Oh yeah, I've seen those pics before but must have missed them when I came back.
The leaves look good and healthy. Shiny/waxy looking which is good.
It looks like you have a clear inner plastic pot with an outer pot. That's good. The outer pot also looks like the sort I like with a space below where the inner pot sits. That's great to allow the medium to drain and not sit in water.
Not sure how much you know so I'm going to give you some watering tips, sorry if you already know them.
It is important to have a pot with drainage and if possible a clear pot. It looks like you have that. Let the roots go silvery before you water. Check their colour down near the bottom as well as at the top (that's why a clear pot is good). When you do water you want to get it thoroughly wet and then let it drain. Some people run water through the pot until it runs out the bottom, some people dunk it in water for 15min or so. Personally I do a bit of both, sometimes one way and sometimes the other.
If you fertilise it's best done 'weakly weekly'. On another post recently Ray had a way of calculating the strength you should use but I can't find it again now. I go by the advice on the bottle. If it advises monthly use then use it quater strength weekly, if it advises weekly use then use it as directed.
An important thing when fertilising is to flush through with clean water every 4th week. When doing this I always run water through the pot to water it rather than dunking. The aim is to rince out the salt buildup from the fertiliser. I'm not sure whether it looks like there is a white salt buildup on the surface of your bark so if you have not flushed it through at all I would do that next time you water.
The last thing (sorry I've rambled on
) is that many people like to repot as soon as they buy orchids so that you know the medium is OK. Even if you don't do that you should repot every couple of years when growing in bark and you should completely remove/replace the medium when you do it. You don't need to change pot size unless you can't easily get the roots back in the pot, the point of repotting is to replace the medium before it compacts rather than to go up a pot size as you would when repotting other types of plant.
Don't make the mistake I made of thinking 'I'm just a beginner the garden center bark will do for me'. I nearly killed my first two Phals before I realised that it was the bark I had repotted them in.
This UK based website sells good bark. I've had sucess with repotting using it.
Orchid Accessories - www.orchidaccessories.co.uk
Well that
has turned in to a long post, whoops. I hope at least some of it was helpful.
Cutting back my phal spike
Linear Mode
