Not my orchids! I still don't see the reason for starving plants when it's just as easy to feed them well? I'm sorry but I just get the point.
I have a few starved plants in my shadehouse. They are miserable! You get fewer and smaller flowers, shorter spikes, smaller pale leaves and tiny pseudobulbs so why do it?
Something is screwy in the above quotes, it crediting me with someone elses statements.
Mike you are correct you miss the point.
1. I am not suggesting that orchids need to be fed low rates of nutrients.
(Actually quite the opposite.)
2. Orchids do not grow and bloom with zero nutrients. Yet that is what Rays example tends to imply.
3. What I said is that when the natural living organisms are present in the growing media there is a supply of nutrients produced by those organisms and that replicates Nature.
4. I think it is a mistake to use field data that measures stemflow and nutrient levels based on dissolved salts to determine that orchids don't need high levels of nutrients.
5. In Nature my theory is that living organisms supply high levels of nutrients in chemical forms that science has yet to recognize as the nutrient source for epiphytes.
6. The use dissolved salts is a substitute nutrient supply that orchids can access as a backup when the preferred complex compounds are not available.
7.The environment has to be near perfect for the nutrient producing living organisms to exist and produce the nutrients.
8. High levels of salt fertilizer applications suppress and prevent the living organisms to populate the orchids environment and thus the need to supply high levels of dissolved salt nutrients frequently.
9.Not all environments that don't get fertilizer manage to support the nutrient producing living organisms so in those environments orchids that don't get fertilizer do grow well.
10. In some environments the living organisms populate and thrive and in this place orchids can grow and bloom very well without ever being fertilized by fertilizer applications.
Obviously in your environment you need to apply fertilizer for the plants to grow. In other growers environments that have thriving organism populations they don't need to apply much ferilizer (Ricks baskets) because their living environment is producing the nutrients the orchids need.
Here in Rays thread "Less is more" his plant grew and flowered without being fertilized with fertilizer.... That is because he populated the closed environment with micro organisms that produce nutrients and then he never applied salt based fertilizer that would have killed the nutrient producing micro organisms.
And as has been said Rays plant looks hungry, just like a wild Phrag growing in Nature.
So "less is more" is not about starving plants. It means applying
less salt nutrients can enable
more natural complex nutrients to be produced.
fyi... I grow using high levels of salt based fertilizer. :wink: