Neo loses
 

Hi all;
As much as I hate to admit it I sometimes lose plants. While most of my Neos are doing well I have lost one from time to time. I suppose misery loves company but I would like to hear of some of your Neo losses, not to open up old wounds but to help heal mine! I'll go first. I lost Neo. Kouen today. Probably my favorite neo of all time but it never came out of it's winter rest. Just pinged off a leaf or two at a time until no more... Roots never really seemed to start growing like my other Neos. :(

I'll be looking for a replacement but until then color me blue...

Instead of wallowing in misery, I'll do you one better.

Neofinetias don't have a winter rest.

You need to water them year-round, just less during the cooler months.

Maybe that's what's causing the losses, idk.

You know, I was wondering about this myself. This species is native to the Ryukyu Islands and it doesn't really snow there. The climate is subtropical, so it gets a lot of precipitation. The flora and fauna there are very similar to what's found in the Philippines, so you would think that Phalaenopsis culture would work well with neos.

Neo losses are part of our growing pains! I have lost more than I can count. I have lost a Koeun as well plus a few valuable ones. Kouens are hard to grow, even in Japan. I have notice that with them it needs a little more humidity around the leaves than others. They don't have many roots to begin with so in my lesson I repeatedly put a plastic hood over the leaves every two weeks to plump the leaves up (they look desiccated most of the time). Once they plump up under lights for week or two I return them to the other neos .... I find that it works like that.

As for winter rest, I do decrease the temp and hold off water to dry them completely before watering again. This means the moss is crispy both top and bottom for 2-3 days, then I water after wetting the top (a crucial step as moss is impermeable to water when crisp)... I fertilize only once or twice from Oct-Feb with fish emulsion. The rest of the time is RO water. Day temp in this period is around 20-25C and nights around 12-16C. I notice this rest encourages more flowers than no rest.


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I'm ryan and I lost my beloved kinrokaku, isechabo and multiple seds to rot. I also can't grow my plants in moss because moss hates me and hurts me by killing my plants. Moss can pound dirt.

I grow under t5 lamps in a grow tent that is pumped full of humid air. I have transitioned my plants to sh or just using hydroton as a medium and now my plants, those that have fully recovered or were acquisitioned post rot are all doing great.


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Neos do have winter rest, rest in a sense of a season when plants are not actively growing. Well, I guess that is a definition of the rest that I did not need to spell out.

With rest, water is of course needed to stay alive. As mentioned above, it needs less watering than summer but still needs water.

I'm no expert on neos, but I know where they grow.
There maybe local varieties since they grow in quite extensive areas in the far east.

Some might experience "mild" winter, but some do get snowed on, but they do not occur where winter is freezing cold, which will kill them.
For example, in the southern tip of South Korea, neos grow on the rocks near the ocean. Winter is mild in a sense that it never really freezes, but it is very very cold and it snows.

Ryan- how does rot set in? and did you try anything to save, like spraying??

My neo from last year (it is just a plain white variety but I love it) is coming back to spiking now.
My other one is a hybrid with something else and I believe it is still too small to flower.

Anyways, I'm asking so I know what to look out for.

Thanks all for sharing.
I know that Kouen is a harder one to grow. But I figured since my others are responding to Spring so vigerously that I must be doing something right. The only other Neo that is suffering so in my Neo from China. It seems to be slow to awake as well. Perhaps from a colder area?

Okay, hope this helps.

I lost a single-growth Beni-kaede to bacteria and a big Amami piecemeal to experimentation.

If we are including Sedirea, I lost two shimas to idiopathy (two standards are doing great under the same conditions).

How did you treat them during the winter??

One reason I was hesitant about getting a neo was that I could not provide enough cooling in the winter. I grow indoor and it's warm here. Someone said theirs are fine without cool winter, so I grabbed one when I saw a nice big one for a test.
Mine is coming back to spiking, but I will have to see how good the flowering is.

For plants that need cool winter, they do not usually just die the following year when not given cool enough winter, but they will gradually decline.







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What do you mean by experimentation? what did you do with your neos??

Stuck a piece on an olla, stuck another piece onto a lava rock (I do have some success with another plant on lava). I must have done one other thing but can't think what right now.