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What do you do when your orchid leaves are flaccid, limp, and just not performing?  How do you get those erect, stiff leaves full of turgor and vigor?

On many occasions I’ve acquired plants or somehow ended up with plants that have a central leaf that just won’t stand at full attention.  I had one particularly large P. rothschildianum ‘Green Valley’ x ‘Fly Eagle’ with lovely thick, wide leaves.  The plant grew well, but at one point the big central leaf just flopped over.  Watering more frequently just didn’t seem to help, despite a pot full of healthy roots (1).

Having grown under lights like the pot growers, I had already experimented with every possible humidifying system you might come across:

Ultrasonic humidifiers:  These are usually cheaply built, with an ultrasonic element that breaks quickly.

Ultrasonic misters:  These are the ultrasonic piezos from the above humidifiers, and they have identical shortcomings.  You can get them in arrays or six elements that can pump put a copious amount of fine fog, but they require a lot of power, and the power supplies are very low quality.  One of them almost started an electrical fire in my home as I was testing it.

Warm steam humidifier:  these have the advantage of warming your plant area, but by the same token, they have the problem of warming your plants when you want it to be cool.  Good for use in the winter if you want to keep plants warm and provide humidity.

Gravel trays:  Heh…  I’m somewhat unconvinced that these work.  Here’s why: When molecules of water evaporate from the surface area of the gravel, they will disperse into the overwhelmingly greater volume of air that is not already humidified.  Hence, the amount of actual humidified air around your plants is quite low especially if your room is large compared to the size of your gravel tray.  How much actually reaches your plants and has an effect is questionable.  If your plants are sitting in water in a gravel tray and thriving, I wouldn’t exactly assign the success of said growth to the gravel trays, but to semihydroponic growth (and a plant that has adjusted well to it).  Nevertheless, if gravel trays work for you, keep it up.

Cooling misters:  These are the plastic tubes with fine nozzles that you get at Home Depot and hook up to a garden hose spigot.  They claim to produce a mist that can reduce the ambient temp by something like twenty degrees (which only works if you’re in the hot desert and dropping 20 degrees gets you down to a balmy 90 deg F).  The problem is that the mist produced is not as fine as you might think, and actually ends up splattering droplets all over your leaves coalesce into big drops that then run into the crown of your plants, forming a lovely cesspool for erwinia and other pathogens to grow and infect your plant.

So, what is going to get those limp leaves up?

I use, and love, The Hydrofogger (2).  This thing pumps out a super fine, atomized mist like nothing I have ever seen.  It works on a different principle than any of the above.  A centrifugal mechanism inside throws water out onto some other thingamajig that results in the finest, loveliest, most ethereal angel mist you can imagine.

If you can use one of these babies in an enclosed space like a small 15′ x 15′ greenhouse and jack it up to full capacity, you will have an area completely packed with fog.  I’ve gotten the fog so thick that I literally could not see more than a few inches in front of my face.

So how did my limp roth do?  Well, I subjected it to a few days of 90%+ relative humidity, and that limp leaf just rose and became erect as if I had fed the plant a bottle of Viagra (not that I have any personal experience or need of such pharmaceuticals).

Other plants that didn’t have limp leaf problems also seemed much happier, too.

Please keep in mind that the other part of this equation is having an enclosed space that can hold the humidity at the required level.  (So if you’re growing on a patio, you may want to try hang some plastic sheeting around your plants to keep the humidity high)  Venting the humidity from time to time, and keeping strong air movement flowing over your plants will help to prevent other opportunistic pathogens from getting a foothold.

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(1) So why doesn’t simply watering the plant more work better?  There is probably a limit to the amount of water that can be pumped through a plant’s vasculature system from the roots.  Increasing the availability of water in the air allows the molecules of water to be absorbed through the leaves and possibly reach areas not reached as efficiently by the plant’s vasculature.

(2) Call the Hydrofogger phone number at 1-866-77-HUMID, and ask to speak with Mr. Thomas.  He will take good care of you.  Full Disclosure: I was so pleased with the results, I told Mr. Thomas I’d mention Hydrofogger on this blog, and he kindly agreed to give me a commission on any sales originating from my referral.  I’d like to pass on the generosity — if you get a Hydrofogger, you can receive $25 off of your next order with us at Paphiness Orchids.

