Genealogy for Two H&R C. walkeriana Compots

[isurus79]

Originally Posted by K-Sci

At this time Harry has the 'Sakura Snowblush' 4N x 'Perfect Blush' 4N compot for sale.

Last November, Harry sent me an email which included this:

"Until recent years, we protected most of our identified 4N plants and only used them for breeding to make many superior 3N crosses. It cost us many many years and lots of R&D costs. We are now getting on in years and no longer feel the need to protect these plants as breeding parents. Consequently, we have been producing and releasing a number of 4N crosses ... such as the 4N selfing you purchased."

Personally, I would want to sell my breeders for good money to others interested in continuing their lines and I would write about my decades of orchid breeding to document a legacy of accomplishment such as Harry's. I wouldn't want what I learned and did to be lost after full retirement.

-Keith

Good to know! Thanks!

[uilliu]

I called Harry today to purchase (24454) Cattleya walkeriana 'Sakura Snowblush' x 'Perfect Blush' along with a few other plants from H&R’s Fall Retail List.

Since I didn’t see any annotations in the pdf retail list about either of the walkeriana compot parents being 4N , naturally I assumed they are all 2N by default. Was there a separate H&R ‘in-group’ distribution list that lists these as 4N? Just curious.

Incidentally, when I asked Harry for advice on the do’s and don’ts of caring for community pot walkerianas, he mentioned that these will (can) bloom by the time they are big enough for 2” and 3” pots; I figured this cross probably produces offsprings that are even more compact than typical walkerianas but didn’t figure them to be 4N. He also said to clock daylight at 11 hours once these are growing in 2” pots (13 hours of complete darkness) — that seems to be the bloom trigger for these tiny plants.

So excited 😆, I have never grown a community pot of walkerianas before. Even though I have 15 other walkerianas growing in semi-hydro (1/2 of their roots are submerged in water 24/7, and they love it!) , I shall refrain from dunking these baby walkerianas in water until they are a bit older.

—Lisa

[K-Sci]

Originally Posted by uilliu

I called Harry today to purchase (24454) Cattleya walkeriana 'Sakura Snowblush' x 'Perfect Blush' along with a few other plants from H&R’s Fall Retail List.

I assumed they are all 2N by default. Was there a separate H&R ‘in-group’ distribution list that lists these as 4N? Just curious.

Hey Lisa,
Harry has confirmed that both parents in this cross are 4N on two occasions. Once on the phone prior to purchase, and once in email when I wrote him for confirmation of my understanding in this thread. Both parents are 4N. He also clarified that the 'Tokyo #1' parent in his 'Perfect Blush' x 'Tokyo #1' is 2N, rather than 4N.

Incidentally, when I asked Harry for advice on the do’s and don’ts of caring for community pot walkerianas, he mentioned that these will (can) bloom by the time they are big enough for 2” and 3” pots; I figured this cross probably produces offsprings that are even more compact than typical walkerianas but didn’t figure them to be 4N. He also said to clock daylight at 11 hours once these are growing in 2” pots (13 hours of complete darkness) — that seems to be the bloom trigger for these tiny plants.

What you describe about day length is the consensus understanding, but two of my Cattleya walkeriana have been in bud for at least two weeks (photo). Sunrise is at 6:53am, sunset at 6:36pm with light at least a half our before and after. I do not believe this walker has xdelosa / 'Orchidglade' or 'Pendentive' in the genealogy, so impure genealogy isn't a likely explanation.

So excited 😆, I have never grown a community pot of walkerianas before. Even though I have 15 other walkerianas growing in semi-hydro (1/2 of their roots are submerged in water 24/7, and they love it!) , I shall refrain from dunking these baby walkerianas in water until they are a bit older.

—Lisa

There have been mixed results on growing walkeriana in S/H, I suspect, but do not know, that this is because walkeriana don't recover well from the root loss that often occurs when introducing S/H, especially if placed in S/H when not putting out a new flush of roots. I would love to hear how you introduced your walkeriana to S/H, and how well they did at first. What stage of development are they in? Have they flowered in S/H?
-Keith

[uilliu]

I originally only transitioned nine of my walkerianas into semi-hydro earlier this year. Because those initial trial runs went so well, the remaining six also went into semi-hydro setup sometime during the summer. From the start, I got them growing 4-5” directly under intense LED lights at 16 hours a day. They are just now slowly coming out of their long hours light exposure. This month I am only giving them 15 hrs.

I will tone it down to 14 hrs in November, 13 hrs in December, then 12 hrs in January (let’s see if they will bloom with 12). February will be 11 hours, and they should bloom soon after. Fingers crossed.

