Saturday, February 27, 2016

Last ditch effort

Home Depot Orchid was the one that kept this madness going. Lately, he has been the one that has been ailing. There was a spike, but the spike only lasted a couple of weeks.


Normally, when the flowers fade, the stem turns brown and dried and shriveled. This is not how it normally looks. If you look down below, one of the leaves turned yellow all of a sudden and the others don't look that good.


The yellow leaf actually fell off while I was taking these pictures. But now, you can see the two topmost leaves. They look dimply. Phalaenopsis leaves shouldn't look dimply. They should be plump and smooth. Also, that yellow green color means that something is off.

The next step is to take this guy out of the pot and have a look at the roots. From above, you can see that there are a couple of viable roots but we need to see what he looks like in the bark.


Home Depot Orchid has some fat and white roots but I think most of those were "above ground". The ones buried in the bark are dried and pretty much dead. From the other side, he looks like this:


He's not fully dead yet so there is still hope! I cut off all the dried and dead parts so you can see the separation of "dead matter" and viable roots:


There's not much of him left but there is hope. That sickly leaf also started to fall off in the process so with a gentle tug, I was also about to separate it from the plant body.

I made it a new home. This container is one of those clear plastic shoeboxes. I filled it with some sphagmum moss. I've never had good luck with the "sphag and bag" method. Sphag and bag involves placing an ailing plant, usually without ANY roots in a plastic bag with either a damp paper towel or a little bit of sphagmum moss. My plant usually ends up grown some fuzzy white moss.

Instead, I'm aiming for a terrarium like environment. The moss is wet so it's got a little bit of moisture. The roots aren't buried but are touching the moss so it can get some moisture.



I've placed it on the window sill but I should probably move it a little bit away since I do have the cover gently sitting on top. I don't want it to get too hot and end up baking to death.


This is a last ditch effort. He will either recover a bit, or we're going to have to say good bye.

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