Vanilla Orchid isn't growing well/losing leaves and no real root growth
 

Hi there! I received a Vanilla orchid as a gift for Christmas. It was meant to have live roots when I got it. However, it only had one aerial root that is maybe a quarter inch long that survived (all others were DOA). My cutting is about 3 feet long. At first I did not have it in a medium that drained well so the leaves rapidly turned leathery dropped. I now have it in a better draining medium but my poor guy only has 2 leaves left and they are only barely hanging in there. It looks like it is wanting to grow some roots. It keeps getting little buds that are 2 - 3mm that look nice and green like roots. However, after a bit of time they stop growing and turn brownish and look a little bark like. Has any one else had this issue? Or some one steer me in the direction of some info I can read about this that is reliable? Every time I try and search I cannot find any one who has had this problem.

Vanillas climb up trees in humid environments and produce aerial roots that stay green by getting humidity from the air and are watered when it rains by the water that runs down the trunk and branches of the tree.

I am not certain of your location but if you live somewhere tropical or very warm, this can be planted outside. If you live somewhere cold (like I do), you can spray the roots every day with distilled or rain water. Your post can also be wrapped with a material that retains some moisture and gives the roots something to grow into.

I keep a spray bottle near my Vanilla and spritz the roots every day.

Good luck!

Unfortunately, I live in an apartment in a city so I cannot plant outside. I just looked it up any way and I believe I am in zone 6b?? My tap is hard though my phalaenopsis don't seem to mind, so it never occured to me to use distilled! I feel silly for that now. Do you think that could be the reason the roots seamingly stop growing a a few milimeters long? I will also try wrapping my post! Thank you for that info. Do you have a recommended material with which to do so?

Definitely agree with leafmite. If humidity is pretty good, and temperature range is good, these vanilla orchids will thrive ------ and won't stop growing even if we wanted them to! They'll actually get very long and even out of control, unless we give them a post or trellis to stay on.

Check the humidity in the growing area. If humidity stays low for long periods of time, then that sort of root drying can happen.

A humidifier could help, but make sure there's some air-movement - to avoid mold/fungus growing on walls or the plant etc.

That could be an indicator of low humidity. If you wrap a pole that would help give the roots a nice damp humid environment to grow in to. I’ve seen people make totems out wood, pvc pipe, and even long skinny blocks of styrofoam. You can just wrap the totems with New Zealand sphagnum moss and secure it with fishing line, then strap the vines to the whole thing

Is there any sort of til of thumb when picking a pole size? Right now my guy is still using the one he came with. Which is fairly narrow and perhaps a touch too short.

I really don't know. I am told that they grew many types of Vanilla at Akron University's greenhouse by making loops out of chicken wire and wrapping the vine around that way. Indoors, that is rather unpractical.
I grow mine with my other houseplants and orchids on a shelf and I do not have much space. I tried a burlap-wrapped styrofoam wreath but, unbeknownst to me, the post securing the wreath pulled out of the pot and fell from the shelf, taking the roots out of the pot and the vine suffered (so, I am not recommending that any longer). I am starting over with a cutting and a coir-wrapped post I found on Amazon. I bought a set of four posts and as the vine expands, I can just add posts for height. So far, so good.

The posts I bought:

Robot Check

My apologies to OP for going slightly off topic, Leafmite's post prompted me to present the following tangent, since I was recently gifted a vanilla orchid... my #8 hahahah. Unsure if it'll root, but, if it does, here are a couple ideas I had for helping the vine grow:

1. something similar to a dragon-fruit post, except a bit shorter (3ft?), and, the top portion would be a long, narrow rectangle. The idea is that the orchid grows up short, and you just wrap it horizontally on top/side of the structure. You can do this indefinitely.. you'll get layers. Like an ogre. I won't take credit for this, I saw something similar on some forum a while back and it's stuck with me.

2. Four strong, skinny posts, 6-8ft tall, from a square with sides of 12-18 inches. Purchase nylon medical gauze netting, and fill with washed coconut coir fibers, moss, or anything else fluffy with moisture properties, then wrap/tie this up and around all the four poles in a light helical manner. Train the orchid to grow up it. Additionally, you can do it a bit at a time, always add more. In fact, the posts could be connecting kind (I have a bunch of these aluminum poles from conference banner popups).

Both would have a foundation in a in a bucket/pot/etc on casters to allow one to move it, since they don't really need much rooting space.

Thoughts?

At the moment, my vanilla orchids are just getting longer and longer, and all I have been doing is to just manually coil them up like a rope heheheh. But soon, I think I will put them under a tree or something and allow them to climb.

Snake basket! :biggrin: