Just last night I finished writing a piece about why you can't amend a water-retentive medium with coarse material. I wrote it specifically as a rejoinder to the very often repeated advice that adding 1 part of perlite to one or 2 parts of water-retentive medium will somehow yield a 'good' medium. I plan on posting it as a thread because it's important for growers to understand that a half measure won't necessarily improve your lot by half. Punked by Perlite? In any forum that is even marginally related to container growing, you'll find the oft repeated advice that you can make a silk purse from a sow's ear by adding together equal measures of an overly water-retentive potting media and perlite. Many growers erroneously believe that you can start with a medium comprised of fine particulates and miraculously make it better by adding perlite. You can't ..... and I'll explain why. Let our starting point be any soil you're so uncomfortable with you feel it needs 'amending' to increase aeration and drainage. Store shelves from coast to coast offer up hundreds of examples, and fora are full of threads that offer suggestions re how to fix them. If there's a standardize version of the advice, it would have to be, “Mix 1 or 2 parts of it [and it rarely seems to matter what 'it' is] with 1 part of perlite and all will be well; but …… will it? Let's look closer. The answer is – the suggested mixture will not perform any where near as well as you might intuit. Just how is perlite supposed increase aeration when it has no internal porosity? By what miracle does a nonporous particle added to a water-retentive container medium, or a bowl of oatmeal for that matter, increase air porosity? Let's say that you have a gallon of Miracle-Gro potting media - the stuff with the moisture control feature, and to it you add a gallon of perlite. Adding perlite is pretty much the same as adding BBs or marbles. If you screened the fines out of the perlite, you end up with 2 gallons of medium, twice the volume; however the double volume ONLY comes with the amount of aeration that was in the gallon of medium that so needed fixing. We sure didn't get any aeration from the perlite. There is no way to deny that with twice the volume of medium and no more than the volume of air already contained in the original gallon you've actually reduced the per volume total air porosity by 50%; AND, the more perlite you add, the worse it gets. Total porosity continues to diminish as you add perlite until you reach a threshold level of coarse material that occurs at the point where there is no longer enough of the original fine material in the newly created medium to fill all the spaces between the large particles of perlite. That will not occur in most practical applications until the fraction of large perlite particles is in the 75-90% range. If your medium consists of 75-90% perlite, it would be misleading to suggest that you're growing in medium X amended with perlite, when you're growing in perlite amended with medium X. We don't take coffee with our sugar or cream, we take sugar or cream with our coffee. In essence, when you begin with a poor medium based on fine particulates, and start adding coarse material like pine bark, perlite, pumice ....... it gets much worse (from the plant's POV) before it starts to get better. If you add an insufficient volume of coarse material – it stays worse. Perlite's primary benefit lies in the fact that it occupies space that might otherwise be filled with saturated medium. Simply put, media comprised of fine particles with perlite added will hold less water on a per volume basis than the same media without perlite, but the aeration level in the fraction of the medium available for root colonization will be roughly the same with or without perlite. Visualize adding a pint of perlite to a pint of sand, then ask yourself whether or not the perlite helped by adding aeration. The answer is a resounding NO. Did it help with drainage? Only to the degree it decreased the amount of water the medium can hold on a per volume basis, but this is something of a hollow victory. More on that in a subsequent paragraph. If we want to take advantage of what well-aerated media have to offer, we need to understand how to EFFECTIVELY use the materials at our disposal. If you have on hand pine bark in an appropriated size, perlite, and sphagnum peat, you can mix them in such a way that the end result is a highly productive medium for container culture; or, the same ingredients can be combined in ways that render them practically unusable. Growers would be much better served to use water-retentive media like as it is from the bag, in combination with the well-reasoned use of ballast in the bottom of the pot than to make a wreck of their medium by adding an insufficient amount of perlite or other coarse materials. The science applies to total porosity and air porosity at container capacity. When using perlite as an 'amendment' to water retentive media, it would also be better to determine the height of the PWT the soil supports (easy peasy), then mix 4 parts of perlite with 1 part of the medium, and fill the bottom of the pot with that mix to the ht of the PWT. Then top it off with the water-retentive mix - unamended. This would be much more effective than amending the entire volume of medium in the pot with perlite. Remember - perlite's job is to take up space, and the space it occupies cannot be colonized with roots. This is the 'hollow victory' I mentioned in a preceding paragraph. While perlite takes up space that might otherwise be full of saturated soil, and in that reduces the volume of water the soil can hold, it also reduces the volume of soil available for root colonization. Space available to roots to grow is still filled with fine particles, which still hold roughly the same amounts of water they did before the perlite was added. Many things can be used to significant benefit if used judiciously, most of those things can put us at a disadvantage if used capriciously. Understanding the role of perlite, and other ingredients that serve as potential additions to container media are steps toward getting to the point where we're far more likely to be limited by things like climate, light levels, and humidity …… than our own skills. Al

