Tag: growing

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What kinds of pots to use for growing orchids?

There are three main types of pots, and have different characteristics that you’ll want to keep in mind.  All three types come in a range of sizes and variations, but the key idea is that they affect water evaporation from the media differently.

The three kinds are:

1) Plastic

2) Wooden/air slat and net pots

3) Terra cotta (unglazed)

All orchid pots need to have drainage.  Many decorative vases do not have any drainage holes, and growing orchids in containers with no drainage is not something I’d recommend (although I’ve seen it done before, usually by some clueless grower, and always leave puzzled as to why it worked for that plant).  You can use a decorative vase if you keep the orchid in a plastic pot that fits inside the vase.  When you need to water, just take the plant in the plastic pot out.

PLASTIC POTS

Plastic pots are cheap, abundant, and reusable.  They also work very well.  Just select the right size pot for your plant’s root system (not too big, and not too small), fill it with your plant and moistened media (this tip is for new growers who may not know to do this).

WOODEN AIR SLAT POTS AND PLASTIC NET POTS

These aren’t really pots so much as open-air receptacles for holding orchids.  You use this kind of container when you want a lot of air movement around your orchid and extra aeration at the root zone.  Many growers prefer to use sphagnum moss in these slat/net pots, but if you use a fine mesh liner, you can use bark as well. 

The thing to keep in mind is that the media will dry out much more quickly in these slat/net pots, and that’s kind of the point.  Growing in pots like this, especially hung outside under shade, means you’ll get lots of air movement around the plant and the media, and hence plenty of evaporation.  This high rate of evaporation means you can water more frequently, and if the plant is growing well, you can get some very robust growth for orchids suited to this style of growing (not all are).  Generally epiphytic orchids will do very well grown like this.

UNGLAZED TERRA COTTA POTS

Many skilled orchid growers prefer using unglazed terra cotta pots.  They’re cheap and easy to find.  Unglazed terra cotta has one tremendous advantage over the other pot types: the micropores in the terra cotta wick away moisture from the media AND reduce the temperature at the root zone.  With good air movement around the pot, you’ll have essentially created an evaporative cooler for your orchid!  

While many orchids don’t really care too much about what kinds of pots their grown in, one of the best Masdevallia growers I’ve known grew all of his Masdies and Pleurothallids in unglazed terra cotta.  He used New Zealand Sphagnum Moss (often with a Styrofoam peanut(s) at the bottom of the pot), and the plants grew to perfection.  Of course, his greenhouse conditions also contributed mightily to his success, but a home grower can do well with unglazed terra cotta, too.

If you grow in an area that is generally known to be too hot to grow, say, Masdevallias, growing in terra cotta might just work.  I read years ago of some growers in Louisiana who did just this, growing Masdevallias mounted to terra cotta shingles.  Certainly worth trying if you live in a hot area but have become obsessed with some cool-growing orchids!

One key concept here: the more evaporative your pot, the more often you can water. The more often you can water (without keeping the roots overly wet), the faster the plant can take up nutrients and grow.  If you had a plant growing in media/pot/conditions that you could water in the morning, and would dry out to mild dampness by evening, AND the plant was receiving enough light to photosynthesize at an optimal rate, in theory you could water every day and get some amazing growth.  This is an experiment I’ve had in mind for quite some time, and once we set it up and get some long-term results, we’ll definitely post it on our website (orchidinsanity.com).

I suspect that many orchids in the jungle naturally experience this kind of near-optimal growth conditions – aerated roots, high humidity, the right amount of light, and daily rain, picking up plenty of detritus, dead bugs, and bird poop for nutrition.

Anyways, all that being said, plastic pots work just fine.  If you’re a new grower, start with regular plastic pots.  While it is tempting to try the other types of pots with all this talk of evaporative cooling and optimal growth, the other kinds of pots have too many variables to think about for an inexperienced grower, and when you’re starting out, you want to reduce the number of variables to a bare minimum so that you can develop a baseline of experience for what works for you.  I wish I had done this when I first started out, but I was too excited about optimizing conditions when, really, I hardly had any experience.  It was a very costly mistake, and a lot of orchid paid with their lives because of my impatience and ineptitude.

