Love this. What a great test and analysis of orchid media. Science + plants 💚💚💚 I love your approach to orchid culture Annabel. Thanks for taking the time to share this and track your experiment. Super integral info here for other growers w/ regards to media, water, and change over time.
Thanks Dustin!! 💗 I really appreciate that, and I hope it does prove useful 🙂 Thanks for showing me how to chop it into segments on the timeline too, hopefully that makes it easier to pick out the relevant info 🙂 You have so much info on your blog with regards to tap water hardness / water quality, it's great to have that info out there that actually directly relates it to orchids!
gorgeous vid, I'll use this data for my aquarium stuff. btw the difference in ph/ size of bark is most likely due to significantly higher surface area the finer the bark is. over a short period like 24h that should do the observed effect, it would balance out the more time passes.
Here are the water absorption rates (weight of water absorbed divided by initial dry weight) arrange from lowest to highest: Lava Rock 16% Kaizen Bonsai (KB) S-TE Kyodama 22% Lava Lite Medium Grade Pumice 22% LECA 28% Large Grade Bark 38% Orchid Garden (OG) Large/XL Grade Pumice 40% Kaizen Bonsai (KB) Superlite Black 55% Kaizen Bonsai (KB) Fine Grade Pumice 56% Kaizen Bonsai (KB) Medium/Large Pumice 58% Medium Grade Bark 88% Orchid Garden (OG) Fine Grade Bark 96% Besgrow Sphagnum Moss 2120%. I am thinking of adding moss or pumice to my chili plant to aerate the soil. Knowing that chili plants hate too much water, it's now clear that I should choose pumice. Great video! Thanks a million!
Very nice empirical results. Thanks for taking so much time and care to show us the important factors for different media for orchids. It looks like you have applied your analytical skills acquired during your graduate studies to this hobby very well.
Thanks! I really appreciate this. Hopefully it puts more 'data' out there, to make media differences a little clearer 🙂 May as well put the PhD to use right 😂
Just sat down from a busy day... 1st time out in the shops! Thank you for uploading... back in my comfort zone (orchids) ... everything takes much longer now with the ‘new’ normal! All that said and I haven’t even watched your video yet! 😂😂🌸 Great video!! 👏🏼👏🏼👍🏼
We have got it down to a 2/3 weekly shop, by the end we are living off cheese and crackers and frozen veg so I can avoid the supermarket as long as possible 😅 Thanks for taking the time out to watch 🙂💗
I like your scientific approach. For me personally the problem is that I water my hydroponic systems with pH5.8 water and after like one day it rose up to pH 6.8 . This also happens when I just water the rocks I am using as the media (pumice + zeolite + lava) without any plants so I think that the rocks are the reason for the pH altering. I used the same approach like you did in the video to find this out. This pretty much makes that rocks pretty useless for hydroponic systems as nobody wants to check or even lower the pH of every plant every day. I found out that perlite does not show that pH rising effect. Maybe because the cation exchange capacity of perlite is much lower than the CEC of pumice for example? Don‘t know exactly. Unfortunately, it would have made more sense to use water with the pH value you would use to water your plants to show the pH rising effect instead of using water with pH >8 in your video.
Awesome! Can I ask your expertise? I have a chronic illness and want to set up my orchids and nepenthes into self watering pots with a cotton wick from a reservoir. What in your opinion would be the best airy but evenly damp mix? For now I am using traditiona spaghnum, perlite and orchid bark, but higher moss to the nepenthes and higher bark for orchids. I would like to switch to inorganic if at all possible eventually but I’ll need to know if the plants do well in it. I have no idea about ph, only ppm for nepenthes... you gave me a new rabbit hole to fall into before I can start my setup
The acidity of organic media is exactly why I don't worry about the pH of my fertilizer being 6.5 or higher and precisely why I flush with pH 7.6 tap water (and sometimes with silicon added to bring it to 8-ish). What is important here, though, is orchiata is a little bit different from other types of bark. It is pre-treated to be pH stable for three years (according to the manufacturer, anyway). I've measured it at 6.8 new, soaked for 30 minutes in distilled water. Whether the pH stable time claim is accurate, I don't know. Now I don't know if you noticed, but some of those inorganics (like the black) didn't so much lower the pH of the tap as freeze it at the original value. Perhaps this was due to the cup sitting on top not allowing for as much gas exchange as an open container?
Only the large bark and the large pumice had a cup put on the top, as they were floating. There were still gaps at the sides though for air contact. The rest were open to air. The pH probe was washed thoroughly using a pH wash buffer and rinsed with distilled water between each media test, so the value you see is a true reflection of the current media value. I suspect the superlite is just quite inert and happened to have a slightly lower intrinsic pH value than the other inorganic media.
@@TheOrchidRoom oh, I'm not questioning the pH readings, just that on a few the pH reading after soaking was nearly identical to the reading of the tap water fresh from the tap (versus the overnight). If there is any acidity to them, a test soaking them in distilled water would be a good way to measure. I suspect the pH will remain the same.
I did think about this, that maybe I should be using distilled water for the whole thing from the start. That would be far more accurate and actually give the medias true pH more visibility. Then I went the lazy tap water option and figured it would do if I had the no addition control as the comparison 😅 Maybe I select a couple, moss, bark, leca and pumice, and do distilled water vs nutrient soaks. I was also thinking maybe I should keep some moss and bark pots and water them for a few months with no orchids in, to track the rate of acidification. Since this is regular bark I would imagine it gets acidic quite quickly, since it's starting out at a surprisingly low pH. Here, but not.. suggested that organic usually starts out more acidic and then tap water deposits accumulate on the media and start to buffer the pH up though, and he has more experience with tracking pH for organic with tap water. When I used to grow in self watering with moss though I noticed by the end if the year I would start to get the plants looking yellow and tired, and they would perk up after the repot, but I was never able to accurately measure the pH as I would just repot and throw the media before I thought it would be good to check. I suspect it was getting very acidic, because I was keeping it constantly moist, and causing nutrient lockout issues. But no proof...
29:12 The results would have been more comparable if they were expressed as percent change (change in weight (that is, weight of water absorbed) divided by initial dry weight) rather than actual change in weight. This is because, generally speaking, the more initial substance we have, the more weight it will absorb anyway (whether the substance is absorbent or not).
Today I checked the pH of the nutrient solution in the reservoir of one of my phals in semi-hydro - she is doing well, my you, growing two leaves simultaneously (finishing one and has been growing another for 12 cm) and is also growing new roots - the pH was 3,7 😳 checked a Ludisia in leca and semi-hydro - pH 6,2 - and a Vanda - pH 8,5. I had calibrated the pH meter beforehand 😘 I remember Ray Barkalow writing on Facebook that the roots can and will alter the pH, but still...
They definitely can and will alter the pH in the reservoir, phals have been found to pH down the rhizosphere to a pH of 5 or lower, going down to a pH of 3 even in an inert textile, with no nutrient deficiencies showing. I'll link the article here: www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=journals.ashs.org/hortsci/downloadpdf/journals/hortsci/46/7/article-p1022.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjD0NPXl4HqAhV-VBUIHbNTBUoQFjAQegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw3KDLaTb4J6A9FOoku8O-ck Quite amazing! Honestly, I wouldn't worry too much though 🙂 Not saying you are, and it's super interesting to hear about this, and I think something we should definitely be checking more to document! But some people get super caught up on this and worry, and I'm not sure it's something to worry over if the orchid looks healthy and is growing well. We can only do so much, when you feed fresh it will be at the pH you want it for a while every week before altering. I think with organic media it's important to be very careful of things getting too acidic as the media will break down, and it will also become a very oxygen starved environment as decomposing bacteria grow. I think with inorganic it's important to feed fresh at an acidic pH so that end of the scale is available for a while, any pH swings after thay will just mean different nutrients become more available. And we want to be cycling pH anyway sometimes. It's interesting that your different orchids are altering the reservoir pH differently. Maybe that's because they want different nutrients in different amounts depending on the species and rate of growth? There just isn't loads of info available on this that is accessible and relatable to orchids. Maybe everything we do can only control this so far, and the rest is something that the orchids do themselves. I've noticed huge improvements in growth since I started really paying attention to nutrients and pH, so even if the orchids are altering the pH in the reservoir, the addition of fresh nutrients weekly at what I think is the right pH must be doing something 🤷♀️ All very interesting and worth looking into more. Maybe if we understand this we can get to understand what we can be doing better to help the orchids.