You can either attach them to a dead branch...or to a live branch. My vote is for a live branch. Some possible candidates... Acacia Albizia Aralia Araucaria Beaucarnea Caesalpinia Cassia Coffee tree Dracaena Elm Ficus Hibiscus Magnolia/Michelia Pachira aquatica Pandanus Phoenix roebelenii Podocarpus Polyscias Radermachera Samanea Schefflera Yucca Clearly they aren't all equally suitable to grow inside and be everybody's phorophyte. But that's what experimenting is all about. At the last show I went to a random lady said, "if you're not killing plants...then you're not stretching yourself as a gardener". Which of these possible phorophytes will give you the most branch for your buck? One "shortcut" is that several of them can be grown from fairly large cuttings. Another technique for greater girth is...if your climate is suitable and you have the space (and patience), you can plant the phorophyte in the ground and then dig it up when the branch is thick enough. Perhaps for a typical Phalaenopsis the branch should be at least as thick as your wrist. In order for the Phal's roots to attach to the branch...the orchid has to be very firmly secured. I use a slip knot method to maintain tension in the 20lb fishing line. If you do it right...you'll be able to water two plants at once...the Phal and its phorophyte. If the Phal is thirstier than its host, then you can attach it with some moss. You can also give the host a faster draining medium. Then the orchid's roots would extend into the phorophyte's medium. Quite often bonsai growers use orchid mix as their medium. You can always raise the phorophyte's root crown above the soil line. This will help hedge against rot and provide a bit more surface area for the Phal. Plus, then you can see two sets of exposed roots...the Phal's and the phorophytes. In terms of watering frequency...it depends on several factors...the temperature, the phorophyte, its medium...and the quantity and type of moss you gave the Phal. Personally, I'd water the Phal as soon as I attached it...and then wait and see how many days it takes for it to look wilty. The next time I watered the Phal it would be a day or two before it was likely to show any signs of drought stress. Generally though, a newly mounted orchid will require more frequent waterings than it will when it has numerous roots (straws) crawling all over the branch. So at least initially, you'd want the phorophyte's medium to drain especially well. It might take some tweaking to get the drainage balance right...but attaching the Phal to a live branch will definitely increase the value to space ratio. You'll get more value for the same amount of space. Check out these nice blank canvases... This post was edited by epiphyte78 on Sat, Aug 2, 14 at 7:57

You are very welcome nca270 :) I recieved a cutting from a friend a while back in Florida. Thank you for sharing the agar agar jelly idea...maybe my next mission :) Happy gardening!

Hi Joy! Wish you could have made it ... iris always go fast! And don't worry about the 'big words' ... that's what Google is for! ;) As the 'worm lady' I just wanted to say that I added an update to my 'Garden Worm Bonanza' thread, after talking with the Ag Station about my worm invasion yesterday. You might want to check it out. All good news it seems ... be grateful you have worms, however colossal they may be! They couldn't really explain the size, except to offer the theory that they have been gorging on REALLY good compost (I still think it's global warming!!) Anyway, welcome and hope you can make it in the spring! Here is a link that might be useful: Worm Thread