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One of the most enjoyable things about growing orchids is the learning process.  It’s also one of the most frustrating things as well.  The pressure is even greater because we’re dealing with beautiful, treasured, (and oftentimes expensive) things that might live — or die — because of our choices.

I guess that’s why growing orchids is so addictive: it’s like gambling.

And in gambling, many “systems” abound.  It’s the same with orchids.

So how do you figure out what works for you and what doesn’t?  Answer: experiment.

While most of us know what an experiment is, not all of us know how to do a proper one that enables you to draw a strong conclusion.

Many well-meaning growers will rave about how switching to a new media/fertilizer/light source/etc  revived a long-dormant plant, resulting in a blooming that caused AOS judges to swoon and give the plant an FCC.  We’ve all heard (or told) stories just like this.

But the question is: how do you know this didn’t just happen by chance?  The world is a very complicated thing, especially when it comes to biology.  Weird, unexpected stuff happens all the time in experiments.  And experiments performed on one single plant can always be attacked on the grounds that the observed result was due to chance, or some other unexplained phenomenon.  The revival of the long-dormant plant could absolutely have been due to whatever change you subjected the plant to, but how do you prove causality?

That’s when you need a well-designed experiment.  A well-designed experiment helps you to conclude that the results obtained were not due to chance.

Here are key steps to doing a solid experiment.

0) You need a control group and an experimental group.  The control group is the one that is treated normally.  No new media or fertilizer or anything.  The experimental group is the one that gets the change in conditions that you’re trying to assess.

1) You need a “useful” number of plants to compare.  A result from testing one plant is not enough from which to draw a strong conclusion.  Ideally, you’d want something like 15 - 30 plants in each group (which is what professional plant researchers try to do).  Of course, we don’t all have the space or resources to do an experiment on that many plants.  For the typical grower, I suggest around six plants in each group.  That means six plants in your control, and six plants in your experimetal group. (I know, I know…this requirement is NOT easy for most home growers.)

2) The plants should be preferably from the same cross.  For example, if you’re testing a new media for growing rothschildianums, ideally you should use siblings from just one cross, such as ‘Rex’ x ‘Mont Millais’.  But if you don’t have six from one cross, at least try to get six similarly-sized roths.

3) Focus on only one variable at a time.  This is a hard one, and requires some self-discipline!  If you’re testing a new fertilizer, don’t change the media as well.  Vary only one variable in the experiment.  Otherwise, your results will always be haunted by the specter of uncertainty of whether that one variable really caused, by itself, the result you observed.

4) Measure, measure, measure (and compare your control group to your experimental group).  How many new root tips?  How many new leaves grew?  How much did leaves elongate?  How much did the plants weigh?  Measuring is objective, and banishes, or at least pushes back, subjectivity from the analysis.  Yes, I know this is a pain, but the more of this stuff you do, the stronger and less assailable your conclusions.

Anyone who has read about orchids on the internet knows that advice and opinions abound.  Doing proper, well-controlled experiments lets you cut through the crap and determine for you and your growing conditions what is likely to work best.

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I like big ones. And little ones. And thin ones. And especially long ones. And preferably covered with hair.

Few things orchidaceous bring me more joy than seeing a plant extend a new root. Sure, we all know the goal is to bloom a plant, and to bloom it well.

But for 70% - 95% of its life, an orchid spends its time doing other things than being in bloom. Growing leaves is great, of course, but something about growing roots excites me even more. I suppose it’s a more robust sign that a plant is happy; I’ve had plenty of plants put up (for a time) great looking leaves, but then have no roots. Without the roots, the leaves eventually die off, too.

From some reading of bonsai literature, I have discovered that cultivators of these potted trees will trim the roots of their plants every year or two. Apparently, tree roots only absorb water through their tips, and so the longer the roots are, the further the tree needs to “suck” the water. It’s analogous to sucking through a very long 1 m straw versus a short 10 cm straw.

I’ve heard it said that orchid roots also only absorb through their tips, but I’m still looking into this. Woody plants, like trees, also have woody roots, whereas it is clear that paph and phrag roots have a different composition than tree roots. And those root hairs emerging all along the length of roots of certain paphs may have an absorption function as well. I’ll post more as I learn more.

