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I have read the data for habitats and yea it is true that orchids don't see the amount of K at one time that we could possibility give them at a high fertilizer dosage. I am not disputing that. I am sure that a lot of the members in my society have killed there fair share of orchids too. My point is that you could have great plants with normal fertilizer and not heaps of dead orchids if you do things correctly and balanced. Low K is not a bad idea, but I don't believe it is to the extent that K-lite is. I don't think it will solve everyones cultural problems. I think when you got on the kick about EC management you were more right on. I think you could have the same results with a normal fert, wating your EC(flushing more), and supplementing with calcium and magnesium instead of fertilizer every once in a while.I bet if you feed with K-lite at the recommended dose of 125ppm like was recommended with msu and didn't watch your EC you would have the same problems.
 
I bet if you feed with K-lite at the recommended dose of 125ppm like was recommended with msu and didn't watch your EC you would have the same problems.

I'm also seeing improvements in my mounted stuff that doesn't/can't accumulate TDS. These plants (probably 1/5 of my collection) can't be flushed, and no EC to monitor. They just plain old like it better.
 
My point is that you could have great plants with normal fertilizer and not heaps of dead orchids if you do things correctly and balanced.

I agree except what defines "correctly and balanced"? What defines an acceptable mortality rate? Or acceptable growth rate? 200 years of orchid growing in my opinion have really set some low standards.

As I've said before, you can get a car to go down the road at 50 miles and hour with the brakes and gas plastered to the floor.

But is that "correct and balanced"?

Unfortunately organism metabolism has a lot more than 2 pedals to push so finding correct and balanced will not be obvious.
 
I guess yet another way to look at it, why do you want to feed at 100ppm K if you have to flush 95% of it back out of the pot the next day?

In parallel with taking care of aquariums, sure you can dump a ton of food in the tank that the fish can't eat in 5 minutes and the rest just goes to rot on the bottom of the tank.

Then you have the option of vacuming and changing a ton of water, or cutting your feeding back in the first place and letting the filtration/biofilter take care of the waste the fish produce.
 
This paph (many years old) is also getting bigger and better and fed with the ''normal'' K levels. So how would Klike help this plant? What would happen to it? My feeling is there would be not much difference in the short term and in the long term possibly K deficiency (but possibly not) so whats the point? I still have trouble seeing the point.



WHat kind of paphio is this Mike? A villosum or gratrix?
 
I never said I was feeding at 100 ppm K. As long as you watch EC and things are not getting built up in the pot. You can use any fertilizer on the market to grow great plants. I will agree that the recommendations of higher doses like 125ppm is going to cause problems. But it is more a problem of to high concentrations of salts in general and not K specifically. Orchids like a lot cleaner water and more of a low constant source of nutrients. Some species and other genera may appreciate more K than is in K-lite and some plants may appreciate more at different times of the year or their cycle. So for a mixed collection I just don't want to use such a low K formula. I think I can get as good of results with any fert at a low dose, good water, and other cultural parameters in check.
 
I never said I was feeding at 100 ppm K.

But by math if you use a "balanced" fertilizer or (or MSU) the amount of K is the same as the amount of N.

So if your target is 100+ ppm N then by default you will be feeding 100ppm+ K.

If you feed lower amounts of fert and you are putting that into a heavily calcareous supplemented pot (lime, oyster shell, ...) and/or use a surface water of moderate or greater levels of hardness (a hardness of 125 will have up to 50ppm of soluble Ca). You cover at least the second tenant of K toxicity by ensuring that the immediate root environment has more Ca than K. The plant and the potting mix will inherently pick less of it out of the fluid mix, and let it pass out of the pot wasted.

I have no doubt there are species that can do great at ratios of K/Ca closer to 1:1. I pointed out that species that have ant associations are particularly conducive to this condition (Gongoras, Coryanthes, Stanophea). But the majority of orchid species are not close to this. This is especially true for species living on limestone cliffs. They may be good at dealing with overall higher TDS levels, but the amount of K in their environment is particularly low. How many monster specimen P emersonii have you seen?

Granted on a single pass through a pot or over a mount, I would suspect that 80-90% of the nutrients go to the floor anyway. The dose of any toxicant in a potted plant is based on the amount held in the potting mix after feeding.

If you shorten the duration of the exposure, buy flushing a day or so later, then that in effect also cuts down on total dose.

