I feel the potting material needs to match all the circumstances. Are you always available to water? Do you like to water.? If you are a busy person you may prefer plastic pots with material that holds a lot of water. Or clay if you are heavy handed with the hose. That is me so I use a lot of lava rock. In clay pots. Then what does the plant like? Some like vanda orchids don't take any medium. Bulbos like it wet. Others like it dry. When making those decisions I try to understand what is happening in nature with the orchid in questions. And try to incorporate that into deciding what material to use. Any diverse collection will need to use various potting materials.

Blue, you talk about watering "as I thought needed" and you refer to "I think they get enough lighting". For some of us such 'seat of the pants' flying is unacceptably instinctual. If it works at all is fairly easy to determine but if there are problems then perhaps a move to more objective methods is in order? Beginning with light, of course, it rarely is enough in North America in the best of places. Indoors is even worse. There simply is no leeway for niceties like 'diffused' or 'dappled' or 'bright shade'. Truth be told, greenhouse growers in the north latitudes use shadecloth to control temperature not to reduce light levels!! So, no, I don't think you have sufficient light unless you are supplementing the dappled west window light with artificial light. I find that a fixed day of the week (or two) on which to water does less harm than the catch as catch can approach. With CHC, or any medium for that matter, you are not so much waiting for the medium to reach a certain level of dryness before you water again as you are topping up the reservoir of water held in suspension before it runs completely dry. Read that again, everyone. It is key to the overwhelming misconception about watering orchids in North America and similar environs. In situ when an orchid receives rain the many crannies in the bark of its mount and the overgrowths of moss and the usual high humidity of the sub/tropical environment all conspire to ensure that rarely if ever will the roots see anything approaching total dryness. Not just phals but Catts too. Climb a tree some summer afternoon when it hasn't rained in days. The bark will have a vaguely damp feel to it and this is quite enough. In a tropical environment the bark would be damper still. When you water a pot full of bark the moisture level will still be quite high the next day, the day after that and maybe even the day after that. In nature although still not totally dry, the root environment will admittely be much less soggy than in the pot. Do you really think that waiting seven days to water again gives the roots anything approaching a natural wet/dry cycle? No it doesen't. Nor do you want it to for in North America, especially indoors, we haven't the humidity levels nor the guarantee of daily rainfal or dew, etc. We may as well learn to rely on the inbuilt capacity of the medium to ensure that adequate gas exchange is possible regardless of the amount of moisture present and water as often as neccessary to ensure that the moisture level never falls below zero. But as far as there being a maximum, there is no such thing. Every day watering while wasteful of water should not be harmful if other aspects of culture are exemplary! In North America, however, things are rarely exemplary and a whole regime of countermeasures has arisen to compensate for reduced light, low humidity, temerature extremes, etc. I haven't seen these measures work to my satisfaction so I am trying (and preaching) a method of creating the environment that promotes vigorous growth and development of the orchid like natural conditions do rather than attempting via water starvation regimens to forestall problems brought about by insufficient light and/or insufficient daytime max temp (in winter), low humidity, etc. Finally, from Blue's language I am pretty certain, like Clara, that s/he is referring to CHC and not coir. And I do believe CHC can be obtained pressed into bricks though mine did come loose in a bag. H

The usual response I get to coconut husk chips is "huh?" No one in my area that I've found so far has even heard of them but for one other fellow Citrus Forum member who lives here. He buys them from a supplier in Orlando and was kind enough to get me a bale last time. I'm using the recipe that Millet gave once and so far it works for me. Here is what I do. After properly pre-soaking and then pre-treating the CHC's with CaNO3 and MgSo4 during the last rinse I then blend my growing medium mixture usually one cubic foot at a time. I start with the basic mix of 4 parts CHC (1/4 or 1/2 inch chips or a mix of the two sizes) to one part peat moss and to this basic mixture I add the following ingredients per 1-cubic foot: .57-lbs. (258-gms) 23-4-8 one year slow release fertilizer. .48-lbs. (218-gms) Dolomite .08-lbs. ( 36-gms) Regular water soluble fertilizer w/o trace minerals. .08-lbs. ( 36-gms) STEM (Soluble Trace Element Mix) Blend entire mixture well. I then begin my regular fertilizer applications one month after transplanting the tree into the above medium. 1 cubic foot = 7.481 liquid gallons or 6.429 dry gallons I have varied from this slightly by using 1.5 parts peat to 4 parts CHCs, but now that I've had a chance to observe my plants for some weeks now the recommended 4:1 is probably sufficient. I could not find any one year slow release fertilizer so I'm using some four month stuff, but given Florida's warm climate it probably releases faster than that. .....Alan.

What an interesting experiment! Citrus and Orchids, which prefer dryer soil and Alocasias which thrive in bogs, all love CHCS! I have lots of tropical fruit trees in CHCs and all have outperformed others in the ground or in regular potting mix. Roots in CHCs hold them so tightly so it can be near impossible to separate rootball from CHCs. Alocasias/Colocasias are much appreciated here. There are common ones and also many rare and beautiful ones. I have Borneo Giant- which develops leaves 12' long and up to 6' wide. I also have some that only get 6-10' tall, growing in the swampy area of the property. Thanks for sharing your experience with the chips vs potting soil. Lisa