Homemade fertilizer

[Ray]

I do not apply compounds to my orchid media that require further processing to be of benefit, and that includes any fillers in fertilizers. For the most part, such fillers are the easy-to-disperse solids that the nutrients are soaked up in, and they are intended for lawns and for mixing in soil media, not for orchid growing, which for all practical purposes is hydroponic in nature. Adding such fillers to orchid media will help suffocate the root system.

The bottom line is that most orchids need to have nutrition supplied to them as ions in dilute solution. The simpler the process to supply them, the better.