Regardless of the outcome in February, by March I will be increasing light exposure again — I have 150 other cattelyas sharing the same grow space, and I am unwilling to sacrifice their optimal growths just so 15 walkerianas can bloom well.

I also have some reservation about my semi-hydro setup for walkerianas, mainly because it’s been less than a year since I’ve transitioned them. Yes, they are growing beautifully. Yes, their bulbs are fat and smooth. And yes, their roots are long and thick, free flowing in water 24/7, with 90% of their original old roots still intact and branching. But, none of them have ever experienced winter cold months with roots submerged in water 24/7 before. No priors. I do not know how they will do in the winter months. Some of them are technically not in semi-hydro anymore but rather full-hydro (water level is high and covers at least 85% of the pots). Lots of roots are floating freely in water (outside of the inner pots). It is almost as if they want to dive for water and don’t want to be confined by clay pebbles and couldn’t careless about lack of air. And while this root growing style of theirs has worked out well during warmer months…. Winter is coming.

I initially was planning to add heat mats for fall and winter months just to be safe, but after Stephen told me walkerianas can withstand the cold, I am now willing to test trial them — no heat mats.

I need to observe that they are capable of making it through all four seasons in this set up - without any setbacks - before I decide to grow them this way forevermore. They still got 3 to 8 months to go before reaching their 1yr anniversary. Fingers crossed. If they can still thrive come winter months, they are probably good to go.

My next target is C.aclandiae. I have started my test trial with a SVO cross (Comets Tail x aclandiae) earlier this summer. The plant has 87% aclandiae lineage. So far so good, roots are floating in water (this one also do not care for clay pebbles, only wants water). If all goes well, by next summer I will be transitioning a pure C. aclandiae into semi hydro.

I will need to find time to type up my “reproduce results” steps on how I transitioned them. Hopefully I will get time to post it tonight or else by tomorrow. Stay tuned.

[K-Sci]

Originally Posted by uilliu

I originally only transitioned nine of my walkerianas into semi-hydro earlier this year. Because those initial trial runs went so well, the remaining six also went into semi-hydro setup sometime during the summer.

What kind of lights? I'm guessing florescent. Full spectrum?

Stay tuned.

I will! I'm very interested in your outcomes.

Thank you for writing up what you've done so far. My tinkering with S/H is still at a very early stage.

-Keith

[uilliu]

I. Pre-Staging
a) Roots- wait until a week before or just right when new roots are starting to appear. Unpot the plants and get them naked. Do not worry about pieces of substrate that are stubbornly attached to roots, by the time I am finished with this process they will come off easily.

b) KelpMax - soak the plant roots in KelpMax mixture at 1 tablespoon per gallon dosage, for 20 minutes.

c) Grow bareroot for the next two weeks. Water often. The roots should go through rapid and repeated wet-dry cycles for two weeks. In my environment I water them every 3 hours, alternating between clear water and 1/8th teaspoon of MSU fertilizer water each time. At night, I soak them in clear water before going to bed. It is during this period that I slowly remove any remaining old substrates. It is also during this period I get to enjoy watching new roots grow and old roots branch with new root tips.

d) Vetting out bad/weak roots. Any roots that are not healthy enough to withstand the past two weeks are eliminated — they will not make it in semi-hydro. Usually when I start this process with a healthy walkeriana, 90% of their roots come through just fine, but the thinner roots usually don’t make it. I am strict in my vetting process— weak roots should not go into semi hydro.

e) Wait for new roots to reach 1.5 inches in length — two weeks should be sufficient time for the new roots to grow to 1.5 inches long. If I need to wait a bit longer, I wait.
Once the roots are close to 1.5 inches long, I start preparing the substrate.

f) Clay pebbles- rinse and soak for 24 hours. After 24 hours, replace with fresh batch of water and boil the pebbles for 10 minutes. Wait until water cools down, replace the water and soak again for 24 hours.

g) When ‘e’ and ‘f’ requirements from above have been met, I make another pot of KelpMax mixture and get ready for potting.

