Cattleya root growth help
 

on ebay i saw some coconut husks at this address and i thought they might help:

ORCHID PLANT COCONUT HUSK READY-MADE 6 ITEM - eBay (item 220227406053 end time Apr-25-08 20:37:35 PDT)

I was wanting to know if cattleyas do good with them. I have several cattleya's and some are showing good root growth and some are not. These are seedlings which i have had for about a year that i bought on ebay. I was just wondering if anyone has any other suggestions as to medium for them. Currently they are in Better Gro Orchid potting mix which contains mostly bark. Recently i added some spaghnum moss to the mix because the bark seems to dry out really quickly (usually by the end of the day i water them the medium is already dry). I water them every 3 days. Any help would be appreciated.

The question is will they work in your growing conditions?

Assuming the things are slabs of husk bound together in a block, it would be just like growing them mounted. If you have a problem with fast drying now, I would not go in that direction.

Thanks for this post! 6 years back, when I got my second orchid- a phal type dendrobium from home depot, it was in this coconut husk thing. It died because it was in a pot, with this squished in it... I had no idea what it was, and thought it was just one slab of bark with the plant growing in it. anyways, it died, a few months after ;), but I always wondered what that was. oh, and the roots had pulled the sections together, so you could not get it off, and I guess the coconut was decintegrating on the inside :(

so thanks for the post! :)

yeah, i have one mounted in spagnum moss on a wooden mount that someone built and it dries out very quickly. In fact it dries out within a few hours of watering it. I've been considering repotting it. The big thing here is that i didn't know how well those coconut husk things held water. By the replies that i have recieved, i'm guessing that they don't hold moisture for long.