Status on Kalista

This morning, I was doing my monthly flushing of the pots.  Everything was coming along splendidly until I started flushing Kalista's pot.  Let me first state that since I received the plant, I noticed that some of the newer leaves that were growing, were rotting at the base. At first, I thought I was overfertilizing since Paphs generally tend to be sensitive to this. It never sat quite right with me that I had never actually seen this plant's roots and as one leaf after another began to wither, I began to think something was definitely amiss.   But, I wanted to not disturb the root system for at least 30 days as the vendor had advised.

This morning, I noticed that with all the other orchids I had been watering that the water would sift through the media and drain freely out at the bottom. With the new fairrieanum, the water was sitting on top and would eventually drain from the sides down. It was as if the center of the media was really dense. I also noticed that the pot itself also weighed a bit more than all the others and no matter how many times I flushed it, there was still evidence of salt in the media.

I decided to look inside the pot and began pouring out the media it came with. It was terribly dense, and at first, I couldn't figure out why.  It just felt so grainy.  It was sand mixed into the bark, and a good deal of it. The sand was making the center of the pot become compacted and was retaining way too much water and had started to rot some of the roots. I repotted into my usual orchiata mix and trimmed some of the roots. I did notice there was a lot of new root growth, which is great and decided to not bury the roots too deeply, but a bit more shallow so they could dry faster. Incredibly, the plant looks perkier already.