II. Execution and Strategy*

a) Use clear plastic orchid pot (drainage holes on the bottom, with holes all along the sides) as inner pot. Place it inside a slightly larger pot or container without drainage holes.

b) Add a very thin layer of horticultural charcoals to in the inner pot (crash larger pieces if smaller size is not available for purchase, just make sure it is small so the layer stays fairly flat.)

c) Wet pebbles - on top of thin layer of charcoal, add the still wet pebbles, just enough to fill up to 1/2 of pot height.

d) Final KelpMax skinny dipping- hold the plant in one hand and dip its roots in KelpMax mixture. Reach in with my other hand and gently manipulate roots in water so that they form a circle no larger than the circumference of the upper 1/2 of the inner pot. Hold them in position and lift plant out and place directly into pot. All roots should be in the upper 1/2 portion of the pot. No roots in the lower half.

e) Gently hold down on the rhizome, make sure the new 1.5” roots have their root tips pointed down (gently guide them using finger tip if necessary). Fill the pot with wet pebbles, try not to press down on the pebbles. Little gaps here and there are okay. * I sometime add pebbles strategically by selecting specific sizes for the area near by newer roots.

f) Add a small amount of clear water in the outer pot. Water reservoir level should not be more than 1 small pebble’s height. In other words, water level for the first 4 weeks should be kept - at most - at a level that is just enough to submerge the bottom lowest layer of pebbles. I allow the roots time to seek out moisture on their own (diving downward), this is how I keep the original older roots alive longer and allow them time to branch new root tips. When I add water, I add directly in the outer pot. I do not pour water down from top of the inner pot during the first few weeks.

g) Fasting — Clear water only. For the first month, I refrain from fertilizing. My local water source quality is pretty good. I use tap water.

h) After the first month, slowly increase water reserve level to 2 pebbles’ height, and as more roots grow downwards more water can be added. It’s okay to water from above the pot at this point. Fertilizer regimen can resume. I keep my fertilizer dosage to no more than 1/8th teaspoon per gallon of water— very small amount — but that’s just me. I don’t want to risk root tip burns.

i) I keep water level to where the pot can stay wet for a full week without me having to refill. Unfortunately some plants are bigger drinkers than others during the summer months, so that has resulted in a few pots with water level nearly to the top.

j) Keep plants on the warmer side during the initial transition. My grow environment day time temperatures during the transitions : 75 to 85F. Night time temperatures: 65 to 70F.

That’s it. That’s how I reproduce results in my environment.

I would like to thank all the random people on the internet who, over the years, have described their failures with S/H in details with neutrality and full precision.

When people are open to share failures in full details and open to hear the opinions of others, against which one may test their own observations and conclusions, usually clarity is not too far away. With clarity comes increased insight and awareness which will most certainly lead to the next subsequent step: progress.

This year is the first time I have ever grown anything in semi hydro. I have found that walkerianas (and likely even acladiae) can transition nicely to semi hydro if proper prep work is done in advance. I can also confirm it is not true that all original roots which existed prior to entering semi hydro environment will die. But semi hydro might not be right for everyone for growing walkerianas —it’s up to each person to decide whether the upfront time investment is worth it.

III.* Fail-Safe and Maintenance

a) Expect imperfection.
Whenever I start something new, I do not daydream about how successful at it I will become. Instead, I mentally prepare that I will be falling short of something at some point. I might put fail-safes in place for things that I might find difficult to recover from.

With walkerianas, using inner orchid pots with holes was a fail-safe.* I needed a way to quickly reverse or reset my semi-hydro experiments in the event orchid roots were failing too fast, and without having to unpot and repot.* Plastic pots with holes meant that I could easily lift them out from the outer pots and within an hour with a ceiling fan blowing I would have a fairly dry root condition leaving only roots, clay pebbles, and a little bit of charcoals inside the pots.* If need be, I can temporarily grow my plants this way while they recover. Happily, I haven’t needed to, so far.

b) Be ready to roll with the punches . * What could possibly go wrong with all those drainage holes for extra air? *How about roots everywhere, growing out through drainage holes and wrapping themselves around the inner pots and submerged in water. * At one point it was a struggle to fit inner pots back inside the outer pots after each watering without bruising orchid roots. *So much roots. The solution: upgrade to larger outer pots to allow more roots to grow (swim) freely in water.

c) All roads to hell are paved with good intentions. * Three months after transitioning, I wanted to treat my semi-hydro walkerianas to some KelpMax to see if they will grow even faster.

Pots of standing KelpMax mixture in warm condition under intense lights for long durations made my walkerianas extra happy. But it also made algae very happy, and by extension it made fungus gnats very happy….

I am still combating fungus gnats; while my cat seems to enjoy chasing and swapping at flies, I do not enjoy finding dead flies in my drinks. I’ve stopped giving my walkerianas KelpMax (note: I unfairly attributed the problem cause to KelpMax. Read on.)

d) Desperation is a powerful motive that can cloud judgements. In an attempt to kill thick layers of algae that have adhered to the top layer of and between clay pebbles, I resorted to using Physan 20. It worked. Physan 20 turned green algae to black and left it there. The amount of force now required to detach black dead algae from the surface of clay pebbles cannot be fulfilled by simply flushing the pots with water. Many Sunday afternoons I’ve spent sitting down with a pair of tweezers in my hand, painstakingly picking out pebbles one at a time and scrubbing the dead algae off its rounded surface. In hindsight I should have just left the green algae alone. The plants are doing fine, roots submerged in water are not affected, most of the algae adhere only to substrate inside the inner pots anyways and not detrimental to my plants.

