedling-size pot.
Good growing - Nancy
p.s. I also think that when you divide, unless it is literally a big honking monster plant, made into big divisions, it may take a year or more to get flower-ready again.

[Charles]

Don't ask me. I really stink at Cattleyas. I heard they need an extended dry period before they will bloom. This seems unnatural to me, thus I really stink at Catts.

[OrchidTess]

You reference small pseudobulbs....do you fertilize regularly? Your plant(s) seems underfed.
Ross and Nancy are right, don't divide until the plant has out grown it's pot. There is a good article on the Home Page of this board The Cattleya "Cut-Divide-and-Conquer" Multiplier Method it's fantastic advice.

[ScottMcC]

I divided a big monster hybrid catt of mine into two plants about a year ago. Each resultant plant still had about 10-12 pseudobulbs, and each plant had 3-4 new growths at the time I divided it. I fed both halves the same fertilizer, I kept them side by side, and lo and behold, one of them flowered this year off big thick pseudobulbs, and the other didn't flower and produced only small pseudobulbs.

So what happened? My theory is that there's two halves to a cattleya division--a front and a back cut. The front is the primary growing direction of the plant, and is comprised of younger, more vigorous pseudobulbs, and so it likes being divided, because it's just shed the "dead weight" of the old, declining bulbs. The back cut is the opposite though, because it's primarily made of declining bulbs, and has lost the vigorous, younger bulbs that were sustaining it. As a result, the back cut needs more time to recover before flowering again. Now of course, I'm hardly an expert, so I could be way off base here--experts, any opinions?

Anyway, this years pseudobulbs on my back cut are nice and fat, so hopefully next spring I'll be treated to blooms. And for the original poster, I'm with Ross--don't divide unless you have to! If it still fits in a pot, it's been divided enough (or you should get a bigger pot).

[justatypn]

Scott I have to agree in theory, this makes a lot of sense. Unlike monopodial the sympodial orchids are much like this. I found this to happen with a dendrobium that I repotted last year, talk about having an angry departure on the parent verses the younger psuedo. Until otherwise proven the theory, my Dendrobium Rojo pouted for so long, guess it's like when your kids leave the nest