repotted in LECA...failing fast

[jenilee]

Hi everyone!

I'm new to the OB...well new to it all actually. I've always loved orchids and had them all around my home and office but never been able to keep them well for long. My birthday came in Oct and my wonderful husband got me the Orchid of the Month club from somewhere in Hawaii....A wonderful gift! One that I'd like not to kill as my thanks! therefore I need to learn as fast as possible! So here's my situation:

I have three Phals from Home Depot that I had in the house before my birthday...they kept their blooms for a couple months and seemed fine. After they all dropped I gave it a couple months to make sure they weren't planning on blooming again and when they didn't I cut my flower spikes all the way down (was that a mistake?) After cutting the spikes back I found a hydroponic site and decided to give that a try since I kept having terrible gnat problems around my orchids. I soaked the Leca pebbles overnight in tap water and a capful of KLN and repotted all three Phals in the morning. All of them had alot of root rot, which I've heard is common in Home Depot orchids and their subpar potting material. Phal one is doing fine, it got to keep three or four healthy roots...no new growth but it's still stable and happy.

The second, which had begun to grow a new leaf, however lost all roots but one...I hope I wasn't too mean to it but there were just no non-mushy, lifeless roots to save! I repotted it in the leca fairly deep to help stablize it...a couple days after repotting, it started drooping all of it's leaves and looking really sad. The hydrophonics guy told me to let it dry out and be stingy with the watering. It's been about three weeks now and I still have droppy leaves so I pulled him out of the pot (I know I shouldn't have I just couldn't help it...I needed to see if he had any new roots coming along)...none of course and I noticed that it had white fluffy mold like spots on the base of it and the roots. Can I save him???

The third one was actually growing a little keiki at the base of it, right next to the old spike. So I cut the spike all the way back to give him some room to grow....in repotting, he got to keep two heathy roots but almost instantly (the next day) my new keiki was looking disappointed...starting to get wrinkly AND growing that same mold looking stuff. I gave it a week and he just kept getting worse and eventually shriveled up...Is he gone? Where did I go wrong?

To top it off I have two new orchids from my "of the month" club and I don't know what to do with them. One, a dendrobium, is looking alright...fully bloomed and semi healthy but one of the flower spikes (or bulbs, not sure what it's called on a dendrobium) lost a couple leaves, they turned yellow and I pulled them off. Should I have done that? Should I use the Leca when it comes time to repot these, or is that causing my problems?

Please help, I don't want to kill my beautiful birthday presents!!! I would love to have a home full of healthy happy orchids that keep reblooming year after year!

Facts:
I live in the midwest so huge temperature swing but the house is fairly stable in temp. Not much humidity though.
They get lots of indirect light because we have wall to wall windows.
I water with tap water.
I talk to them all the time (some people say it helps!!!) I even named them!

[trdyl]

Hi Jenilee!

Welcome to OB!

Repotting them was a good move on your part. Since you put them in LECA you will not have to worry about the medium rotting. Are you using the LECA as a standard medium or are you using the semi-hydroponics method, commonly refered to as S/H around here?

[jenilee]

Originally Posted by trdyl

Hi Jenilee!

Welcome to OB!

Repotting them was a good move on your part. Since you put them in LECA you will not have to worry about the medium rotting. Are you using the LECA as a standard medium or are you using the semi-hydroponics method, commonly refered to as S/H around here?

if by "standard medium" you mean just LECA pebbles then yes ....I repotted them in all LECA pebbles, should I have put something else in there? I just did what the instructions said...

[trdyl]

No, that is not what I mean. Does their pot have holes on the bottom or are they about an inch up the side and not on the bottom at all?

[RosieC]

OK, yours is a long post so I'm going to try and work down it and address your questions in sequence as I read so you are likely to get lots of posts following. That way I don't forget anything as I read down.

First off, cutting the flower spike all the way down is not a problem. I do that a lot of the time. Some people like to leave them until they go brown (because it may produce a couple more flowers later), others like to cut them as soon as they finish. I do a mixture depending on the plant and whether the spikes will get in the way where I want to keep it.

I often think that a full new blooming, on a new spike is nicer than a few extra flowers on an old spike, which is one reason I often cut them.

It really doesn't matter though and Phals will do just fine either way.

[camille1585]

You say you're using leca, but are they simply potted in leca, or are you doing (semi)hydroponics with them? It's not clear from your post. Once we know that, it'll be easier to ask specific questions to pinpoint the problem.

[RosieC]

If the roots on the second Phal were mushy then there was no point leaving them and you did the right thing to remove them.

Leaving them would just mean they decayed in the medium and would cause problems being there.

[RosieC]

Camille asks a good question, I'm not clear on that. You said you were keeping it pretty dry though, so that sounds like it's not S/H.

Lecca can be used to grow Orchids in at least two ways. One is like a standard medium (bark or moss etc) where you water it normally and don't leave it standing in water.

In S/H you actually leave it standing in water. I believe Semi-hydroponics is a variant of the 'Drench and Drain' technique of hydroponics, but rather than an expensive system it is done with single pots and no special equipment.

For more information on that see this link to Ray's site. Semi-hydroponics Orchid Plants T5 Lighting
and our own S/H discussion area. Semi-Hydroponic Culture - Orchid Board - Most Complete Orchid Forum on the web !.

One thing with moving to S/H is that plants will often loose all roots as a result, so it's best done when new root growth is occuring so you have quick replacement of the roots that die.

[RosieC]

The answer to whether this second plant is salvagable is 'maybe'. I had one that had similar problems after I had grown it well for several years then repotted in bad medium, and I rescued it.

Another couple which I bought in sodden moss I couldn't save.

The white mold is not good. The one I saved I kept completely bare root when it got to a similar point. I soaked the remaining root stubs every morning (if they looked dry) and then just left it hanging loose over a pot. It DID get very dehydrated and limp, but the root stubs very slowly grew. By keeping the roots bare I was able to water it regularly while also knowing that it dried out completely during the day. This stopped the growth of anything like mould.

I didn't know about S/H at the time, or I would have tried that once it got growing again, what I actually did is pot it back up in a very tiny pot of bark, the smallest I could fit the remaining roots into (that first pot was about 3" and no more).

However once you have very few roots and mould it could be difficult to save, but if it were mine I would still try.

[RosieC]

I would treat the third the same way as the second. I don't know about the keiki but if it's dried up that part probably won't survive.