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Should you repot your new orchid right away?

Many people advise repotting orchids you’ve gotten right away.  These growers fall into two camps:

1) Experienced growers who actually know what they’re talking about, but don’t realize they have plenty of newbies in their audience

2) People who don’t know what they’re talking about

Obviously, ignore (2) whenever possible.  For a few tips on how to detect these well-meaning but dangerous-to-your-orchids people, see this post: Questions To Ask About Any Orchid Advice You’re Given [coming soon].

Now when an experienced grower gives you advice, they’re telling you what works for them, because they already know how orchids fare in their own growing conditions AND (this next part is very important) they know what to expect.

When an experienced grower repots their plants immediately, they’re doing it because they have a media/growing mix they prefer BECAUSE they understand how their media performs with water retention and their watering frequency.  Just as importantly, they also know how long it will take for newly-acquired plants to respond (e.g., grow new roots) and hence have the proper expectations.  These experienced guys tell you what they know works for them, but they don’t always keep in mind that new growers lack the experience to place this advice in the proper context.

New orchid growers have usually grown other houseplants, and generally repotting a houseplant soon after you get it is the right move.  What these new orchid growers don’t know is how slow orchids root and grow relative to houseplants.  They (and even some experienced growers) also don’t know that orchids make roots adapted to the media they’re growing in.  Switching from, say, a coconut husk medium over to sphagnum moss may be exactly the right thing to do for long-term health of a plant, but the newbie grower is usually expecting something to happen fast, like in a few days.  After all, this is what happens with other house and garden plants, right?   Unfortunately, for orchids: wrong.  New roots might take weeks, or even several months to start to grow.  It depends on the type of plant, the media, the humidity level, etc.  

If you’re just getting into orchids, DO NOT REPOT your plants right away.  You want to give your plants time to adjust to their new home — the light, the temperature, the humidity (hopefully high), the water quality, and watering frequency.  Re-potting right away compounds the stress faced by your plants after they’ve arrived.  In fact, re-potting into a new, DIFFERENT media than your plant was growing in can be quite stressful for some orchids.  If the media is good stuff, and the growing conditions are good, the plant will be just fine in the long run (do expect a few dropped leaves).  If you’re new to orchids, the conditions you’re providing newly-arrived plants may not be great yet; that’s to be expected because, after all, you’re still learning.  But you can lighten the load on your new plants by not repotting for six months or even longer.  A healthy plant will NOT be harmed by not repotting.  (If the plant is not healthy, repotting is one of the best things to do, but hopefully as a new grower you’re not trying to recover stressed orchids; that’s something you do when you’re an advanced grower.)

Not repotting your new orchid right away will give you a few months to see how it does in your growing conditions, and hopefully give you time to get more educated about the types of media out there, and how to create great growing conditions for your orchids.  And most importantly, it gives you the time to acquire the proper expectations for orchids.  They’re NOT garden/vegetable/typical house plants, and they do things on their own time scale.  Repotting into new potting media, and expecting a fast and obvious response from the plant, is absolutely the wrong expectation to have and will lead to frustration for the grower and stress for the plant…or even worse if the grower falls into the orchid newbie vicious cycle of errors.  

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Why so much orchid growing info on the web is unreliable, bad, or wrong

Why is so much orchid info online bad, wrong, or low quality?

Because many people simply don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to orchids (and much else).  Do you remember those kids in school who just had to blare out whatever they thought on any subject?  They always had an opinion or half-baked thought.  They may genuinely have believed they were being helpful, but mostly they lacked a bit of self-awareness.  You may even have someone like that in your family or workplace who simply MUST give you advice (often bad) and opinions (often silly) on every situation in your life.

