My experience with sphagnum moss

[Paul]

Originally Posted by bil

Absolutely. You can grow orchids in almost anything provided the watering matches the media.

For that matter, there are a number of epiphytes for which media can be skipped entirely. Had a catt I divided a couple years back with the intent to sell off or trade the division. I almost always mail my chids out bare root. Since I had not planned on having it around for long, I simply set the division in a large plastic cache pot I had laying around. Well as life would have it, as one thing led to another, it wound up being around a year later that I finally found a home for it. During that interim, I never did pot it up. Just poured water into the cache pot to soak the roots once or twice a week for around 20minutes then dumped the water out. The division grew a couple new pbs during that time and bloomed for me. (And this was in an apartment in the Great White North with my winter RH usually around 20%.)

Originally Posted by Raqsharqi

I have found, though, that I can't pack the mix in as tightly as they seem to.

I know many folks who really pack their media in tight -- to the point where they could grab the recently potted plant, lift it up by the leaves/pbs, and have the entire mass -- plastic pot and all -- rise up with the plant. Packing that tight has never worked for me.