Neofinetia falcata "Kibana"
 

Wise people of OB... I don't have any Neo's yet but I have rather fallen for this Neo. falcata "Kibana". Neofinetia falcata ‘Kibana’ | Elite Orchids

Does anyone have this in their collections who could give advise on care or it's suitability for my conditions.
I grow primarily in bark medium, on either east or west facing windowsills in the UK. I also have supplemental LED grow lights in my "orchid room" - the rest of the population would call it a spare bedroom but... :rofl:

I grow mine bare root, in little candle jars. Water twice a week in summer, once a week in winter, in South facing windows. Normal room temperatures, about 16C in winter mid 20s in summer.

super easy to grow. bark, moss, or no mix (I grow my neos mounded in the traditional style).

Kibana gets its yellow from ascocentrum (yes I know they are all considered vandas now) genes in the background.

If you were in the US I'd send you a piece...

I don't have this specific Neo, but have 2 others. I grew them in bark the first year, until one of them consistently grew all roots outside the pot. Non of them wanted to dive into the bark.

Someone on OB gave me the advise to grow it 'pot in pot' and that did the trick.

However, I have them 1.5 years now and despite it are established plants, they didn't flower for me. I had them outdoors during summer and previous year had them outdoors until temperatures went down to 10C.
This year I brought them in much earlier.

Thus, I have problems getting them to bloom.

A fellow member of OB, living in Germany, same latitude as I am growing the plants, managed to flower them. So must be possible for me, and for you too.

I uploaded some pictures from the 'pot in pot' method, if you might find them here on OB. If not I'll make new pictures to clarify what it looks like.

Be aware that the 'Kibana' plant with 99.99% certainty is a hybrid, and not the pure species.

All V. (Neo.) falcata with strong flower color are known to be hybrids (in Japan, if it looks like a Neo, they call it a Neo).

Neo's aren't hard to grow. They're like all orchids: Too much watering and you might run into issues, too little watering and they can tolerate it better, as a lot of orchids in the Vanda group can, than most, but you can eventually run into problems.

They're not heavy sun/light Vandas, medium light is perfectly fine for most (somewhat lower light for tiger stripe types, some fukurin/shima types, and green flower types).

I have quite a few of the Neo hybrid's that the Koreans and Japanese still call Neos, and they generally can handle roughly the same temperatures as the pure hybrids. They can't handle the cold as much as their pure Neo counterparts, but I've not subjected any of my plants to extremely cold conditions.

Bark works great for most, to give you an idea of what you could use OrchidWeb here in the US has a mix that's 1/3 each of

• Small and medium Orchiata
• small and medium horticultural charcoal
• small and medium perlite

You can replace the perlite with pumice/lava rock to make the pot a bit heavier if you feel like you need to.

I'm going to try leca this coming spring, as while the moss mounds are neat, they're a pain in the ass to make when you have a lot of plants. I'm not doing semi-hydro, I'm just doing plain old leca in the traiditional fuukiran pots with a filter on the bottom to prevent the medium from spilling out.