Here’s my hypothesis: a huge amount of stuff posted as comments on the web comes from people like this.  They don’t know what they’re talking about, but they feel a need to tell you anyways.

A treasure trove garbage dump of bad orchid advice is the answers given to questions asked on our Amazon listing for Dendrobium kingianum, our top-selling orchid.  Any customer can ask a question, and anyone can chime in with an answer. I recently perused what people asked about this orchid we offer, and the “helpful” answers provided by self-declared experts. There’s so much mis-information, ignorance masquerading as deep knowledge, and even confessions of “I don’t know” by people who are trying to answer the question (well, if you don’t know, why bother uploading an answer?).

The following response takes the cake:

Q: How do you grow this plant?

You’ll want to keep the temperature above 55, but below 85 with the highest humidity. [WRONG, WRONG, and HALF-WRONG. You want to let this plant get down into the 40s F (or even 30s F) during winter so that it will set the flower buds for blooming in spring. This plant can easily handle temps into 100+ F; they certainly do at my nursery and in their native Australia. High humidity is good, but not critical for this species.]

Bright light, but out of direct sunlight is best–even a strong halogen bulb will burn the leaves. [OK, not completely off-base re direct sun, but not so true re halogen bulb . You want to get a recalcitrant kingianum to bloom?  Give it DIRECT SUN even if the leaves burn.  This but of advice was given to me by an expert grower in Australia, where this species comes from]

Repot it as soon as it comes in, [SUPER WRONG!] mine had a solid ball of sphagnum in the roots which will rot and cause damage to your roots. [SUPER DUPER WRONG- sphagnum moss is the BEST medium for this kind of orchid! Wow.]

Don’t repot in a huge container, orchids like to wrap their roots in a ball, so choose a pot only slightly larger to promote growth. [BINGO, FINALLY, A REASONABLY CORRECT ANSWER!]

Repot once every two years, you’ll notice the bark chips start to break down–thats when to repot. [NOT REALLY NEEDED FOR THIS SPECIES] Many people avoid terracotta because the roots will bind to the edge, but I like that it helps wick away excess water in the bottom of the pot. [HEY, NOT BAD…] Edging with a butter knife will get the roots to come back out with little damage.

Water it with about 1/4 cup of water around once per week. [UNBELIEVABLY WRONG! JUST USE A HOSE AND DON’T BE SHY WITH WATER. I MEAN, DOES ANYONE GO AROUND POURING A SMALL QUARTER CUP OF WATER ON ORCHIDS IN THE JUNGLE? WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS!]

Keep it in well draining soil (I use mostly bark chips, but you’ll need to figure out what is best for your climate) Starting in November, you’ll want to water it half as often until it grows a flower spike. [HALF WRONG.  LET IT DRY OUT COMPLETELY!]  If May comes around and still no flowers [WRONG, THAT’S TOO LONG TO WAIT], go back to usual watering and try again next year with a little less watering. [DANG, WE INCLUDE INSTRUCTIONS THAT TELL YOU NO WATER STARTING NOVEMBER 1!]

If you start using fertilizer, make it half as strong as suggested on the bottle for the first couple uses, going straight to full strength fertilizer can burn the roots. [A POSSIBLY ACCEPTABLE ANSWER DEPENDING ON TYPE OF FERTILIZER USED]

This person meant well, but unfortunately, most of what he said was flat-out wrong! Now when most comments on the internet are posted by people like this, clogging up the web with wrong info, it makes it hard for the accurate stuff to get through. And that’s why there’s so much bad info about orchids online.

If you want reliable info on growing orchids, www.orchidinsanity.com (i.e., the present website) is pretty good, if I do say so myself.

