I did fuss with it a lot at the beginning, rotted a lot of its roots, tried to mount it, dried some more roots, took it off the mount, potted into moss and clay and let it be. It lost some leaves, then grew some new ones, grew some new roots. Now it looks a bit on a smaller side, but still alive and healthy.
Two spikes didn't do much all this time.
Now both of them activated, but they are not growing the buds, both of them started a keiki:
One already unwrapped the leaf, another one just started at the bottom node.
Since plant just grew a new leaf and the roots seem ok, I checked recently, I refuse to beleive that it is going to die soon and now desperately growing those keikis to save its genetic material.
What would be the other explanation? I didn't even know cornu-cervi liked to grow keikis, I thought it was equestris or pulchra and lueddemanniana thing.
Now, it is fourth plant that started to grow keiki instead of blooms on the existing spikes. Is it something I do wrong? I fertilize with dilluted solution of balanced 20-20-20 all purpose fertilizer, maybe that's a problem and I should switch to specialized orchid fert with higher middle number?
Any ideas?
It really sounds like something in your conditions is pushing the spiking phals towards keikis instead of flowers.
ReplyDeleteThis article (http://www.hrt.msu.edu/faculty/Runkle/Orchid/Articles/Growing_the_Best_Phalaenopsis_Part_3.pdf)
suggests that temperatures above 82F (28C) while the spike is young can induce keikis. So maybe your phals are responding to some temperature fluctuations you had?
Well, they were at around 21-22C before the orchid tank and now in the tank it is around 25C, so definitely not above 28C. Somebody on Orchid Board suggested that low light could trigger that and my plants were in pretty low light conditions before the tank.
ReplyDeleteNow they receive bright light and I hope for blooms for a change :).