P.bulb recovery

[wahaj]

Hiya,

I have an oncidium NOID I believe that I bought about a year ago from the eden project. As I didn't know much about watering, and I knew I have a habit of over watering things, I repotted it into a thin, tall clay pot with orchid compost i bought from the garden centre.

I watered it about once a week or fortnight all of last year but the p.bulbs dried up slowly over time. It's new growth on the leaves also started to become pleated. So I assumed from this that it was being under watered.

So last week i took it out of the clay pot to find dry but wonderfully clean happy looking roots, however they didn't take into the new compost at all. The compost seemed pretty bone dry, even though i used to soak the pot into water for about 10 minutes and then let the water drain off.

So i've repotted into a much smaller, glazed pot to keep the moisture in.

My question is that if i keep it well watered this time, do you think the p.bulbs will re hydrate or have i now lost them? they're still green, and hold their leaves, they're just shrivelled up and almost flat.

[Ray]

They can recover to some degree, but it's generally not 100%.

As an editorial comment, I think you "jumped the gun" and made a bad move with the recent repot. Based upon your good description, I picture the scenario differently:

The plant's root system was inadequate to draw up sufficient water, so the plant sacrificed its stores while it grew a new root mass - those you saw when you repotted it. Orchid roots need to "breathe" more than anything, so that open, fast-drying medium was probably great, but you simply needed to water more often. By moving the plant into a denser medium in a non-porous pot, you risk suffocating the root system, so had better be very stingy with your watering.

[wahaj]

Hmm, I see what you mean. The thing is the orchid didn't seem to grow into the new medium at all, the rootball was still the shape of the old pot that i transplated from a year ago.

I've planted it in a mixture of medium course bark, plenty of perlite, about a 6th of cut down moss, beany bag beans and a bit of coconut fibre. even though it's in a glazed pot, the pot is only slightly bigger than it's very densly packed root ball. An yeah i will be keeping a close eye on it because i really don't want to lose it.

From that, would you still say it might suffer?

thanks for your help. I'll try and take a picture and show you guys.

[wahaj]

So these are the pictures I've just taken. I realised it's actually happening on two of them. No idea about the other orchid, is it an odontoglossum?

there's also pictures from when they both last bloomed. a pathetic attempt to be fair! the oncidium when i bought it had a spray of flowers about 2 feet tall, covered in flowers. last time it seemed to produce 2 flowers under my care!