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Car tires and orchid roots

A good way to think about orchid roots is to think about car tires.  Tires do an important job, get worn out doing their job, and eventually get replaced.  Orchid roots are the same way – they do an important job, get worn out doing their job, and eventually get replaced.  Orchid plants generally initiate new root growth during the start of the growing season.  Roots will emerge from new shoots; it is rare that roots will emerge from older growths.  In some orchid types, you’ll actually get new root tips branching out from OLD roots; Vandaceous types including Phalaenopsis and Neofinetia) do this, and I’m sure others can, too.

So if you find that your orchid doesn’t have quite the robust root system you were expecting, don’t worry too much.  Orchids want to grow new roots, but they’ll do so when the season and growing conditions are right.

Your job as a grower is to create conditions where new roots can grow AND extend.  That means having the proper media and moisture level in the media for roots to grow into.  It’s always annoying when an orchid starts to make new roots, but then the roots stop growing.  This happens because the root couldn’t find water (and, in some cases, something to cling to).   So when you see new roots emerging, make sure the roots can find some moist media, such as damp sphagnum moss or thoroughly wetted bark.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of orchids want aeration at the root zone, which is why overwatering is the number one killer of orchids. Too much water (usually because there’s too much media in the pot) will drown the roots, and you’ll end up with a rootless, and stressed, plant. One great thing about orchids is how tough they are. Consider a garden plant like a tomato. A few days without water, and that thing is in trouble. This is very true for many plants, especially ones grown in containers. Orchids, on the other hand, can handle lack of water for weeks, and in some cases, even months. This very ability to handle dry conditions means that orchids can usually recover from loss of roots, although it can take awhile (months or even a year) before they re-establish, and it’s best keep them very humid in the meantime.

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The best orchid teachers you’ll ever meet

The world is awash with books, websites, and videos on how to grow orchids. Most of these sources have some useful information, but some do not, and a few have positively misleading information. Of course, you can rely on the info we offer here at Orchid Insanity; we don’t claim to know everything, but experience, successes, and failures, have taught us things that will be helpful to many growers.

While you can certainly learn a lot from us and other experienced growers, the best teachers of orchid growing are the orchids themselves.

What you learn from careful observation of your own plants in your own growing conditions matters more than what books or videos or the know-it-all at the orchid society (or online forum) tells you. Your goal is to develop a reference baseline for what works for you, and what doesn’t. Once you have a reference baseline (which is just a fancy way of saying “experience with what works”), you’ll be better equipped to figure out how to grow a new kind of orchid that has joined your collection, or how to solve some culture issue you’re facing.

One reason many new growers struggle with orchids is they have the wrong expectation. They might get a few nice plants to begin with, but they really don’t know what to expect, and when the plants don’t meet their expectations, a new grower might start panicking, which usually results in overwatering, or over fertilizing, or switching to the latest growing media/nutrient fad, which further stresses the plant, causing the grower to eventually give up, claiming that growing orchids is just too hard. The reality is the new grower didn’t have a good baseline of experience and hence had the wrong expectations, and made the wrong decisions as a result.

The best and fastest way to develop baseline experience is to grow a lot of different types of orchids, preferably cheap ones to start with. You might try a few Cattleyas, a few Dendrobiums, a few Paphiopedilums, some Odont/Oncidiums, and maybe a few off the beaten path. A good number to start with is between 10 – 20 plants. You can get some cheap from an orchid society raffle table, or someone who is downsizing their collection. (We often have “cosmetically challenged” plants with minor leaf damage or irregularities that we can offer for a discount.) Do your research, but try not to fine-tune things too early. Keep conditions general — moderate light, watering to keep the medium in the pot moist, infrequent fertilization — and above all, give them high humidity conditions. High humidity is really the secret. If you’re growing indoors, the best setup for high humidity would be a humidity shelf, which is simply a plastic storage shelving unit wrapped in plastic sheeting (saran wrap is just fine!).

If some plants struggle, while others thrive, don’t stress out. This is natural, and common, and is a necessary step to becoming a good grower. Your plant’s successes and failures at growing speak volumes, once you know how to “listen” to what they’re saying. Once you learn how to listen, they’ll teach you to be better orchid growers.