Orchid ID; and are they salvageable?
 

Hi All,

For your consideration, next in my quest to salvage the sad orchids around my new home. 1) What am I looking at here and 2) can I save them? I see some obvious disease issues going on.

Aloha

They look like something in the Vanda alliance. I'm guessing the black on leaves is spme form of mildew. Many people grow Vandas bare-root, watering the roots daily.

Could be Vandaceous, but that long rhizome makes me not so sure. Will have to think on that and look around the garden in the morning to see if I can find something that matches more...Maybe even not orchid. At any rate, I see roots, always a good thing. Maybe some sort of fungal issue on the leaves, I suspect that with better culture won't be a long range problem. Another candidate for a mount, whatever it is.

It's interesting about the rhizome ... I'll send a few more photos tomorrow, but I have a bunch of what look like Vandaceous orchids (now that I've had a chance to read up on that a little) that were planted in the ground, and are growing up a cinder brick wall or staked up that look like they're on stems ... prolly not worth describing further. I'll send a photo in the AM.

A bunch of my plants are in this kind of condition.

Those do look like Vandas... the one you showed at the start of this thread could well be the same, having lost roots.... what looks like a rhizome or stolon may just be the stem of a Vanda that has lost leaves (which they do when stressed) with some keikis growing on it - it's trying to survive. The roots in dirt are probably mostly pretty rotted. The challenge will be to encourage new ones (which will mostly probably be aerial roots farther up the stem) So if you pot them up in large bark, and keep them well watered, they all have a fighting chance. You have humidity and nearly ideal temperatures. How about rain? As I recall, Lanai gets less than some of the islands that have mountains in the middle to catch the clouds, so you will probably have to help nature when she doesn't provide enough water. Don't worry much about fertilizer until you have some roots to absorb it. For now, it's all about roots...

Great! Thanks for the insight. I can work with that.

In terms of rain, while Lanai as an island gets less than others (We're in Maui's shadow and we're not very tall), town itself is at about 1,650 feet just on the leeward side of the Lanai Hale (a 3,300+ft ridge that bisects most of the island) so we still get orographic and/or convective clouds, mists and light showers almost daily. We've been here for a couple of years, and I'm not sure that the relative humidity has dropped below 50% in that time; when the weather is nice, it seems to hover in the 60-70% range, and obviously higher when we have our afternoon mist or rain. All in all, pretty good orchid weather as far as I can tell.

Thanks again for your help.

Vandas are very thirsty. The roots need to get wet every day. A little mist might not be enough. They also require much more nitrogen than most other orchids to grow and bloom well. Martin Motes writes there should be a clearly visible, pale green zone of new growth at the base of emerging leaves that is 1 centimeter in width. If narrower, more fertilizer is indicated. If wider, less.

Have they ever bloomed for you? If not, I would suspect not enough fertilizer. Plants in fast growth in warm to hot climates can use far more fertilizer than those growing on cold continental windowsills.

I think these babies need roots before they can do anything... Mist and humidity (as supplied by Mother Nature) along with rain supplemented with hose if it doesn't rain should encourage roots. They clearly want to live... OP sort of "inherited" them with the property, they were planted in dirt (which I am sure did a number on the roots). So It's going to take some love, and tincture of time to get them to where they can benefit from the finer points of Vanda culture.

I've seen quite a few Vandas planted in soil in Hawaii, including ones without terete ancestry.