Self-watering pots with leca

[SouthPark]

Originally Posted by orchidphile

It's amazing, isn't it? I'm sitting here looking at oncidiums, cattleyas, vandas, phals, etc., etc., all supposedly having different needs and all thriving in my self-watering system. They pretty much all thrived in regular semi-hydro too, except for the vandas.

Absolutely! Absolutely amazing in that once some golden rules of orchid growing are realised (known), then a lot of the issues that a lot of people once had in the past become significantly reduced or even eliminated.

The wicking water system started off with wicking material - microfibre, wipe material, or other material - that goes down into water, which the water runs up the material. It was then connected up to say the base of a pseudobulb or rhizome (or something) of an orchid that had very little roots, or maybe even no roots - and the idea was to keep moist the rhizome area or minimal root area - without rotting. An airy environment with good air movement allowed for this.

The idea of wicking with good aeration to roots is the important thing. So whether the material is a suitable cloth material or LECA etc is just fine - as long as the material can be used to keep wicking the water and good aeration to the roots is maintained, then it should be possible to grow an orchid based around that method. Naturally, some maintenance is required every once in a while, as expected. The maintenance typically or classically requires pot handling, lifting of pot with hands, cleaning things etc.

For your reservoir system, maybe a water level indicator on the side of the reservoir, with a hole/window for topping-up water would be workable.

Just got to watch out for configurations that aren't able to provide adequate aeration to the roots, which also can have other negative spin-off effects such as creating conditions that might eventually produce certain kinds of unwanted fungus/bacteria - or maybe algae too (where algae might not at first appear to be a problem).