Phew!
I have just finished repotting my Phal!
I think my results were pretty mediocre, which is a lot better than I expected. Here they are:
(click on the pictures and then click again to see them better)
This is what I used, from left to right: Pinus Bark (and there's a bag of cinnamon on top of it), Eucalyptus Charcoal (all we have here in Brazil) on a bucket that I used to rinse it, Water and Bleach in a bucket (in this picture the scissors I used to cut the roots are inside it), the Phal and a little watering can.
After I took the Phal out of it's pot I left the pot on the bucket with blech for about half an hour, and then thoroughly rinsed it before putting the plant back.
These are the roots after I took the Phal out of it's pot and cleaned them.
I am not the best judge of root quality, but as you can see these are pretty damaged. Some of the roots were already cut off, so I guess the guys who sold it to me had already done this not too long ago. The media was really, really decomposed, though, so I don't know what to think. I guess the media was once coconut husk chips, but now it looked almost like common soil.
I proceeded and cut off the roots that were clearly dead. Most of the roots, though, had lots of black spots in the middle of them, which looked pretty bad, as you can see on the third and forth pictures.
The black parts that you can see in the pictures are really fragile and have just that middle vein passing through. To both sides of the black spots, though, the roots are hard and plump (though weird colored), so I decide not to cut them out.
This is another example of a root that I decide not to cut off. It's black, ugly and fragile on the tip, but there's a very green mini root coming off of it, so I decided to leave it alone. This is the case of most of the roots, and if I had cut these off there would be barely any left, so I decided to just put a lot of cinnamon on the black spots (along with the parts that I have cut and broken) and leave them there.
These are the roots after I used the cinnamon.
After that I laid a layer of charcoal on the bottom of the pot, held the orchid in place and started filling the pot with bark and just a little bit of charcoal.
This is the Phal after I placed it back on the pot.
The little leaf you can see on the right was completely covered by the media before. I didn't even know it existed until now.
I tried to repot the orchid in a way that this leaf would be out of the media, and as a result the rest of the leaves had to be really tilted to the side, in a way that they would almost fall out of the pot along with the roots and everything else. This is what bothered me the most and that's why I say I think my results were mediocre. After that I placed those wires that you can see holding the spikes. They are attached to the side of the pot and they hold the whole thing from falling apart (or almost falling apart), that's why the plant looks generally fine when you look from afar. If I take the wires off it gets pretty unstable, though. How bad is that?
This is another picture showing how tilted the whole thing is. As you can see some of the roots are showing on top of the media. These roots come from above that first (or last?) leaf in the crown, so as I wanted to keep the leaf out of the media I had to leave those roots out too. Was that a good decision?
Should I just have cut the leaf out or buried it like it was before?
This is how the plant looks like now overall.
I think that along all this
I might have made about 5 or 6 cracks on the roots, which I sprinkled with cinnamon.
How bad do you think I did? Will my Phal live?
And most of all, do you think I
should cut off the spikes? I really didn't want to.
I have also not watered it yet after repotting it. Everything was pretty wet, though, since I thoroughly washed the charcoal, the bark and the roots.
Should I water it now or wait for it to get drier?
Thanks again for all your help, guys.
W.
Repotting!
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