What to do with Vanilla?
My mom is the orchid lover and collector, I just help taking care of the orchids.
Anyway, she has a Vanilla plant, in a container (inside another with rocks, so it won't fall over), resting against a wall (there is a support inside the container, made with bamboos and that is resting against the wall) and on a counter top. However, recently (two months? I think? Quarantine made me lose track of time) due to strong gusts of wind, the plant fell over and unfortunately, lost many, if not all, of the roots in the container. We thought that maybe, there was enough roots overall and it would just be like "nah, it was nothing". It does have a lot of aerial roots (some of them are around 1m each)
That wasn't the case. The leaves closer to the roots are yellowing out, and it's slowly climbing up. The stem itself is still green. It's just the leaves that are yellowing and then dying. I also have noticed that the good leaves have started to lose their deep green tone and instead are light green with yellow undertone. The tip of the plant was starting to put out a leaf, but that died and haven't been growing up anymore.
We tried using a root simulator to see if it could produce more roots in the container a couple of days after it fell down, but it didn't seem to be helping. We have been spraying the roots and leaves with water, to try to keep the humidity high (we are currently in dry season and this week in particular have been excessively dry, with afternoon humidity usually at 20%). We haven't been watering the pot frequently, just when the medium is dry. I have also added a bit of Bokashi fertlizer as I realized it's been a good while we haven't fertilized it. It's what I use on my tomatoes plants, so I had some of it and thought it wouldn't hurt the Vanilla.
I'll shortly take a couple of pics of the yellowing leaves and plant. It seems that once we started spraying it more frequently (we used to spray just twice a day, but because of recent alerts of super dry air, we decided to change to 4, 5 times a day), it have been slowing down the yellowing process.
Is it a sign that it's time to repot it? Or is it a matter of just being patient and keep spraying it more frequently?
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