The Phal abuse ends here. - Orchid Board

King_of_orchid_growing:) · #11 04-28-2012, 07:34 PM

This whole, "water once or twice a week liberally," piece of advice should not be taken too literally. They are guidelines. Different micro-environments, different types of pots, different potting media, and different methods of growing, will often dictate the frequency by which you will be watering your orchids. Do not get hung up on these guidelines, they don't take into account a whole lot of specific details you need to take into consideration.

Your main focus should be to replicate, to the best of your ability, an environment that best simulates the natural habitat of where your orchids originally come from in the wild, using whatever tools, materials, and methods you can gain access to in order to get you there.

With most Phals, that happens to be a tropical Asian swamp forest, in which the orchids are usually found growing on the trunks or branches of trees with little to no moss growing on them, that are usually partially submerged in water during the wet/monsoon season - which is usually around spring or summer. These areas are usually fairly humid due to the moisture that comes from the ocean during the drier seasons where there is still rainfall, but less so during the wet/monsoon season, when the rain falls in buckets, and the humidity gets unbearably uncomfortable. The swamp water is being wicked up the trees pretty consistently.

I have provided links to people's blogs and YouTube videos on several occasions in other people's posts recently, as well as in the past. I highly recommend checking those out.

I don't recommend providing humidity for your Phals via spray misting their leaves. The water droplets have a tendency to collect inside the crown and not dry out fast enough before it causes suffocation and death to the cells in the crown area of the plant - particularly when they are usually being grown inside a house. This is especially true of Phals that are being unwittingly grown upright - a growth orientation that is actually very unnatural for Phals. In the wild, they hang perpendicularly or pendulously off of the trees they grow on.