On Watering and Potting In General

We have an eclectic array of pots in our collection partly because we leave things in whatever they came to us in sometimes, at least for a while. My general impression is that orchids tend in two directions in their water preferences: either they like to dry out between waterings, or they don't and prefer to be evenly moist.

For the things that like to be evenly moist like Phals we keep them in sphagnum in clay pots. This has been working extremely well for us. We even unpotted our Love Orchid at one point because we were worried about the roots, only to find that there was not a single dead root! We said holy shit! This system must be a good one. We let them dry almost all the way out (tested by sticking my finger in the medium) before watering again. Depending on the weather this can take 1-2 weeks. Bulbophyllums also like to be evenly moist. Since they have such shallow roots I have been putting them in 1-2 inch deep shallow baskets or pots filled with moss.

For things that like to dry out like cattleyas, oncidiums, vandas, and epis, we keep them mostly in baskets with fir bark mix, although sometimes in clay pots depending on what we have handy. This has worked really well. Once the medium feels dry when I stick my finger in it, it's time to water. For these I generally lean towards less water is better since the roots can have a tendancy to rot. Waiting one more day doesn't usually hurt.

Vandas are seriously high maintenance unless you have a green house and sprinkler system, which we don't. When we first got them the leaves started shriveling and looking so sad. One was in a wooden basket and the other was mounted in a tiny clay pot with the roots hanging down. We were spraying them daily, and they were still sad, so we moved to twice a day spraying. This seemed to help. We decided they just needed more humidity, so we put some loose large chunks of bark, wine corks, and a few bits of moss in around the roots inside the basket. We repotted the other one into a basket also and did the same. Now we have to spray only once a day and they are no longer shrivelled! We were proud of our inventive solution, because no one I've seen grows vandas like this.

When I repot into a larger home for my babies, I get stingy with watering sometimes for a while because they often don't have much in the way of roots to dry out so much medium fast enough. So at these times, usually only for a few months, I make sure I wait until the medium is dry for my finger stick before I water, even if it takes 2-3 weeks. I sometimes spray the top or put a bit of moss near any new growths or new roots to keep them humid enough. We made up a mnemonic device "bark over moss, major root loss" because it seems tempting to mix moss and bark, but it really just makes the bark rot faster and it takes way too long then for the medium to dry out properly leading to root death. Moss over bark is ok, but not the other way around. If anything starts taking more than 2 weeks to dry out I start getting nervous that it will have problems.