So ultimately, yes you can always get a high K feed to "work" at some level. Now just reconcile that with "correctly and balanced".
 
First I said that some people have sucess with a balanced fertilizer and that I don't really agree with it and it is not my choice of fertilizer. I used to put some lime into the pots for a few choice species but I do not do that anymore after switching to kiwi bark (without lime added) and orchiata that I rinse first to remove most of the surface dust and some of the lime on the outside. The calcium and magnesium is in the form of nitrate and sulfate again at low doses. I am not targeting 100 ppm N. I said I think orchids are much happier at a lot lower of a consrtant feed of fertilizer and a good amount of clean fresh water. It does not have to be RO but rainwater work good with a small dash of fert when you are flushing. Again the main point is that you do not need to use a low K fert to achive good results. I think most of the problems come in when you are pouring on the fertilizer and not watching what the pot environment is like. Which is why I said I thought when you got on the kick of watching EC it was more right on than strickly using little to no K. You said a lot of times how orchids don't need much at all in the way of nutrients. So why can't you keep a good pot environment by using a low dose of any fertilizer? I think that you would see the same benefits of them picking up more cal and mag. Why does it have to be all or nothing? I don't think it was ever the K but the combination of how much fert was applied in relation to the mix and flushing that can cause problems.
 
So why can't you keep a good pot environment by using a low dose of any fertilizer? I think that you would see the same benefits of them picking up more cal and mag. Why does it have to be all or nothing?

You certainly can.

It wasn't my idea that everyone was insisting on targeting 100ppm N on a weekly basis.

In some ways low K is a great demonstration of differntial pickup of different nutrients.

Most are getting improved results (either directly in growth, leaf quality, disease resistance, or ability to grow those "tougher" species from flask) and still feeding at the same old 100ppm N rate. That demonstrates the effect of K since that was the only analyte significantly changed. (K dropped from around 100 ppm to 10ppm and now less than Ca).

However, as the last couple years have progressed, its apparent to me that 100 ppm N (per week) is a waste.

Yes I've increased flush rates, but a lot of the high EC pots were initially exposed to the old MSU. So was I flushing out K accumulated at 100 ppm per weekly feeding or 3ppm?

It also seems that since the high EC pots have been flushed, I hardly have to pay attention to them anymore, so accumulation of salts (especially K) is much reduced in general.

Since when is 10 or 3ppm nothing? It's still more than in most drinking waters off the tap. My well water is less than 1ppm
 
Thank-you both for generating an interesting discussion. I now flush regularly with rainwater and have diluted my fertilizer regimen further. Only time will tell if it works in my hands.
 
3/1000000 is getting close to nothing.:rollhappy::rollhappy::rollhappy:

Yup that is always a funny perspective.

You here about various chemicals toxic at micrograms per liter (like copper to water fleas) or even nanograms per liter (mercury and silver and certainly PCB numbers are something like that).

Another way to percieve this, is that 1 ml of water is a gram (1000 mg/L) and almost universally it takes 20 +/_ drops to make a ml

So a drop of water into a liter of water is 50 mg/L

Now consider how little nutrients are floating around in nature (ppms) vs how much we put in our fertilizer dispensor (teaspoons/gallon)!
 
Afraid you are talking to a professional toxicologist, and antagonism is just one of a myriad forms/causes/mechanisms of "toxicity".

Yep I know what you do Rick. But please explain how if K does no specific damage to the plant cell can it be considered toxic in the true sense? (like Fe or NaCl or Mn can be)
 
Most is probably the key word here. Even Xaviar would agree that MOST of the billions of orchids either brought into culture or seedlings started from flask are in that great compost bin in the sky. Not monster specimen plants like in your GH.
True but nothing to do with K


We all have our handful of individual successes, but collectively they represent a tiny fraction of all the attempts that are either dead or look like crap.
I beg to differ! Yes I do loose the occasional orchid but I would say that the LOSSES are the tiny fraction. So I can't put the loss down to improper feeding before improper temps or watering or air movement or whatever.

