Friday, November 12, 2010

Re-potting ground orchids

I used to pot my ground orchids in a mix consisting of rice husks and perlite. During the dry season, this mix seems fine but in the rainy season, my plants don't look very happy in it.
In my last visit to Chatuchak market in Bangkok, I noticed that the people there had their ground orchids in pure coconut chips (don't know if I got the word correct, what I mean is the 'outter skin' of the nut, not the 'shell', chopped to small square pieces). The plants looked very healthy and produced many flower spikes.
So I decided to re-pot my orchids using 'tree fern roots' (another word which could be mis-used here, but I think you can see clearly in the photos) I also use this medium for my 'air-orchids' such as Cattleya and Brassavola.




This medium retains some moisture and is very airy, so hopefully my plants will like it. The down-side maybe I will need to water more in the dry season.

3 comments:

Stephanie said...

Tiny snails breed in coconut husk in my garden. I never use this medium for anything that I need to place on the ground.

Your ground orchid will certainly enjoy rooting in the airy rice husk or tree fern root :-) These two medium are new to me... thanks for sharing Ha Xuan!

Hà Xuân said...

I hope for the same, that my orchids would like this new medium.
Actually, in Thailand, I saw that they grew their dendrobiums on coconut husk, everywhere I looked :-). Maybe they treated it somehow that it worked well for them.

Stephanie said...

Oh a friend of mine stuff coconut husk inbetween the charcoal medium she used for her dendrobiums. She wanted her orchids to have more moisture at the roots ;-)