[Light Source]
12 of my 15 walkerianas grow under Sunblaster LED lights, 6400k, 242 umol/ms at 6” (I grow mine at 4-5”) directly below the light bars. The product is high in blue spectrum to promote vegetative growth, a bit low in red spectrum. As it turns out, green algae’s adhesion mechanism works best under blue light and are mostly deactivated in red light condition. I didn’t know I had put together a perfect environment for green algae adhesion. Physan 20 was not the correct fix to the root cause. Had I not been so desperate to find an ‘easy fix’, I would have noticed that my pots growing under Sunblaster LED have much more green algae adhesion than ones growing under my other lights (SpiderFarmer). You see, it is easy to draw incomplete conclusions when multiple root causes exist but not identified. It wasn’t entirely KelpMax. It’s a combination of how close the plants are growing under lights, the type of lights, the constant wet environment and warm temps. My walkerianas get very little fertilizer so that’s less of a contributing factor for me, but they still get about 1/8th teaspoon of MSU a couple times a month.

Okay, that’s enough typing. I wish I can share more but I have used up all the spare time I have this week. Please, do not blindly follow everything I did. Be sure to adjust/adapt steps to suit your grow environment and skillset. And even if you never wanted to grow walkeriana in semi hydro after reading this, that’s totally okay too. There is more than one way to grow a healthy plant. Happy growing!

- Lisa

[thefish1337]

Wow Lisa that is a meticulous write up! Hope your semi-hydro walkeriana are a success! I grow all my walkeriana indoors under lights so I've never found winter temps to be an issue compared to those who have to overwinter their plants in a greenhouse where heating becomes cost prohibitive.

I'm also growing in Seattle so I'm interested in your findings because your conditions should be similar to mine.

[Eisland]

Originally Posted by K-Sci

I created this thread hoping there are other walkeriana fanatics on the forum who may know the topic. I'm starting to think there aren't. If nobody has any corrections or comments, I'll email the core details to Harry to see how much I've got right/wrong. Considering the number of years since the 70's, I may have some major gaps/errors. It was pieced together from tidbits found in a lot of posts.

Harry hasn't posted here since Jan 2020, but the posts he made before that contain a lot of valuable information.

-Keith

Hi: I came across this thread while doing a C. walkeriana search. I've been trying for a while to find some genealogy or origin information for C. w semi albas 'Carmela', 'Taka', and 'Gold Country'. 'Taka' seems to be mostly in Japan and I only found that it is of Hawaiian origin. The three clones look somewhat similar to the old Hawaiian clones 'H&R', 'Puanani' 'Tokyo no. 1', which can be traced to the native clones 'Meire' and 'Nem Sempre'. My guess is that Carmela, Taka and Gold Country are relative of these. It seems the clone name "Taka" was used by Katsuura orchids in Hawaii?. "Carmela" is obviously from Carmela Orchids in Hawaii and "Gold Country" from GC orchids. Any clues?. Thank you.

[Eisland]

Originally Posted by isurus79

I should have been more explicit in my previous post. There really aren't any folks on OB that have a fairly good knowledge of walkeriana lineages. I consider myself fairly up to date on H&R lines, but the lineages become fairly obscured once you get back to Brazil. I've asked Harry about some of those aspects and like I said, he's pretty good about answering!

Stephen, are you looking for lineage of any certain Brazilian ones?

[isurus79]

Originally Posted by Eisland

Stephen, are you looking for lineage of any certain Brazilian ones?

Yes, actually. I know that Estrela da Colina has several famous sibs (you mentioned Dayane Wenzel in another thread). I can't recall the named sibs!

Do you also recall the names of both parents for those famous sibs? I know Orchidglade was one, but was the other named also?

---------- Post added at 08:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:24 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Eisland

"Carmela" is obviously from Carmela Orchids in Hawaii and "Gold Country" from GC orchids. Any clues?. Thank you.

Carmela and Gold Country look identical to my eye. I have to assume they're the same plant.

I believe Alan Koch (and many California breeders) were using The Chairman in their breeding programs for a long time. It would be interesting to see if there's a relation between The Chairman and Gold Country.