Dear all,
Ended up on this website because I stumbled upon a "A-step-by-step-guide-to-replating-media-preparation" thread here. That thread is rather old though and doesn't seem very active anymore though.
Don't know much about orchids but live in the Phils and promised my wife to help out with the technical bits about a flasking business she intends to set up. What I intended to post regarding that thread by the way was that the Lotte and Thomas procedure seems to allow for plenty of time for "fresh" air to be sucked into the container during cooling which cannot be a good thing so you should fully close the jars while still piping hot.
Probably doesn't make too much sense what I'm saying outside the scope of that thread
As such setting up any orchid flasking business in Philippines seems a tremendous headache but so is setting up what ever business here. My wife literally spend weeks to simply find out where to get any CITES certificates because the Department of Environment- something kept insisting they don't issue CITES certificates in Phils, only export permits. But the Bureau of Forestry-something (by all means very much so part of the Department of Environment-something) actually
does , and they are very much so in the same building as it turned out.
Another headache is identification. There are some 1200 indigenous species apparently but less than 20 % seem properly documented. The Dutch embassy sponsored a project producing CD's properly classifying indigenous species. A copy of the first CD was handed to the head of the Botanical department of the National museum in Manila and we went there but the dear chap actually seems convinced it was handed to him as a personal copy and refused us access. For some odd reason the project is no longer sponsored. Wonder why.
Does anybody have some decent literature on indigenous Phil orchids and in case I would upload pictures somewhere, would people be able to help us identify what on earth it what?
This country is what it is and there's a lot of poor people and so there's a thriving black market in orchids collected from the wild, smack in the middle of QC. In general sellers don't seem too familiar with what they are selling and often only know species under their local name. I don't feel exactly a villain simply dropping by and taking some pictures and I figure we'd being doing mother nature a favor if we could at least make them concentrate on collecting pods rather than plants. Suppose I could buy people a few of those single use camera's to help identify the species.
We seem to at least have managed to become fairly well connected over the past 4 month and there is at least one top notch lab here. Blacklights everywhere, cabinets full of chemicals, the works. Those people however seem far more interested in multiplying ornamental plants in bulk.
Comments and ideas are very, very welcome indeed. Will check back in a few days.
Take good care.
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