Oncidium with poor roots - Orchid Board

MissB · #1 03-29-2013, 05:15 PM

Hello, everyone! I am new to this forum, and unfortunately, I come to you during a bad time for my family's orchids. We have been raising phals for years, usually with great success (mostly due to luck and intuition -- we hadn't studied them much). The oncidium I bought for my mother this past December is a different story, however. I bought the NoID from Trader Joe's in Chicago without knowing even its genus (the card that came with it didn't even say how much light or water to give it). I just fell in love with its dainty maroon-and-gold blooms and even the pseudobulb. I brought it home to my parents in WV a few weeks later. In the mean time, it had gone from a stem with 30+ blooms to dropping most of those blooms and my cutting the stem. I knew there was not enough light or humidity for it in the home where it had been.

My mother took care of it from the time I brought it home at Christmas to the end of February. At that time, she started noticing that the leaves were browning. She complained that she couldn't figure out what sort of orchid it was despite her best efforts at researching it online and therefore couldn't figure out how to keep it growing properly. By the time I got home in early March, all the leaves were brown and one of the two pseudobulbs had turned brown as well. We stopped watering it -- my mother thought it was too late for it, and I thought it might shape up if the cause had been mere over-watering.

After researching and finding that the orchid is most likely a oncidium or allied genus and getting some vague idea of what the requirements are for that genus, I repotted the plant into a well-ventilated container with a prepackaged mixture of large pieces of bark, perlite, and charcoal mixed with a very small amount of sphagnum moss. The previous medium was very tightly packed sphagnum moss with some small pieces of florists' foam (why?!) that had broken down so that it was not much better than potting soil. I also trimmed away many dead roots. I clearly should have repotted it as soon as I cut the bloom stem.

Long story short: Is it possible to save an oncidium NoID with only one green pseudobulb, dried leaves, and some green roots and a few firm white ones with no green tip? It has just been repotted (see italics above). I plan on misting the leaves once a day and doing the skewer test before I water. It receives indirect light from a growlamp. If so, any advice would be appreciated!

Also, does anyone have suggestions for where to order oncidiums if (when!) we would like to try again? I live in an area where one doesn't come by anything besides phals and native lady slippers often. Thanks