rootless but recovering
 

hi helpful people

so we've got a phal that was doing great for a couple years for my SO. this last fall we almost lost it cause of total root rot from not being repotted (we are still learning about nursery bought orchids). anyways, my girl chopped all the dead stuff (everything) and it has a long, brown, old stock. she put it into an airy bed of most moss and it's getting a new crop of roots! she saved it looks like!!

so now i'm wanting to give a go on one plant with s/h. i was thinking this might be a good candidate since it's growning a completely new crop of roots.

but then i was thinking that maybe constantly moist medium might rot out the brown stem that's buried in the leca.

thoughts? should i not do it with this guy? instead choose a healthier, more established plant? will the old crown/stem produce new roots in the medium?? all we see now are new roots coming from the base of the leaves.
for reference i have done this method with other plants to good success, i just didn't know it had a name and was prevalent in the orchid community! so i'm not so concerned with the s/h method, more how a brown/deadish stalk of an orchid will react in nearly constantly moist medium.

p.s.- i'll try to upload a pic when i get to my girls place later on. thanks for any input!

Imgur: The magic of the Internet

well, I did it real quick anyway 😂 it wasn’t much of a change. sorry I didn’t get pics of the before and old stalk. oh well, perhaps in a year we can either see a success or failure

As orchid roots grow, they configure themselves on a cellular level to function optimally in that environment. Once they have grown, they cannot change.

When you moved the plant to semi-hydroponics, you changed the environment, immediately making the roots suboptimal, and they have failed.

The best time to move any plant into S/H culture is just when new roots are emerging from the base of the plant, as they will grow in a fashion that IS optimal for the conditions.

As sorry as that plant looks - desiccated and rootless - it really does not have much of a chance of surviving.

hi ray,

thanks for the response. well, it wasn’t s/h that killed off the roots. that was the fault of the really badly decomposed medium it was in for a couple years. my girl got this one a few years ago and didn’t know to repot in new medium. it flowered last over a year ago and then very quickly we noticed it was looking quite bad. that’s when we pulled it and realized it had no roots left. the pics I put up last night were from last night. we had put it into a bed of moss for a week, and those new little nubbins have grown, so while I was with you to just pitch the plant, she is determined to try and save it! so I can’t blame semi hydro for this loss, I blame our lack of knowledge. but now we know some things to watch out for.

edit to say that there are more new roots starting, just like the 2 tiny starts you can see in pic 2. The other ones are just in the leca now. that was why I sort of want to do this quick if I was gonna, just so any new roots would be adapted to this media. we’ll see how it goes!