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  #11  
Old 02-27-2014, 03:29 PM
awakedude985 awakedude985 is offline
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You won't need to start a new thread... People that have some great potential to help are already watching. Just post the photos onto this same thread.
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  #12  
Old 02-27-2014, 11:23 PM
Bill U. Bill U. is offline
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Okay, so you repotted everything. How did all of the roots look? Were they dry and shriveled? Were they plump? Were there only a few or a lot?

If you are following the bamboo skewer method, and you are able to get your finger in there and determine that the bark is still drying out in a matter of days- go ahead and water! The suggestion of "once every 7-10 days" is more of a suggestion for beginners as a starting point to make sure that they don't normally overwater their phals, but in your case, I would say that they would need to be watered more frequently. A potential source of this drying could be all of the heating going on in your house to battle this bitter cold. Modern heating systems do not help to raise humidity. Speaking of the humidifier, how close is your humidifier to your plants? Is it across the room or right next to your grow space? I would recommend that you get your humidifier as close as possible to your grow space to get the max potential. I would not worry too much about it rotting out your roots as a result, because most of the time the humidity is only in the air and maaaybe a little bit on the leaves it if is really high, but rarely to a point where the roots become saturated enough to even start thinking about rotting. Another trick that you can use is to place trays of water with some gravel or river rocks under your plants to help aid in the humidification effort- as the water evaporates from the trays, it will rise up in the space around the leaves and help increase the relative humidity (often abbreviated "RH") of your plants. Yet another trick is to group your plants together because as they undergo cellular respiration, they release a small amount of water into the air as a byproduct, and this increase of water to the RH can serve as a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" method among your plants to help RH be higher. Please keep in mind that any doors, windows, or drafts from the outdoors will often decrease the humidity in your growing areas as well.

For the droopy leaves- which leaves are drooping- from close to the bottom (older leaves) or from closer to the top of the plant (newer leaves)? To what degree are they drooping- somewhat droopy or completely flaccid?

Drooping can be caused by:
1) Stress. Any moderate stress upon the plant, such as repotting, change of growing area, insufficient watering, etc., can cause a phal's leaves to droop because a phal will use their leaves as storage tanks to store small amounts of water and nutrients just for times of stress. When the plant is feeling that stress, it can remove the nutrients and water stored in its leaves to supplement and bolster the overall vigor of the plant. This can result in drooping and possibly eventual loss of the leaf if the main plant cannot support it. Normally this type of drooping is most commonly seen in lower (older) leaves on the crown stalk.
2) Genetics- there are some varieties of phals that do not have very stiff leaves and as the leaves get older, they will tend to droop more.
3) "Big box"- these poor soldiers have been through a lot! They were initially grown in ideal greenhouse conditions that normally forced fast growth with no blooming until those plants are determined to be shipped off to the market by the grower. Then, once they arrive in the "big box" stores, they normally receive extremely poor care, if they survive at all. After being saved from those stores, those same phals now have to adjust to your growing conditions, which are more than likely incredibly different yet from anything they have experienced.

Lighting- yes, full-spectrum CF's will be able to supplement the natural light that your plants are receiving. With those CF's, the best bulbs are those that have a color temperature range of between 5500-6500K (most full spectrum bulbs are) because it is within this range that the lights will be producing all of the reds and blues that plants love for photosynthesis. In terms of intensity, there is a large market of light meters available or even free light meter apps on smartphones that can help give you an estimate of what your plants are getting. For phals, you want your plants to be getting something in the range of 1000-2000 footcandles or 10,000-20,000 lux (these are completely different units of measurement and are not equivalent to each other, but this can be a good starting "ballpark" for you). Try to match the number of sunlight hours of the season outside to try and get your orchids on track with what the season is to try and reproduce accurate bloom periods. *Many times orchids purchased from stores or sources other than a grower's greenhouse may have altered internal schedules because they were forced to bloom at a specific time for market, messing up their internal clock.

Leaves on orchids can vary in their response times, but I would say a safe bet is to give them approximately 2 weeks to a month for determining color. Then again, in many phals, they can have naturally dark leaves- especially those that have red or purple pigmentation in them (a high level of anthrocyanin) which can cause the entire leaf to appear darker or have a reddish tinge when grown around the higher levels of light that it can tolerate.

For the number of posts- you can post absolute gibberish in order to get you up to 5. That is acceptable here
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  #13  
Old 02-27-2014, 11:46 PM
jocierk jocierk is offline
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Thank you soooooo much!!! I feel much better now.

The roots looks pretty good. Very few were brown and mushy, a few of the ones that had poked up above the pot had become dry but most of them were nice and plump. One of the phals had a surprising amount of roots, the others had what I would guess to be a moderate amount. I have a total of 4 phals btw (all of which are big box NoIDs). The humidifier is on a table next to the shelf of plants so its as close as I can get it. Part of the problem is that the orchids are just off the kitchen which is a huge open area and thus hard to raise the humidity in. We are in the process of finding a new place to move to so I don't want to invest a fortune in humidifiers just yet. I actually posted a new thread with a few more questions and some pics if you wouldn't mind looking when you get a chance

http://www.orchidboard.com/community...idity-etc.html

I felt like all my issues were connected so I wanted to sum it all up in one post. The pics show the droopy leaves as well as my whole setup.

Thanks again so much! I feel better already about how I am caring for them.

Last edited by jocierk; 02-27-2014 at 11:48 PM..
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