My experience with sphagnum moss

[Paul]

Originally Posted by bil

Absolutely. You can grow orchids in almost anything provided the watering matches the media.

For that matter, there are a number of epiphytes for which media can be skipped entirely. Had a catt I divided a couple years back with the intent to sell off or trade the division. I almost always mail my chids out bare root. Since I had not planned on having it around for long, I simply set the division in a large plastic cache pot I had laying around. Well as life would have it, as one thing led to another, it wound up being around a year later that I finally found a home for it. During that interim, I never did pot it up. Just poured water into the cache pot to soak the roots once or twice a week for around 20minutes then dumped the water out. The division grew a couple new pbs during that time and bloomed for me. (And this was in an apartment in the Great White North with my winter RH usually around 20%.)

Originally Posted by Raqsharqi

I have found, though, that I can't pack the mix in as tightly as they seem to.

I know many folks who really pack their media in tight -- to the point where they could grab the recently potted plant, lift it up by the leaves/pbs, and have the entire mass -- plastic pot and all -- rise up with the plant. Packing that tight has never worked for me.

[bil]

Originally Posted by Paul

For that matter, there are a number of epiphytes for which media can be skipped entirely. Had a catt I divided a couple years back with the intent to sell off or trade the division. I almost always mail my chids out bare root. Since I had not planned on having it around for long, I simply set the division in a large plastic cache pot I had laying around. Well as life would have it, as one thing led to another, it wound up being around a year later that I finally found a home for it. During that interim, I never did pot it up. Just poured water into the cache pot to soak the roots once or twice a week for around 20minutes then dumped the water out. The division grew a couple new pbs during that time and bloomed for me. (And this was in an apartment in the Great White North with my winter RH usually around 20%.)




I know many folks who really pack their media in tight -- to the point where they could grab the recently potted plant, lift it up by the leaves/pbs, and have the entire mass -- plastic pot and all -- rise up with the plant. Packing that tight has never worked for me.

Yep. That makes the point quite naturally. Epiphytes need no media, so media carries the risk of causing problems, and the wetter the medium, the bigger the risk of root rot.

I have seen the result of that "packed moss" technique, having bought Catts whose roots have been solid, dead plugs of sphag.