Orchid with white roots?

[orchidmania123]

Hello.

I received miltoniopsis with very thin dried out roots with no active tips. It's literally just white and seems rather hollow when squeezing it.

Does this mean they are all dead?

I am currently soaking just the root part in distilled water.

---------- Post added at 08:08 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:06 AM ----------

Originally Posted by orchidmania123

Hello.

I received miltoniopsis with very thin dried out roots with no active tips. It's literally just white and seems rather hollow when squeezing it.

Does this mean they are all dead?

I am currently soaking just the root part in distilled water.

BTW when I say white, I am saying DRIED OUT WHITE. Not healthy white with green tip.

[Bulbopedilum]

I have experienced what you are talking about. I half-killed my oncidium with hard beatings of sun rays and water-in-tight-spaces (rot). All the roots where dead white, but then I repotted it into chopped up tree fern fiber (it used to be in weird fern fiber blocks) and now, 4 months later, it's doing great, growing a new pseudobulb and new roots, even grew one weird root that creeped up on one of the pseudobulbs lol! It's not a miltoniopsis but maybe you could take some tips.

[orchidmania123]

Originally Posted by Bulbopedilum

I have experienced what you are talking about. I half-killed my oncidium with hard beatings of sun rays and water-in-tight-spaces (rot). All the roots where dead white, but then I repotted it into chopped up tree fern fiber (it used to be in weird fern fiber blocks) and now, 4 months later, it's doing great, growing a new pseudobulb and new roots, even grew one weird root that creeped up on one of the pseudobulbs lol! It's not a miltoniopsis but maybe you could take some tips.

Great! Hope mine does as well as yours!
Other than the root itself, the leaves look great so hopefully it bounces up back quickly

[bil]

DON'T cut the dead roots off, pot it in shallow fine bark with a coupe of balls of moss round the edge of the pot, and water it as tho it were healthy.

[Optimist]

Roots grow (tip green, or in some cases red) during "root growing" phases (when certain hormones are engaged due to various external stimuli like day length, and exposure to light). Plain white roots are not necessarily "dead," they are just inactive. An active root has vellum (the white stuff) which works at shuttling water into the stringy center. Inside of the vellum, center of the root, and various other places, cellular activities take apart water into hydrogen and oxygen and take them to their various places to mix with carbon and make the food (sugar) that plants need to eat and store.

A dead root is papery, falls apart easily, and does not function. It is often a woody brown or straw color. The vellum comes right off.

Some working roots are also brownish. They are roots which are getting older and starting to die off but still working. Plants lose roots just the same way they lose leaves.

[estación seca]

White roots are usually alive. Don't cut them off. The green growing tips disappear when there isn't sufficient water. The roots should resume growing with proper care.

Use the search function in the maroon menu at the top to look for Miltoniopsis and see how others grow them. They are cold to cool growers that do not do well with any heat. They also like plentiful amounts of pure water. People in places with cool summers and cool winter growing rooms tend to do well with them.

[bil]

Originally Posted by estación seca

Use the search function in the maroon menu at the top to look for Miltoniopsis and see how others grow them. They are cold to cool growers that do not do well with any heat.

Yeah, I took a chance on a few here, and they did OK the first summer when it hit 40C.
Trouble is the following year it hit 43C, and they really didn't like that at all.
I lost most of them, but saved a couple that weren't too far gone. I'm trying them on mounts now to see if they do better there.