Cheapest virus tests?

[Jmoney]

Originally Posted by MateoinLosAngeles

I'm mid-serious, I don't have a strong stance at this point and I prefer not to know. This might change in the future, but as of now, I prefer to only test when something makes me suspicious: plant vigor, flower quality/issues, leaf pathology... Mostly to prevent wasting my time and money trying to treat a plant that has something untreatable. Testing every single one of my plants would require thousands of dollars of investment and a lot of time, and that would only be for viruses with available tests (orchid fleck doesn't have one). If I wanted to be thorough, I would probably want to test twice, at least to confirm positives. Then there's the question of whether you caught a plant too early in the infection before it got time to become completely systemic and therefore get a number of false negatives. I genuinely think this is a recipe for madness. After all, since we can't actually fully test for every virus an orchid might have, a negative test for the two most common viruses might help reassure some people, but it's kind of a false reassurance.

I don't do plant exchanges, or gift plants, or participate in showcase tables. So at least whatever my plants carry is contained within my collection.

I do want to try to achieve a level of sustainability when it comes to throwing away plastic pots. They soak in bleach for a long time, but it might be worth experimenting with other substances like Virkon for this purpose. I've also been implementing a regime of microbial inoculation on my plants, they get seasonal sprays and drenches with high concentrations of B. subtilis and Streptomyces spp, the latter seems to show some promising effect on the common orchid viruses, might be worth considering soaking the pots in these inoculants.

Most of my clay pots are destroyed when I repot them, as I prefer to give them a whack with a hammer and sacrifice the pot over sacrificing a healthy root system that will inevitably be attached to the pot. However, I have some clay pots that may be in contact with plants in some other way. For example, I use them to stabilize plants potted in plastic pots, especially smaller ones in plastic pots that are easy to knock over. Even if I didn't pot a plant directly in the pot, any pot that gets in contact with the growing area (I keep the storage separately) gets sanitized. I follow Sue Bottom's process described in the St Augustine Orchid Society's website: dishwasher, scrubbing, 12-24h citric acid soak, scrub some more, soak some more, leave in the oven at 400ºF for 2h while still wet (water helps even out temperature through the pot). I would expect the heat treatment to suffice, but oh well...

completely reasonable, I think each individual needs to determine what to do for his/her collection. And you are right in that there are dozens of viruses that may lurk without a test. One of my phals has what I think may be orchidfleck, so it got tossed. Then when I retested my small phal collection I found one with CymMV. I suspect the prior negative on that one was from root testing, now I use leaves only. But false negatives...

And I will say >95% of my positive virus tests are on plants with no symptoms.

For sphagnum in clay pots, which I use a lot, a heavy watering helps me get the plant out of the pot with very mild root breakage. Not sure if that applies with other media though. Trying to rip out a big cattleya from a 7.5" pot however is a workout...