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Well, I didn’t grow the actual marijuana… (Really!) I just learned from those who do.

If you’re an indoor orchid grower looking to get the most cutting edge info on setting up an indoor growing operation, be it a small shelf, a movable rack, all the way to a stripped out house, you can learn everything you need to know by checking out the pot growing sites which have sprouted up like, er, weeds on the web. Just do a search for “pot grow indoors”, and you’ll be inundated with site names like “weedsthatplease.com, mellowgold.com, and marijuanapassion.com.” These sites are full of great info for controlling temperature, lighting, humidity (I think cannabis prefers lower humidity), air movement, etc., plus getting rid of smells (which shouldn’t be a problem for most slipper species, except at least my kolopakingii). There are plans and schematics for timing circuits to control every aspect of growing. One site I came across described how this guy set up an amazing grow operation in a hollowed out standard office file cabinet, complete with misting, lights, and odor elimination. It was extremely impressive.

Counter to the stoner stereotype, these sites are populated by very serious and knowledgeable people who obviously have some technical know-how, and are quite helpful to their fellow growers. These guys have really worked out pot growing to a science. You really can learn a lot from their creative methods to reach a (literal) gardening high, and escape detection by the law. They are certainly a very, very devoted bunch.

Maybe more devoted than orchid growers? Nah…

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I am going to reveal how, using the following recipe, I have never lost a de-flasked paph seedling to infection within the first week of de-flasking. During that first week or so, the little seedlings are exposed to great changes in air, humidity, media, and water. And, they encounter for the first time all those nasty microbes (fungi and bacteria) just waiting to feast on their succulent leaves.

Prior to discovering my method, a significant percentage of my de-flasked seedlings always got infected shortly after coming out of the bottle. Those days were stressful, aggravating, and painful. But that still didn’t stop me from blowing too much on expensive flasks…

To be clear, I have lost seedlings treated with my secret method, but they died for different (and preventable) reasons, not to infection in those sensitive days after de-flasking.

In the past, I’ve wrestled with revealing certain of my tricks of the trade, for fear that my secrets would cost me my competitive edge in the orchid market. Then I realized a couple of things:

Firstly, changes in the slipper orchid market occur about as fast as growing multifloral species from seed. (For those not in the know, that means five to seven years!) No serious grower is going to get a leg up on anyone else based on “secret” methods such as the one I’m about to disclose. (That doesn’t mean that there aren’t even more closely guarded secret, though. There probably are…)

Secondly, and far more important: slipper folks are so opinionated and convinced their own methods are the best that no matter what I say, I doubt anyone will change their mind!

So, here’s the secret:

1 gram Thiomyl + 1 gram Dithane M-45 (aka mancozeb, manzanate) in 1 liter of water.

Spray/drench/soak plants in this stuff. It doesn’t seem to affect tender seedlings at all! When I first tried this, I was worried that these chemicals would kill the plants, but absolutely nothing happened, other than that the plants survived past that first critical week.

Dithane is a plant fungicide that appears to coat plant surfaces and stick. So, any fungal (and likely bacterial) cells exposed to this would likely suffer a quick death. Thiomyl, on the other hand, is a systemic fungicide that can kill bugs (i.e., microbes) that have breached the plant’s cells and taken up residence inside the plant’s tissues.

OK, so what about bacterial infections? I don’t know how often infections are caused by bacteria versus how often they’re caused by fungi in de-flasked paph seedlings. But I do suspect that the concentrations used here will be more than sufficient to kill any bacteria likely to take up residence on your plants. Some may argue that the killing mechanisms of these compounds affect only certain molecular processes in fungi and not bacteria, etc. Well, having labored on a Ph.D. in bacterial research, I take the point, but I won’t bother to argue about it. All I’ll say is: it works for me!

Hope it works for you! Drop me an email at orchids@paphinessorchids.com if you do try it.

(Disclaimer: I offer this for informational purposes only… Use this at your own risk! I make no guarantees, claims, warranties, or comments on safety for humans, plants, or other creatures exposed to this. )

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