Soaking Cork-Mounted Orchid with Dilute K-Lite - Orchid Board

galguibra · #1 07-25-2024, 02:46 PM

Back again with another mount question! Since getting a tall/narrow enough collapsible bucket that'll fit my C. intermedia's cork mount without needing a crazy excess of my distilled water, I've recently started soaking it every ~1-2 days, depending on how dry it's looking and how patient I'm feeling. I also still mist it every day since it always dries out at least once even with a soak, and the orchid seems to have appreciated the increase in watering.

Initially, I was only ever soaking in distilled water and then misting with dilute ~25ppm N fertilizer a few times a day as needed, because I didn't have any fertilizer with a reasonable nutrient ratio for orchids and didn't have the time to be mixing it up fresh from components every day. Making a concentrate and diluting it to use in the spray bottle just made a lot more sense.

Recently, though, I decided to try out using K-lite—both for the lower phosphorous/potassium and the convenience of being one-part—and I was curious to know if it would make sense to add it to the soaks, or if I should stick to distilled water and only fertilize when I mist, especially since I have to water the mount multiple times a day.

I have a milligram scale at home, so I figured I could just fill the bucket up with 3L of distilled water and add 600mg of the K-Lite to hit that 25ppm N target. Would it be too much fertilizer to be both soaking and misting with nutrients on a regular basis at that concentration? Obviously the length of the soaks (what would you suggest: maybe 30min?), how long it takes for the solution to evaporate afterward (not much, unfortunately), etc would all affect how much is actually absorbed, but I mostly just wanted a sanity check on the frequency/duration/concentration.

I was also wondering about the pH of K-Lite in distilled water at those kinds of low concentrations, since I'd rather not have to use pH Up and add a bunch more potassium/alkalinity. If anyone who's used it has any thoughts about deciding to pH it or not, I'd really appreciate that too!