Did you miss Xavier's comments about how much bigger and better wild plants look than cultivated plants? Did you miss all his other posts about how many millions of collected plants and captive propagated plants crap out before reaching blooming size (let alone the stray specimen)?
Again nothing to do with K. Plants brought in from the wild 9 times out of 10 die because of the trauma of having their roots destroyed and brought into cultivation without the critical reestablishment procedures.
Did you miss the "tombstones" thread that showed everyone's handfuls of old plant tags from lost specimens. Or have you missed the random comments like "your a newbie until you've killed your ____ (fill in age, weight, ...huge number) of orchids.
There are so many reasons why people lose orchids and I'm all for trying to find the reasons. But I'm afraid that historically its always been the wrong environment coupled with improper day to day care that leads to the loss not the fertilizer. And thats a fact not a theory.
I'm proposing that a good place to see "all that antagonism" is the 99% of orchids that never made it to specimen status.
Recently I purchased 2 identical Cattleya seedlings. Both treated the same. Same pot, same p/mix, same watering, same fert. After a few days, 1 developed an infection and was about to die (luckily I think I saved it by soaking in Banrot)
The other is still fine. The reason I believe was that the infection started in the mix and quickly moved through the roots and into the plant. Its just one of those things that happens from time to time and nothing can really be done about it. Most losses come like this and have nothing to do with nutrients.
 
Where are all these countless experiments (with orchids)? I found a few short term trials with hybrid phales. And rarely if did they account for Ca and Mg.
Not with orchids but every other type of plant including shrubs and foliage plants many of which originate from the same Sotheast Asian or Sth American ecosystems.

Nature is the best long term trial and I only found a small minority of cases where wild orchids had access to K higher than Ca, and actually accumulated more K than Ca.[/
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I totally agree with the above but I'm saying that excess K acumulation in captivity does not seem (to me) to cause any adverse affects (that I have seen) In other words, for every plant you have doing well with klite, You can see a thousand others doing just as well without it. Surely you can't tell me all those other plants are on the brink of collapse?
 
I'm with Stone here.

Its really interesting in how many other (english speaking) orchid forums the topic "Fertilizer" seems so important for the user to culture paphis. We in Germany don't discuss this topic at all - beside the salt concentrations of some cheap fertilizers which are too high for orchids roots.

Maybe if you use K-less fertilizers or P-rich (never tried one of them) you can make a little difference in plant growth or flowering but beside that I haven't seen anywhere a great success with different fertilizers. There are by far more other important things like tempature, humidity, light, CO2 and most important - substrate and watering scheme - than a fertilizer discussion in my IMHO.
 
I've also mentioned some species differences. Freshwater mussels are particularly sensitive to K. In some ways very much like orchids. They suck it in and can't expel it (except as below). At low levels (in the 10-25ppm K range) it acts as a paralytic and messes up the K/Na/Ca pumps in the musculature. Once you get up to 50 ppm or so K the build up of cations causes an osmotic differential and they start blimping up like balloons. Also interesting is that the more calcium in the water, the more K it takes to kill the mussels. Also interesting is that if there is very low Na in the system the uptake of K is irreversible with as little as an hour or so of exposure. But if Na is equal to or greater than the K, the mussels are able to recover if placed back at low levels (less than 4ppm) of K.

Of coarse orchids aren't mussels: But they are found world wide living in all the unpolluted streams fed by the seeps/springs/runoff from places where orchids grow. The greatest diversity is in North America (the karst areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama having the worlds highest diversity, and the place where the little old German lady gets her water for her orchids). Interestingly the second highest diversity for unionid mussels is South China and SE Asia with a big hot spot in North Vietnam/South China which has the highest Paph diversity in the world.
 
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I'm with Stone here.

There are by far more other important things like tempature, humidity, light, CO2 and most important - substrate and watering scheme - than a fertilizer discussion in my IMHO.

Which we have discussed over the years ad-nausea. And no matter how much we tweak and fiddle around the basics it never gets us to significant high yields.

If we compare long term production levels of orchids to what is capable with food crops we'd be starving if we had to eat them. The problem is just that we keep trying to feed our plants like corn, and when they don't grow or die (no matter how much we fiddle with the light/temp/humidity, we make up excuses about mycorhizae dependence.
 
QUOTE]
I totally agree with the above but I'm saying that excess K acumulation in captivity does not seem (to me) to cause any adverse affects (that I have seen) In other words, for every plant you have doing well with klite, You can see a thousand others doing just as well without it. Surely you can't tell me all those other plants are on the brink of collapse?[/QUOTE]

Tell that to the millions of plants that died while getting fed a high K diet. Seed grown or otherwise.

I could also say for every plant I've seen looking good with a standard high K diet, I could find the same thing grown even better with no supplementation at all and its probably 2 or 3 times older.
 
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