@@TheOrchidRoom I love this! Of cause you have a reference for phalaenopsis roots influence on pH 🤣 no, I wasn't really worried as the plant looks so good, but I was puzzled 🤗
Love this. What a great test and analysis of orchid media. Science + plants 💚💚💚 I love your approach to orchid culture Annabel. Thanks for taking the time to share this and track your experiment. Super integral info here for other growers w/ regards to media, water, and change over time.
Thanks Dustin!! 💗 I really appreciate that, and I hope it does prove useful 🙂 Thanks for showing me how to chop it into segments on the timeline too, hopefully that makes it easier to pick out the relevant info 🙂 You have so much info on your blog with regards to tap water hardness / water quality, it's great to have that info out there that actually directly relates it to orchids!
gorgeous vid, I'll use this data for my aquarium stuff. btw the difference in ph/ size of bark is most likely due to significantly higher surface area the finer the bark is. over a short period like 24h that should do the observed effect, it would balance out the more time passes.
Here are the water absorption rates (weight of water absorbed divided by initial dry weight) arrange from lowest to highest:
Lava Rock 16%
Kaizen Bonsai (KB) S-TE Kyodama 22%
Lava Lite Medium Grade Pumice 22%
LECA 28%
Large Grade Bark 38%
Orchid Garden (OG) Large/XL Grade Pumice 40%
Kaizen Bonsai (KB) Superlite Black 55%
Kaizen Bonsai (KB) Fine Grade Pumice 56%
Kaizen Bonsai (KB) Medium/Large Pumice 58%
Medium Grade Bark 88%
Orchid Garden (OG) Fine Grade Bark 96%
Besgrow Sphagnum Moss 2120%.
I am thinking of adding moss or pumice to my chili plant to aerate the soil. Knowing that chili plants hate too much water, it's now clear that I should choose pumice. Great video! Thanks a million!
Very interesting and very informative Annabel, I use quite a lot of lava rock, so look forward to your follow up video.
Very nice empirical results. Thanks for taking so much time and care to show us the important factors for different media for orchids. It looks like you have applied your analytical skills acquired during your graduate studies to this hobby very well.
Thanks! I really appreciate this. Hopefully it puts more 'data' out there, to make media differences a little clearer 🙂 May as well put the PhD to use right 😂
Loved it Annabel! I'm looking forward to part two 😘
Thanks Ulla! Yes I think my main question in life is, "...but, does it wick?" 🤣
@@TheOrchidRoom lol 🤣
Brilliant info, thanks for sharing. Now I know why small bark and spag moss stay wet too long during my cold winter season.
Just sat down from a busy day... 1st time out in the shops! Thank you for uploading... back in my comfort zone (orchids) ... everything takes much longer now with the ‘new’ normal! All that said and I haven’t even watched your video yet! 😂😂🌸
Great video!! 👏🏼👏🏼👍🏼
We have got it down to a 2/3 weekly shop, by the end we are living off cheese and crackers and frozen veg so I can avoid the supermarket as long as possible 😅 Thanks for taking the time out to watch 🙂💗
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this series of tests!
Wow ! I want to compliment you on this experiment, really very interesting! Thank you for sharing and for engaging in this time consuming experiment.
