Miltassia Shelob 'The Weed', repotted and possibly in trouble

[Dalton]

Hey, everyone. I've got a Miltassia Shelob 'The Weed', that was my first orchid, ever. I repotted it recently and I think it might be in trouble.

Here is the story on it. I bought it around 6 years ago. It was hanging in the store in a perforated plastic bag, with another bag rubber banded around the pot to hold in moisture. I know I personally walked past it for 2 weeks before buying it as I didn't have a lot of pocket money at the time. I don't think it was very expensive, I'm just very tight.

Anyway, I brought it home and immediately repotted it. The soil was completely broken down. I repotted it in straight orchid bark and that's what it's been in it's whole life, till recently. It took it 6 months to show growth and 4 years to bloom. Now it puts out a new bulb and blooms one spike from it a couple-three times a year.

I've only had to repot it a couple of times in the last 6 years. The bark has held up really well and the only reason I had to repot was because it kept climbing out of it's pot.

Being my first orchid, I made plenty of mistakes with it. One time I thought it would like to be on the front porch with just a touch of full sun in the morning and bright shade the rest of the day. It might like that, but I guess I didn't acclimate it and burnt the plant badly. I brought it back in and it recovered, but because of rookie mistakes like that, I haven't ever divided it, only cut off the bad bulbs.

Recently, it started out growing it's pot again. I decided that while the older bulbs didn't look fantastic, that this was the first time I thought I could divide it. I cut it in half. one "plant" had the four oldest bulbs and the other "plant" had the 5 newest. As you'll be able to see in the following picture, it had a lot of roots. More than I thought it would. I ended up having to trim the longest ones to get it jammed in the pot. Possible a mistake in retrospect. I probably should have just bought a larger pot.

I've been watering this plant about once a week for it's life time. I've never fertilized much and I plan to change that. I wanted to adjust the media, because as you might be able to see from some of the pics, the older bulbs are pretty shriveled. It's just not cutting it. So I added some LFS to the mix. I tried not to put a massive amount in the mix. I tried to keep it around 1/4-1/3 of the mix and I scattered it throughout the bark. I figured it would still be well draining, but provide some water reserves for the plant.

The plant with the newest bulb seemed to take to it really well. The old bulbs didn't unshrivel, but they felt firmer. The newest bulb really plumped up and got fat and tight, without a wrinkle to be seen.

That was on 4/11/2016. Over the last couple of weeks, I've noticed that there has been some shriveling to the newest bulb. I'm letting it dry out, at least down to a knuckle or two on my finger before rewatering. I don't want to rot the roots.

I'm just worried that it was fully plump and is now shriveling some. It's mostly on one side of the bulb. It also has a spike that had just started when I repotted. I didn't want to, but it really needed it and I figured it wouldn't hurt much since the spike had just started. It's now a couple of weeks away from blooming and seems to be doing fine.

I just don't know if it's something to worry about or not. I'm guessing it's a combination of the older bulbs drawing on it, the spike drawing on it, and the change of media. I don't think it's damaged roots, because I only trimmed the longest ones on the older bulbs. I didn't mess with the ones on this division. I hope the roots aren't rotting or anything. I guess I could repot it again and reduce the sphag, but it did really well there for a couple of weeks.

As far as I can tell, the shriveling isn't getting much worse since I noticed it. It's just kind of holding for now. I just don't know why it was so good before and not now.

So I'll post some pics below. One is from the repotting and simply shows the plant and root mass. The second two are the newest bulb, post repot, from the front and back. You'll notice that he back of the bulb isn't nearly as shriveled as the front. Thanks for the help.