Ascocentrum ampullaceum

I just realized as I was trying to link to this post from the Updates post, that I never made a post about this plant! Oops! We got this at the Redland Orchid Festival last year in May 2012. It was flowering when we bought it. It was wired into a little maybe 3" clay pot with the roots just loose and hanging down. We sprayed it every morning, but the leaves started to shrivel pretty badly. Along with the other vanda, we started to spray it twice a day to see if it was just a moisture problem. The leaves plumped right back up. We decided to repot it into a 6" wooden basket and wrap the roots around inside the basket. We then put some large bark chunks, wine corks and a bit of moss in there to keep the humidity up more. Then it did just fine with once a day spraying. The plant has done pretty well. It started growing a lot more after I started using fertilizer water to spray it instead of plain water.

I started bloom boosting it in April because I knew it would flower in May. It did flower, but the spikes got sunburnt or too dried out at the tips and they didn't really elongate much. There were only a few flowers on each spike. That was pretty disappointing, but at least we knew we could make it happen. Next year we will try to cover the spikes a little or something maybe.

Lately the plant has been making roots, but the growing tips on them keep dying. We thought they might be getting too much sun, so we put a bit of loose coconut husk over them to provide a little shade. The coconut husk doesn't really retain much moisture, so I'm not worried about it staying too wet. We are keeping both the vandas outside the porch now because they get the best light there. Even if it rains on them a lot I'm not very concerned about the roots staying too wet and rotting because there's so little medium. If it rains for many days in a row we can always bring them on the porch.

Apparently we never took a picture of it either! The flowers are pink, and the leaves are supposed to get dark purple sun freckles. It is getting more of them now that it is in more sun again.