Thanks Anna! 😃
Very informative Annabelle. Thanks for showing this! Stay safe! 👋
Thanks!! Glad you thought so 😀 I hope you are staying safe also 💗
Great information and food for thought when caring for our orchids!
Thanks Lucy! 🙂
Very informative video. Thanks for sharing Annabel! ☺ 🌞
Thanks!!
Thank you for all your testing. Very informative. I still like a combination of media.
Thanks! Yes, I also use media combinations primarily.
Great video! This is very informative. Thanks a lot
I like your scientific approach. For me personally the problem is that I water my hydroponic systems with pH5.8 water and after like one day it rose up to pH 6.8 . This also happens when I just water the rocks I am using as the media (pumice + zeolite + lava) without any plants so I think that the rocks are the reason for the pH altering. I used the same approach like you did in the video to find this out. This pretty much makes that rocks pretty useless for hydroponic systems as nobody wants to check or even lower the pH of every plant every day. I found out that perlite does not show that pH rising effect. Maybe because the cation exchange capacity of perlite is much lower than the CEC of pumice for example? Don‘t know exactly. Unfortunately, it would have made more sense to use water with the pH value you would use to water your plants to show the pH rising effect instead of using water with pH >8 in your video.
Awesome! Can I ask your expertise? I have a chronic illness and want to set up my orchids and nepenthes into self watering pots with a cotton wick from a reservoir. What in your opinion would be the best airy but evenly damp mix? For now I am using traditiona spaghnum, perlite and orchid bark, but higher moss to the nepenthes and higher bark for orchids. I would like to switch to inorganic if at all possible eventually but I’ll need to know if the plants do well in it.
I have no idea about ph, only ppm for nepenthes... you gave me a new rabbit hole to fall into before I can start my setup
Very interesting....thanks for your efforts.
The acidity of organic media is exactly why I don't worry about the pH of my fertilizer being 6.5 or higher and precisely why I flush with pH 7.6 tap water (and sometimes with silicon added to bring it to 8-ish). What is important here, though, is orchiata is a little bit different from other types of bark. It is pre-treated to be pH stable for three years (according to the manufacturer, anyway). I've measured it at 6.8 new, soaked for 30 minutes in distilled water. Whether the pH stable time claim is accurate, I don't know.
Now I don't know if you noticed, but some of those inorganics (like the black) didn't so much lower the pH of the tap as freeze it at the original value. Perhaps this was due to the cup sitting on top not allowing for as much gas exchange as an open container?
Only the large bark and the large pumice had a cup put on the top, as they were floating. There were still gaps at the sides though for air contact. The rest were open to air. The pH probe was washed thoroughly using a pH wash buffer and rinsed with distilled water between each media test, so the value you see is a true reflection of the current media value. I suspect the superlite is just quite inert and happened to have a slightly lower intrinsic pH value than the other inorganic media.
@@TheOrchidRoom oh, I'm not questioning the pH readings, just that on a few the pH reading after soaking was nearly identical to the reading of the tap water fresh from the tap (versus the overnight). If there is any acidity to them, a test soaking them in distilled water would be a good way to measure. I suspect the pH will remain the same.
I'd also be interested to see the same experiment run using your nutrient solution to see how the pH is impacted.
I did think about this, that maybe I should be using distilled water for the whole thing from the start. That would be far more accurate and actually give the medias true pH more visibility. Then I went the lazy tap water option and figured it would do if I had the no addition control as the comparison 😅 Maybe I select a couple, moss, bark, leca and pumice, and do distilled water vs nutrient soaks. I was also thinking maybe I should keep some moss and bark pots and water them for a few months with no orchids in, to track the rate of acidification. Since this is regular bark I would imagine it gets acidic quite quickly, since it's starting out at a surprisingly low pH. Here, but not.. suggested that organic usually starts out more acidic and then tap water deposits accumulate on the media and start to buffer the pH up though, and he has more experience with tracking pH for organic with tap water. When I used to grow in self watering with moss though I noticed by the end if the year I would start to get the plants looking yellow and tired, and they would perk up after the repot, but I was never able to accurately measure the pH as I would just repot and throw the media before I thought it would be good to check. I suspect it was getting very acidic, because I was keeping it constantly moist, and causing nutrient lockout issues. But no proof...
