Help! oncidium roots with black spots...

[Shadeflower]

Hey zekey,
you will find that everyone has their own technique, spraying, dunking, watering, self watering, semi hydro etc.

There is no right or wrong.

I have been advised lots of orchids need to be grown mounted. This is not really the case

Most people pbelieve rock growing orchids need to be grown on rocks.

It is hard for me to tell you what you need to do and I don't think I shoud be the one to advise as I use extremely experimental methods at time.

Sometimes I find something that works 10x better, sometimes I do something that doesn't work.

Anyway, they are disconnected. I can't tell you why, but hoepfully the smaller one just snapped off.

You might think they are connected by a root - this is not physically possible, what will be happening is that one root has attached itself to the other root and it will seem they are connected but if they are not connected at the bulbs it is impossible for one root to grow out of a bulb and be attached to a different bulb at the same time.

So this is a problem. The backbulbs won't make it (edit: actually the backbulbs do have at least 1 healthy root so it could make it). Only the new bulb which is already smaller and weaker than the previous bulbs will be able to make it. It has some good roots and what YaON says should work if you can.

The backbulb will need to be kept humid 100% of the time. This is more important than heat. If the heat dries the bulb too much it might not like it.

But cold + high humidity promoted funga infections. Weak bulbs are prone to getting infected.

So those are the challenges. you need to maintain high humidity, have good airflow (without dropping humdity, so just gentle circulating) and some artificial light as winter is approaching.

How you pot it is up to you. Spraying is ok but watering this one is fine too as it has good roots.

We can't tell you exactly how to pot it as it depends on your experience and how you like to water.

A backbulb like this is most prone to get a fungal infection because you end up spraying it too much..

It is better to water the roots and let the substrate dry till it is nearly dry (not completely) then rewater without making it too soggy.

Hope you can work it out. It's not hard, you just have to maintain a good wet/dry watering cycle without letting it get too wet or too dry at any time, maintaining that is the challenge.