Repot and Splitting up a phal mess.

[phirephly]

This plant was purchased about 3 years ago and neglected on my window sill. It blooms every year (usually more than one stalk of blooms), oozes sticky, but is now toppling over it's pot. I've had to prop it up on various nearby containers, such as the plastic cereal container it's leaning against.

I'm not sure how to split it up, afraid I'm going to kill it, and confused about what's to be potted with the new keiki plants. Seems to be majority air roots, so what part of the new plants is actually potted? Very confused. Here are the pictures. I hope nobody cries.

In the past month, it's started sending out a new flower stem from the upper left plant. It bloomed with 2 stalks in July and about 15 blooms total.

[slipperfreak]

So you want to know what to do with the keikis?

Just flame-sterilize a blade and cut them off the flower stems as close to the keikis as you can. Then, pot them in the same mix as the mother plant. Fit what roots you can in the pot, and leave the rest outside it. The plants will make more roots that will grow into the pots. Don't use too big a pot!

[King_of_orchid_growing:)]

Pot them up in medium or large grade wood chips. No moss. Use a clear plastic pot and find one that fits the root mass with just a little bit of wiggle room. Try to resist giving the plants too much room/too big a pot size.

Try and wiggle the kheikis off first. If they won't come off, then cut between nodes on the "stem" of the inflorescence.

[Sammy]

Wow! That is amazing, i have never seen that before, infact i didnt even realise that phals did this!

Does this happen to all phals if you leave the spike on after flowering?

I just think thats soo cool!

[johnblagg]

some do it oftem some less often but In theory they all can produce keikis sometimes it takes some assistance from hormones.

[phirephly]

OK, thanks for the replies so far. I will be using ceramic, since I don't have any clear plastic. The clear plastics that I have already have two orchards in them, because they're the original pot. The mother plant is in a clear plastic, which is then sitting inside a ceramic.

I don't know what the original potting medium is. It's not bark. When I pull some out, it looks like stringy light brown substance, maybe it's some type of moss? I have two bags of bark mix I purchased six months ago, a bag of cactus mix, a bag or perlite, and a bag of african violet mix. I'd love to get this done tonight while I'm in the mood...

Does everyone think the bark and ceramic is good or should I definitely hold off for plastic? If I re-pot some other plants, I will have some opaque (green or brown) plastic pots. I have a lot of cacti type plants I can repot for their store provided plastic pots.

[phirephly]

Chilean 5 Star Premium Sphagnum Moss Orchid Media

It looks like the stringed moss on the page above, so I guess that answers the "what is this crap?" question. Now, what to do though... Will the keikis adapt to bark, but not the mother plant? I don't have any bags of moss...

[King_of_orchid_growing:)]

Bark is usually good enough. If not then a thin top dressing of moss is fine.

Phals grow on trees in the wild. The trees have little or no moss. But they're near a good supply of water.

The roots are photosynthetic. That's why I recommended the clear plastic pots. You can use ceramic though. I just recommend the clear plastic pots. You can also see what's going on with the roots if you use the clear plastic pots.

[King_of_orchid_growing:)]

Oh, and I forgot, Phals grow horizontally in nature, not vertically.

Your Phals will naturally tend to lean over time.

So I recommend you lean them anyways. If you look at the crown head on, you'll notice the leaves arrange themselves in an upside down chevron. The leaf tips point down towards the ground. The crown should be tipped over. This way if water gets on the leaves and into the crown, it'll eventually dribble away from the crown. Thus naturally preventing crown rot.

[King_of_orchid_growing:)]

If you like you can do a Google image search on "Phalaenopsis in-situ" and you should pull up a few Phals growing in the wild.

Most Google image searches are of Phals in pot culture or mounted in cultivation. The mounted pics are the easiest to access and the closest to what they look like growing in nature.