Habaneria medusa corm or mold?

[Shakeinmyshoes]

all! This is my first post here after lurking for a couple of years. I’m worried about my first ever Habaneria, purchased in bud in soil in the summer or fall of 2019. It’s been sitting dry, with a spritz of water every few months (my humidity level is pretty low), and I just picked it up and there’s a fuzzy white growth coming out of the bottom of its pot! Bloomed successfully and then started to die back. I kind of just put it in a corner when I saw it faltering and forgot about it until I just checked it today.
So my question is, is this a corm or a biological growth? Should I cut the dried stalk and unpot or just leave it? Should I have cut the stalk when it had just entered dormancy? Did I mess up by not unpotting the corm? Is it rotting? Googling what a corm looks like gives me lots of pictures of 🌽 and not a lot of orchid content. Any help is appreciated, as this is my one and only habaneria type and I’m fascinated by its growth pattern and blooms!

[SaraJean]

Try searching for “Habenaria tuber” and that should give you some results that are not a vegetable

And yes, that’s what the tubers look like. It also looks nice and chunky, so good job on that. I personally like to repot my Habenarias a bit later, whenever I see that first sign of new growth, but I think a lot of people do repot in the winter while they are dormant. Be very careful while repoting. Don’t try to force the tuber out, that could damage it and cause it to die back. I would cut the pot off, cut plastic where it connects to to pot by the tuber but don’t worry about removing any plastic stuck to the tuber, being very careful on the side walls, shake off the media, and put the whole thing (plastic and all) in a new deeper pot. If you are concerned about cutting into a tuber you can try to dump some of the old media out first. You might find that it made more than one new tuber last season

As far as cutting the stalk back, my understanding is that you leave everything on these plants until it’s dead and crispy so it can reabsorb any of the nutrients. Looks like yours is ready to be trimmed off

Edit: and welcome!

[Shakeinmyshoes]

Thank you thank you! So helpful! I’m glad to know it’s okay, and I appreciate your thorough response. I’ll wait a bit to re-pot. What a strange plant, I was not expecting the fuzz!