Thanks for the responses everyone! Toni, up until late Fall I was feeding it every other week with Miracle Grow with a shot of Super Thrive once a month. Since it's gotten colder I've slacked off on the fertilizer. I've also switched to Eleanor's VF-11, which I feed in a diluted dose once every month or two until Spring. I keep trying to treat my plants like they're dormant but most of them don't really seem to want to go to sleep! It's easy for plants to get confused around here where we have some 7 seasons a year as opposed to the usual 4! But no, no pets or kids. What I mean by sever is that a particular spot on the stem will just sort of break down and rot, I guess? It is usually a clean cut. It's like the tissue just seperates. The huge flower on my Cattleya did the same thing after it was finished blooming. It was like someone just came by with a really sharp knife and lopped it off. The leaves are fairly healthy looking though when they drop. I will say that it hasn't happened for awhile either. Mr Subjunctive, I'll try to get a picture next time it happens. I wish I'd taken a picture of the one that seperated in a bunch of places, that was weird.

you could do whatever you like at this point, once it roots. You can plant it and keep the soil moist until repoting is needed or you can keep it how it is now and just change the water every once in awhile until you get as much roots as desired. :) hope this helped the slightest bit .

It's not a bother at all. Adding 50% peat to an otherwise unacceptably water-retentive soil is helpful, but you can see it's only marginally effective, even using only the mind's eye./ If you start with a very water retentive soil, and mix it with half perlite, what exactly is accomplished? We know that there is still enough fine particles in the mix to entirely fill the spaces between the perlite particles, so aeration and drainage aren't improved. The primary benefit of adding large volumes of perlite to heavy (water-retentive) media comes from the fact that perlite isn't internally porous, so it takes up space that would otherwise be occupied by fine particles and filled with water. IOW, it acts as ballast. In order to maximize the benefit perlite can offer, you would need to screen out the fine particles and use a volume of screened perlite sufficient to ensure there would be an insufficient volume of fine particles to fill all the air spaces between the perlite particles, and that would be somewhere in the range of 80% screened perlite. Larger volumes of perlite are helpful because they reduce the volume of water a soil CAN hold, and that allows better aeration to return to a larger fraction of the soil faster; but as noted, it doesn't help much with drainage or aeration unless its volume is greater than the threshold % it takes to ensure all the spaces between the perlite particles aren't filled with fine material. Perlite also doesn't reduce the ht of the perched water column (depth of the saturated soil after a full saturation) until it reaches the threshold level where the air spaces between perlite particles aren't entirely filled by fine matter. Pine bark and perlite are almost made for each other. Perlite and peat, mixed, can't offer near the drainage/aeration potential of a perlite pine bark mix. The perlite particles, even small ones, wedge between the flat bark pieces, creating very large pockets of air that don't occur in peat or other fine particles. That allows you to add either bark fines or peat back into the mix to adjust water retention, and still have a LOT of air porosity at container capacity (medium fully saturated). You don't need to worry about what's acceptable to me. I'm good with whatever you decide is right for you. I'm not here to criticize your choices, rather, I am here to provide the information you and others need to weigh the cost of materials, time, and effort against the potential gains. If someone tells you Miracle-Gro et al similar offer potential equal or similar to a soil designed to minimize excess water retention (perched water), that's a conversation I want to be a part of. Being able to go a week or two between waterings is convenient, but the convenience comes at a cost. I point out the cost or lost potential, and you decide what best fits your needs. There should be no surprise in the idea that what best suits the grower and what best suits the plant are more often than not, mutually exclusive. BTW - that tip about holding the pot over a sink, lowering it, then sharply reversing direction to upward is a VERY good way to rid smaller pots of excess water. I use it ALL THE TIME on small starts - especially cuttings. Al

I have a leaf that fell off while repotting. It has the stem part of the leaf, cut off or not? Will it root better in soil or water? Different options online...which method have you used?