29:12 The results would have been more comparable if they were expressed as percent change (change in weight (that is, weight of water absorbed) divided by initial dry weight) rather than actual change in weight. This is because, generally speaking, the more initial substance we have, the more weight it will absorb anyway (whether the substance is absorbent or not).
Leca has the lowest percentage, next to chunky lava rock. I've tried it. Both at around 21% increase.
Hello annabel. New subs here. What's combination would you recommend for Dragonfruit? Thanks from NZ
Great experiment!
Today I checked the pH of the nutrient solution in the reservoir of one of my phals in semi-hydro - she is doing well, my you, growing two leaves simultaneously (finishing one and has been growing another for 12 cm) and is also growing new roots - the pH was 3,7 😳 checked a Ludisia in leca and semi-hydro - pH 6,2 - and a Vanda - pH 8,5. I had calibrated the pH meter beforehand 😘 I remember Ray Barkalow writing on Facebook that the roots can and will alter the pH, but still...
They definitely can and will alter the pH in the reservoir, phals have been found to pH down the rhizosphere to a pH of 5 or lower, going down to a pH of 3 even in an inert textile, with no nutrient deficiencies showing.
I'll link the article here: www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=journals.ashs.org/hortsci/downloadpdf/journals/hortsci/46/7/article-p1022.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjD0NPXl4HqAhV-VBUIHbNTBUoQFjAQegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw3KDLaTb4J6A9FOoku8O-ck
Quite amazing! Honestly, I wouldn't worry too much though 🙂 Not saying you are, and it's super interesting to hear about this, and I think something we should definitely be checking more to document! But some people get super caught up on this and worry, and I'm not sure it's something to worry over if the orchid looks healthy and is growing well. We can only do so much, when you feed fresh it will be at the pH you want it for a while every week before altering. I think with organic media it's important to be very careful of things getting too acidic as the media will break down, and it will also become a very oxygen starved environment as decomposing bacteria grow. I think with inorganic it's important to feed fresh at an acidic pH so that end of the scale is available for a while, any pH swings after thay will just mean different nutrients become more available. And we want to be cycling pH anyway sometimes. It's interesting that your different orchids are altering the reservoir pH differently. Maybe that's because they want different nutrients in different amounts depending on the species and rate of growth? There just isn't loads of info available on this that is accessible and relatable to orchids. Maybe everything we do can only control this so far, and the rest is something that the orchids do themselves. I've noticed huge improvements in growth since I started really paying attention to nutrients and pH, so even if the orchids are altering the pH in the reservoir, the addition of fresh nutrients weekly at what I think is the right pH must be doing something 🤷♀️ All very interesting and worth looking into more. Maybe if we understand this we can get to understand what we can be doing better to help the orchids.
@@TheOrchidRoom I love this! Of cause you have a reference for phalaenopsis roots influence on pH 🤣 no, I wasn't really worried as the plant looks so good, but I was puzzled 🤗
Does bark is pine wook or what type wood was it?
Awesome job. I loved this
Great, thankyou I really appreciate this 🙂
I really appreciate this! Thank you for doing it!
Thanks! No problem, hopefully it puts some more 'data' out there 🙂
Interesting & very helpful.
Thanks Jo! 🙂
Oh ps, could you include parts per million into these tests from now on? That would be very helpful :)
Great video!!
Thanks!! 🙂
Awesome ! Thank you very much !
No problem, thankyou! 🙂
@@TheOrchidRoom Why didn't you test the seramis ?
Thank you very interesting! 🤓
Thanks! 🙂 Glad you found it interesting!
Very good again
Thankyou! I'm improving these tests each time I do them, think next time I have a better way to measure the top layer 🙂
Awesome!💚
Thanks! 😀
🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻
Just get to it.