365 days of orchids – day 83 – Pleione formosana
This lovely little cool growing orchid from China and Taiwan spends its time in our Temperate section with a minimum of 6C although it would happily go colder during its dry winter rest.
Flowers are appearing now and these will be followed by single leaves in the spring. We water very heavily from the end of April onwards to grow good sized bulbs for next years flowers. From November onwards the plants are left completely dry.
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You water very heavily, but wich medium do you grow them in. We use a spaghnum bark mix, but then at the end of summer we easily remain to wet with rotting bulbs as a result. If you got a better mixture, I would be happy to hear.
Hi, good to hear from you. Our Pleiones sit on a weld mesh bench and so are very free draining (we use back and sphagnum too). I agree that rotting bulbs is a possibility but a bigger problem for us is keeping plants wet enough in the summer to make strong bulbs and not forcing them to dry too quickly at the end of the growing season. We start to reduce watering once the leaves start to brown and die but keep a close eye to avoid shrivelling of the bulbs before the leaves fall.